Thursday, June 12, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Corporate utopia

By John Ziebell

Jennifer Government, the title character in Australian writer Max Barry's new novel, seems like any other average, underpaid single mom just trying to get by--except for the bar code tattooed under her left eye, the arsenal concealed inside her raincoat and, of course, that name.

In Barry's satire-fueled near future, employees brand themselves with the names of the corporations they work for. John Nike and John Nike, for example, are both in the athletic shoe business. Billy Bechtel builds tanks until he becomes Billy NRA, a private-sector soldier; between jobs Billy, like all the unemployed, has no last name at all, no "real" identity whatsoever. Jennifer Government is a federal agent, the profession with "the highest death rate of any occupation except machine operators," and it's pretty easy to see why when we see her on the job.

This is a brave new world, all right--or, more accurately, the brave new world we might find in the addled fantasies of a lunatic right-wing pundit. Corporate America has acquired two-thirds of the world, with some not-unforeseeable consequences. Mattel and McDonald's run the schools. Ambulances don't roll without a credit card number. The National Rifle Association has become a global monolith with its own army and air force, providing private-sector shock troops, for-profit political assassinations and NRA-sponsored gun stores in neighborhoods the world over. And Jennifer, along with the other Governments, can only pursue bad guys if victims fund their own investigations.

Nike, General Motors, Pepsi, Exxon/Mobil--the major players have eliminated independent competition in this parallel universe and are now siding up to slug it out for a stranglehold on international commerce. They've banded into two "loyalty programs" that compete for the control of consumer dollars--think the free air mile ploys of credit card companies taken to the absurd. Things start going really wrong when Hack Nike, a shipping manager turned scapegoat, bungles a guerilla marketing campaign to pump the new "to die for" shoe: the shooting of 10 random citizens at a Nike Town promotion, trusting the media attention to "shift" their stock in record time. The evil genius John Nike (the other one spends most of the novel in a coma) is on a mission to eliminate the last vestiges of government, clearing the way for that eternal Republican wet dream of an absolutely unregulated marketplace.

"Yes, some people die. But look at the gain," John says at a board meeting of Team Advantage, the loyalty program Nike has joined forces with. "I've given you a world without government interference. ... You want to reward consumers who complain about your competition in the media? You want to pay them for recruiting their little brothers and sisters to your brand of cigarettes? You want the NRA to help you eliminate your competition? Then do it. Just do it."

While Barry's critique of "capitalizm" may be arguably heavy-handed at times, it is consistently funny, and funny is a big part of what makes satire work. It also helps that his prognostications have a credible feel--we may not like to admit it, but some of the corporate philosophies espoused here are not totally unthinkable. And Barry gives us a guy we love to hate in wicked corporate overlord John Nike. Sure, he's despicable. We know he's doomed. Some circumstantial developments, like the fact that he and Jennifer Government have a history together, are a bit too predictable. But he's our Teflon cretin, and halfway through the book we can only marvel at his audacity and the narrowness of his escapes.

Jennifer Government has its narrative flaws, but they are far from fatal. There's enough excess complexity in the plot that it often borders on chaos, almost escaping Barry's control in its wild unfolding. The ending is fairly glib, less than we want and perhaps deserve. The book supports a fairly large cast of people we don't know very well, but while a number of the characters might seem somewhat thin, we're not meant to confuse them with family; they populate a work that has no pretensions to realism, so it's only fair to take them as the figureheads they are, like the creations of a contemporary Jonathan Swift. Being both funny and on target may fail to make this book perfect, but the entertainment value sure helps us forgive its transgressions.