FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.

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Ecstasy Club Douglas Rushkoff HarperEdge/HarperCollins, 315 pp. Like Ethan Hawke's The Hottest State (out now in paperback!), Douglas Rushkoff's techno-hep fiction debut is an easy target - but not as bad as you'd think and not as good as you'd hope. Zach is a grad student whose weekend interest in raves/drugs/sex leads to an exciting new life with The Ecstasy Club, a group/cult of twentysomething cyber-idealists that stages über-raves in its San Francisco warehouse. Zach's fellow clubbers are a ragtag group of misfits. Only Duncan, the club's charismatic leader (maybe-guru/maybe-fake), and his girlfriend Lauren are of note - due largely to Zach's crush on Lauren and the resulting group sex scene (!) which bisects the novel like a Penthouse Forum bookmark. The orgy (pp. 113-115, for all you bookstore browsers) is important for two reasons: (a) it actually contains the lines "Mathematically speaking, it was like a flow-through equation. Lauren was giving a blow job and Duncan was getting one. I was just the medium." And (b) it's proof positive Rushkoff has maintained the bloodless prose of his non-fiction writing. He's not a bad writer, nor is he a dummy - he just somehow manages to beat the spark out of his subject, be it sex or The Simpsons. Ecstasy Club is an old-fashioned pageturner swaddled in a shiny www.rave.drugs blanket. Zach's recollection of the Club's quick rise to party glory, and slow descent into paranoid self-destruction, is peppered with "now" references. Some of the references are real and others are disguised by winky-wink pseudonyms (Rushkoff's real-life nemesis, Wired magazine, becomes Plugged; some old coot subs for Rushkoff's real-life pal Timothy Leary; Genesis P. Orridge becomes Renn A. Sanz, etc.). Rushkoff isn't the first writer to OD on "hip" references, but the book feels dated in the worst of ways. Reading Ecstasy Club drives home critic/novelist David Foster Wallace's bittersweet conclusion about hip-lit: "Brand loyalty really is synecdochic of character." Somewhere between the namedropping and rutting lies a convoluted conspiracy theory which threatens to grind the book to a screeching halt. This may or may not be The Point, but it sure puts a lot of weight on what is (at best) a fun, light read. At the book's end, Zach reflects on the ambiguous facts and shadowy memories left in the wake of the Grand Conspiracy, questioning whether the Ecstasy Club suckered themselves into buying their own hype. (This sentiment should strike a chord with the half-titillated, half-bored reader.) The novel's shaggy dog pseudo-philosophical ending proves mom correct: Believe in yourself - and you'll drive yourself nuts. Ecstasy Club is a mini-Foucault's Pendulum for the chemical generation, or....errr, daft punks? James Martin

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