>>REVIEW
THE FUTURIST
James P. Othmer
Doubleday Canada, 257 pp.
If you work in advertising, marketing, public relations, sales, or under the bland banner of communications, The Futurist may make you nauseous. This novel speaks to the unbearable faux-ness of being – conferences where people glean nothing except how to fill out their company expense form, and delegate bags stuffed with digital toys and cocktail hours sponsored by Grey Goose.
The futurist is a guy named Yates, who has gotten really good at saying things like, "Space is the next Everest." He begins the novel headed for the Futureworld Conference in Johannesburg. En route, he suffers the first of several breakdowns – his wife has left him, appropriately enough, for a high school history teacher – which he treats with huge amounts of alcohol. Later, things go from ugly to violent.
After an impressive opening, The Futurist begins to channel the energy of all lousy Hollywood movies. The love interest is introduced – Marjorie, "a tall blond white woman," as she first appears to Yates in his hotel room. The reader may forgive this rudimentary observation, as Yates spends a great deal of time – at every stop in this odd odyssey – glued to the television.
While it takes 190 pages for the novel to touch down in the U.S., there is something utterly American about The Futurist. Othmer writes, "He’s as far away from civilization as he’s ever been, in his own hut on a private island, thousands of miles from CNN headquarters in Atlanta..." Only an American could equate civilization with CNN, and not see the joke in it. But Othmer delivers this and other global observations with a straight face.
But what is The Futurist really about? War. Spin and 10 dead Arabs for every dead Jew? Acceptable losses or more corpses of children than soldiers? It is also a midlife crisis novel that spends several chapters hanging with surfer dudes in the Fijian islands.
If Douglas Copeland’s JPod is the funniest book of 2006 (and it is), then The Futurist is perhaps the most promising. For a brief span of pages, I felt deeply engaged and entertained. However, this feeling was fleeting and gone too soon. |
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