Set in the spring of the year 2000, `Turn of the Century’ presents a plausible near-future and the story of one media-savvy couple’s fraying success
TURN OF THE CENTURY
By Kurt Andersen
Random House, 659 pages, $24.95
It’s a reflection of the Escher-like interplay of fiction and reality in Kurt Andersen’s new novel, “Turn of the Century,” that its author’s resume reads as if it belonged to one of the characters in his book. Currently a writer for The New Yorker, Andersen has previously been editor of New York magazine, an architecture critic and writer for Time and–perhaps most memorably–a founding editor (with Graydon Carter, himself now editor of Vanity Fair) of Spy, the magazine that epitomized while it satirized the worst excesses of the 1980s. (In addition, he is the co-author of two tongue-in-cheek works of non-fiction: “Loose Lips,” about the strange or hilarious things famous people say, and “Tools of Power,” a jokey pseudo-guide to professional Machiavellianism.)
He’s also connected: His wife is a television producer; two of his closest friends, singled out for recognition in “Turn of the Century’s” acknowledgments, are stock trader James J. Cramer, founder of TheStreet.com and personification of the business-Internet interface, and super-publicist Leslee Dart of PMK, one of the high priestesses of the commodification of buzz.
All of which makes him perfectly positioned to write the ultimate insider novel of the techno-media-business complex, to capture the signal (to use one of his own phrases) emitted by our turn-of-the-century Zeitgeist. Certainly he has a pitch-perfect ear for it: for the buzzwords and concepts, the designer labels and addresses that define his characters’ lives. And if some of his fantasy constructs sound unsettlingly plausible–MBA Barbie (a doll with a chalk-striped suit), Teen Nation (a new magazine for serious, politically conscious teenagers), the Beep Seat (a toilet seat that beeps when left in the up position)–it’s because he has had the inspired notion to set his story in the very near future: the spring of the year 2000.
His inventions are less fantasy than a kind of digital enhancement of reality, and the line between the actual and the enhanced is disconcertingly indistinct.
Against this hyper-real backdrop, Andersen has set a moral tale for the millennium, the story of George Mactier and his wife, Lizzie Zimbalist, technologically savvy New Yorkers whose pillow talk includes phrases like “You have a high signal-to-noise ratio.” George, a Newsweek writer and ABC newsman turned television producer, is the co-creator of “NARCS,” a “Homicide” look-alike that melds footage of actual drug busts with staged scenes and nets him $16,575 a week. Lizzie, formerly a low-level corporate and foundation executive, now runs her own software company, Fine Technologies, which has hit the jackpot with a millennial system fix called Y2KRx, or “YAKety-rex,” as Lizzie calls it, and she’s in the middle of acquisition talks with Microsoft. But despite their Wired-style success–their renovated-coffee-warehouse dwelling in lower Manhattan, their LandCruiser and their country house in upstate New York–George and Lizzie have the souls of poets. George wears an 11-year-old Armani overcoat, and Lizzie is the inventor not only of Y2KRx but also of a speech-recognition application called, with a nod to Vladimir Nabokov, “Speak Memory.” And because they have souls, they’re inevitably snookered by the slick convergence cowboys who are the masters of “Turn of the Century’s” universe.
The instrument of George’s undoing–one of them–is his hot new show, “Real Time,” a hybrid of straight news and dramatic simulation in which actors play newscasters. Although his network picks it up, the possibilities for it to fail spectacularly are endless, and in putting it together, George loses not just his sense of proportion but his sense of psychic balance–a loss abetted by Lizzie’s growing involvement in the synergy dreams of communications magnate Harold Mose.
Mose is a man who understands the connection between his own reputation and his company’s stock price. ” `Earnings equals spin squared,’ ” he says. Having parlayed a Canadian greeting-card business into ownership of The Mose Broadcasting Company (“The MBC”), the television network that runs “NARCS” and has bought “Real Time,” Mose now wants to expand into the world of on-line entertainment. And he may or may not be trying to acquire Lizzie, or her company, to help him do this. Whether or not Mose has a hand in their undoing, Lizzie’s negotiations with Microsoft–or with the basketball-dribbling geeks delegated to explore the acquisition–end badly. ” `I run the company,’ ” she says, defending her less-than-nerdish command of programming arcana, ” `I don’t spend a lot of time debugging lines of code.’ ” ” `Got you,’ ” replies her graceless interlocutor. ” `It’s the you’re-from-Venus-we’re-from-Mars deal. We program and slay the beasts, and you,’ he says, pausing, chuckling, `market, or whatever.’ ” Microsoft proceeds to low-ball her with an insulting offer, forcing her to sell her company to Mose instead and take over the direction of his Internet strategy–which in turn leads George, by now paranoid with anxiety about “Real Time,” to suspect that her cohabitation with Mose is more than corporate.
Meanwhile, Lizzie’s father is undergoing an experimental pig-liver transplant that embroils the family in a news-magazine feeding frenzy, their son’s science project has turned up marijuana traces in their home air-sample, and George has gotten entangled with an ambitious starlet who thinks “Real Time” can make her a star. And his stock-trader friend Ben Gould is speculating like crazy on the fortunes of The MBC, while some of Lizzie’s disgruntled former staffers and her hacker friends are plotting how to revenge themselves on Microsoft.
It takes more than 600 pages for all these complications to play out–about 200 more pages than are good for this novel. The problem is that Andersen seems to have been unable to resist cramming into his book every smart observation, bizarre concept or loopy conversation he has ever had or overheard. There’s Lizzie’s glossary of airport codes (ORD is short for “ordinary”). There are the riffs on pretentious restaurant menus (” `I think we may have one more of the Pacific Markethouse ragouts of free-range North Oregon weasel, which is prepared tartare style, with white and cayenne peppers moistened by Burmese mustard’ “). There’s the weird Esperanto spouted by The MBC’s ad sales director: ” `And the show is grooving? I liked the feminist-anchor-chick-breakthrough hokey-pokey in the Sunday Times.’ ” And there’s the inside-dope verisimilitude of scenes like the one in which Ben Gould rides the bucking bronco of stock market chaos, “blasting through transactions recklessly, faster than any normal human trader can or would”–” `Billy,’ Ben says, looking up from his screen, then back to the green blinking line of Microsoft BID and ASKED prices, `get me a size-ola market in the Microsoft puts, the Decembers first, as many as we can, all of them, as fast as you can. . . . Go, go, go.’ “
Stop, stop, stop! the reader wants to scream–because the story of George and Lizzie pales into insignificance next to this razzle-dazzle. Their marriage doesn’t seem fleshed-out enough for its survival to matter; their relationships with their parents don’t have the emotional weight to make those parents’ deaths affecting; and they themselves have so little inner life that the loss of their professional dreams seems oddly inconsequential. To turn Lizzie’s remark to George on its head, “Turn of the Century” has a high noise-to-signal ratio–too high, perhaps, to make it work convincingly as fiction. And unlike Tom Wolfe, a novelist to whom he has been recently compared, Andersen isn’t the kind of rococo stylist whose voice is the raison d’etre of his work.
But something is going on in these pages, something that keeps a reader coming back–not to find out what will happen to the characters, or to see what the author will do next, but to listen. For as Lizzie also says to George: ” `I even find your noise pretty interesting.’ ” It’s that noise, the sound of our century turning, that is the real hero of this book, and Andersen’s ability to hear it, and reproduce or re-engineer it, makes him worth listening to.
