Feed

I was a little skeptical of this book at first. It's not often that I read a young adult novel, though this one was recommended strongly by Nick Hornby in his last collection on reading. I was also skeptical because it's set in the future with a teenager as the narrator. Anderson said that he spent months reading teen magazines and eavesdropping on cell phone calls in the mall to get the voice just right. This was worrying. It sounded like it would be some middle-aged guy's version of what teenagers are like. Besides, it's always a little dicey when you have an essentially stupid narrator telling a story, which is the case here. But in the end it actually works.

"Feed" is about a future world that is falling apart except that all the rich kids have a "feed" of information directly planted into their brain. And by information, I mean mostly advertising. What if your brain could play you commercials when you went to the mall? That's what life is like in "Feed."

As Titus our narrator explains:

Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit.... But the braggest thing about the feed ... is that it knows everything you want, and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are. It can tell you how to get them and how to make buying decisions that are hard.

This is a funny book, a great parody of the consumer world we live in today. While it's partly satire, it soon becomes what some would call a crying book. I didn't expect the sadness and potency of this book. There's a great story in here that just sneaked up on me, amidst all the silly lines and young adult-ness of it. And so I conclude that it's an excellent young adult novel, though I know a young adult I'm going to test it out on.

Having said that, it was a little weird reading this concurrently with Richard Ford's "Independence Day." "Independence Day" is about the most adult book I have read; there are long paragraphs about mortgages, for example. I would read that during the day, and then at night I would read about teenagers of the future getting wasted on the moon. It's no wonder that the next book I'm reading is non-fiction.