| julie
brock
The Futurist,
by James. P. Othmer. Doubleday, New York: 2006. 257 pp.
Apple pie and baseball might have been the symbols of twentieth
century America, but in The Futurist, the iPod may
be the heir to the throne, symbolizing the American capacity
for conveniently packaged self-absorption. This debut novel
by James P. Othmer features the most cynical and least sympathetic
main character since the unreliable narrator in Chuck Palahniuk’s
Fight Club, though Yates is typically on the receiving
end of the punch instead of throwing it.
As a self-proclaimed futurist, Yates makes his living prognosticating,
with scant forethought, a predisposition toward plagiarism,
and no requirements except that his fee is paid. We know right
away not to trust Yates. What honest man makes a living off
keynote speeches and breakout sessions? Other than a pesky
new sense of shame over the “utter and complete bullshit”
he passes off as the insight of a mastermind, Yates digs the
talking head lifestyle. He lives out of hotels and jet-sets
to speaking gigs around the world showing audiences the “shortcuts
to getting more.”
Getting more is a theme throughout the book, but no one does
it better than the Americans. Yates’ friend Campbell
says it best: “It’s an addiction to wealth. Not
to wealth because of its buying power, but the bragging power…I
want to have more than so and so…Just for one moment,
I would like to have the most. Just for one tiny moment.”
Yates disagrees but the evidence is on Campbell’s side,
and Yates rarely needs to leave the bar to find proof. In
Italy he meets a group of American twentysomethings returning
from vacation in Afghanistan, having been lured there by the
“Tribal unrest. Undetonated ordinance. Snipers.”
Deanna from Branson in particular relishes the “bit
of danger” she finds in war-torn countries. “It
makes me feel brave,” she says, explaining that her
job as a preschool teacher doesn’t involve enough brushes
with death to satisfy her.
Other Americans in hot pursuit of an expensive thrill are
the space tourists, whose slow deaths are broadcast 24/7 on
CNN after the space hotel’s oxygen supply runs out.
Yates feels guilty for having been a paid spokesman for the
space hotel. But when cosmetics heiress Annalise Kinkaid spends
her final seconds of life instructing her daughter to “spend
whatever it takes to have [her] attorneys sue with every ounce
of their being the following corporations and individuals…,”
you get the feeling that the space tourists would have found
some other spectacularly ridiculous way to die, and that they
would be pleased to learn that CNN’s ratings reached
an all-time high during their continuous coverage of the debacle.
The Americans’ presence in far-off locales is testimony
to their ability to afford the trips. They have all the money
they need, but like Campbell — the billionaire living
as a recluse in his Greenlandic fortress — they have
discovered that having money, and then more money, means nothing.
It’s what they buy with their money that makes them
cool.
Yates himself does an admirable job of reinforcing the egotistical
and materialistic American stereotype. He is bothered by what
he interprets as a nearly universal dislike of Americans,
but given the examples in this book it’s hard to understand
who wouldn’t hate Americans. Yates’ most dramatic
failure, involving the victim of a suicide bomber, illustrates
the point. Yates had tried to help the injured boy immediately
after the bomb detonated, but the boy pushed him away, screaming
“Go. Now, American!” as though “American”
is just another word for “giant hissing cockroach.”
Yates decides, inexplicably, to visit the boy in the hospital
and make a peace offering, but he succeeds only in demonstrating
his emotional deafness. Yates gives the boy an iPod loaded
with his entire music collection. “Beethoven to Wilco
to Johnny Cash and the Meat Puppets…It’s the only
thing Yates can think of, to show him.” We are not told
what Yates wants to show the boy. He seems to believe that
the immeasurable coolness of the music, the sharing of his
“progressively nuanced soul,” will cure the boy’s
hatred of Americans. For Yates, there is no moral or ideological
ill that cannot be cured by six gigabytes of the trendiest
music around.
Redemption for Yates doesn’t seem to be on Othmer’s
agenda. His intent is to give us a front-row seat to Yates’,
and presumably Othmer’s, world — the made-for-TV
movie would surely air in HDTV. Othmer’s work as an
executive at advertising giant Young & Rubicam has provided
him a rich source for satire, as he must be privy to some
of the multinational marketing firm’s juicy secrets.
In an age when cities “brand” themselves and run
ad campaigns to attract business, his “Brand America”
concept (“…we’re conducting focus groups
in five of the markets that despise us most…”)
seems more like fact than fiction.
Othmer’s prose is generally concise, but he typically
slathers on the irony so you rarely get less than a mouthful.
There is often enough left over to dribble down your chin,
which is okay if you like your writing a bit messy. Cases
in point: Yates’ girlfriend dumps him, the futurist,
for a history teacher. Yates meets the CEO of the world’s
largest antivirus software company, who moonlights as the
world’s most prolific creator of viruses. Yates’
assistant is a part-time high school reunion planner. These
ironic flourishes tend to induce sighs instead of laugher,
though the effort eventually either pays off (or wears you
down), as with the ultratrendy Italian bar full of fashionistas
making an antifashion statement — “pretty people
purposely dressed ugly.” The bar is called Burlap Thong.
Othmer saves the ugliest Americans and his most scathing satire
for the fast-paced finale. Yates may have drunk his own Kool-Aid
and foolishly looked for spiritual fulfillment instead of
contentedly counting his money. But his dogged idealism, however
unexamined, prevents him from being truly evil. The truly
evil Americans are in Bas’ar, and they make the thrill-seeking
space tourists and third-world sightseers seem cuddly in comparison.
Bas’ar is a fictional Middle Eastern country only a
few facts shy of the real thing. It is also the site of the
Destination Capitalization conference, “an event that’s
been canceled and rescheduled four times since Bas’ar
became a nation or had nationhood thrust upon it, depending
on where you sit at the UN Security Council table.”
The quasi governmental types are secretive about their employers,
but they insist that they aren’t employed by the government,
American or otherwise. “We are businessmen and –women,”
says one man. “We outsource for war, peace, democracy,
revolution, at the highest attainable profit, of course.”
The night before the conference starts the Americans share
a toast to the “peaceful transfer of power” in
the air traffic control tower cocktail lounge, while tracer
missiles streak across the night sky. If at first we aren’t
sure where these Americans stand, we soon find out how things
really are: “…at the end of the day, all God’s
creatures are a subsidiary of Halliburton.”
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