If there was such a genre as "slacker cyberpunk," Whiskey Tango Foxtrot would firmly fit inside it. You might also find it on the "rehab science fiction" or "literary conspiracy drama" shelves at B&N. Repeated mentions of Edward Snowden on the back cover might lead a harried stockperson to shelve it in the "post-privacy politics" section. This is both the charm and the downfall of this novel; it's neither fish nor fowl, neither literary nor genre, neither serious nor sendup.
For all this, it's not hard to sum up the concept: three youngish Americans of various levels of slackerhood run afoul of a Secret Global Conspiracy(TM) to privatize all of the world's data and crash the public Internet so the SGC can sell to the cat video-starved masses …show more content…
His dialog is just so for the various characters -- although all Our Heroes are perhaps a bit too literate and arch -- and his settings are lightly sketched but with enough shading to allow us to build a good-enough mental picture. (Some familiarity with Portland, Oregon is helpful.) The tone is light enough that you'll figure the author wasn't taking this all that seriously, and perhaps neither should you. This isn't a bad thing; some more ludicrous thrillers I've read took themselves very seriously, which made them unintentionally more funny. Here the laugh lines are …show more content…
Mark is a drug-addled fake self-help guru and Leo is a drug-addled trust-fund Portlandian with a highly checkered employment history. Both male leads are regularly overmatched by real life and are mostly defined by the controlled and uncontrolled substances they overindulge in. Leila got me through this; I couldn't bring myself to care about either of the men, who worked very hard to squander what good fortune they had. Having dealt with real addictive personalities, I'm less than enchanted by the ultimately egotistical hijinks of fictional ones, especially when I'm supposed to root for them as
For all this, it's not hard to sum up the concept: three youngish Americans of various levels of slackerhood run afoul of a Secret Global Conspiracy(TM) to privatize all of the world's data and crash the public Internet so the SGC can sell to the cat video-starved masses …show more content…
His dialog is just so for the various characters -- although all Our Heroes are perhaps a bit too literate and arch -- and his settings are lightly sketched but with enough shading to allow us to build a good-enough mental picture. (Some familiarity with Portland, Oregon is helpful.) The tone is light enough that you'll figure the author wasn't taking this all that seriously, and perhaps neither should you. This isn't a bad thing; some more ludicrous thrillers I've read took themselves very seriously, which made them unintentionally more funny. Here the laugh lines are …show more content…
Mark is a drug-addled fake self-help guru and Leo is a drug-addled trust-fund Portlandian with a highly checkered employment history. Both male leads are regularly overmatched by real life and are mostly defined by the controlled and uncontrolled substances they overindulge in. Leila got me through this; I couldn't bring myself to care about either of the men, who worked very hard to squander what good fortune they had. Having dealt with real addictive personalities, I'm less than enchanted by the ultimately egotistical hijinks of fictional ones, especially when I'm supposed to root for them as