Feed started off really well. “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.” In fact, the whole first section, maybe forty pages, where they were on the moon was pretty good. Our disaffected hero hangs around with the popular guys and girls, feeling vaguely uneasy about the whole teen culture, and then he Meets This Girl, and then some dissident gives his brain feed a virus. Good stuff. The second section, where he gets to know the Girl, is pretty good, too. After that, it’s mostly downhill.
In an interview, M.T. Anderson said that rather than writing a futuristic novel, he “uses images from an imagined future in an almost allegorical way to discuss things we’re dealing with now.” I think the book has all the flaws of that. And the benefits, too—when he hits something right on the head, exaggerating rather than extrapolating, it can be devastatingly funny. But the thing can’t sustain itself, even as a YA novel, because the world is so incompletely realized, and because our hero is a shallow jerk. Which gets his point across, but I got the point in those first forty pages. The other two hundred and sixty are really just a marketing technique, because you can sell a lot more novels than short stories.
Digression: Are there YA short stories? Is there an ongoing market for that sort of thing? Does Seventeen or, or, um, you know I was about to say Tiger Beat. I have no idea of they are even still publishing Seventeen. Anyway, I might have guessed that teenagers might enjoy short stories more than novels, those who read, I mean, but while I am aware there is a pretty lively market for YA novels, I don’t know if there is one for YA short fiction. The likeliest thing is that it exists without my knowing about it, because it doesn’t show up in libraries and bookstores and I wouldn’t see reviews and all. But I don’t know. End Digression.
What M.T. Anderson does very very well is create that exaggerated teen culture, with plausibly funny slang that is meg brag, a television show called Oh, Wow, Thing, and mock fashionable lesions and riotwear. The most memorable scene, for me, is where CocaColaCo has announced a promotion where they track how often you say nice things about Coke to your friends, and for every gazillion plugs you get a six-pack. Our Hero’s moronic buddies decide they are going to stick it to The Man by getting together one afternoon and just saying meaningless CokeAd nicenesses until they get a year’s supply, free. How about that? Only, of course, they are too ignorant and inarticulate to come up with anything other than “I like Coke”, and once they finally get started, of course, they all get really thirsty and ditch it to go out and buy some Coke. Way to stick it to the man, guys! Our children are our future!
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Oh, shoot, this is driving me crazy. The style of what you’re quoting sounds a lot like an excellent short story I read a while ago about pre-teens and teenagers recruited on account of their all-surpassing coolness to be part of a nonstop live-in focus group. They have some sort of brain-net interface so that rather than express ideas, they can just give each other the address of the idea they’re regarding — leading them to say things like, “where are you at?” to express disbelief or misunderstanding. And then things get complicated.
But is it the same author? Dang, I cannot tell.