Jennifer Government

Rating:
Summary: Smoke and Mirrors
Review: This book, like a well-executed marketing campaign, is full of empty promises. A Grand Idea - which is nothing more than a twist on other successful books of this nature - surrounded by television-level writing, nestled in "Wouldn't it be crazy if?" execution that anyone over the age of 20 should be ashamed to buy into. The literary equivalent of a get-rich-buying-and-selling-real estate infomercial. If you held the book up to a mirror, would it have a reflection? Probably not. It never had a soul to begin with. Read this book if you think fast food commericals are hilarious.

Rating:
Summary: 1984 it's not, but it's still interesting
Review: As an avid player of the online game NationStates, I was exposed to the book through the presence of the game as a promotional device for the book. The more intensely I got into the roleplaying game, the more interested I got in reading the book, so putting my recent history of not finishing books I started, I bought Jennifer Government.

I've seen the book compared to George Orwell's 1984 and recently, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Since I'm not that familiar with Brave New World, I'll focus mainly on 1984. Both Jennifer Government and 1984 require that the reader suspend disbelief to a certain extent. Big Brother as a growing menace to freedom or corporations taking over the world are both premises that sound extreme to the casual reader. But while Orwell is able to craft a story that becomes a clear cautionary tale, Max Barry seems to be caught up more in the humorous aspects of poking fun at the Nikes or the McDonalds of the world.

While Barry's writing starts out slowly enough, with seemingly outrageous plots that make suspension of disbelief harder to accomplish, he eventually is able to take the reader through the suspenseful points and allow the reader to picture the events happening. Try as you might to show your disbelief in the events, you still read on to find out what happens in the end and find out if Jennifer Government can get her man.

Barry eventually makes his point that capitalizm (his spelling) running unfettered can have undesirable consequences, but it wsan't quite the polished work that Orwell's classic was. Still, it was an entertaining read and it was clever to use the online game to promote the book.

Rating:
Summary: Good idea - very weak characterization
Review: I'm rating Jennifer Government a 2 star, but it really should be a 2.5 (it is an average book).

Strong points:

Good premise.

The dust jacket artwork is excellent.

This book is quite humorous, and the author must have spent a great deal of time working on a style that is similar to Douglas Adams with a bit of Heller (Catch-22, as mentioned on the dust jacket) tossed in for good measure.

It is a fast read, and the pages are easily consumed.

There is a great deal of humor; however I am not sure that the funny aspects will tickle each reader the same way. The mature adult reader will no doubt be laughing at the absurdity of the characters and the satirical unrealism of the enjoyable plot.

Weak points:

Paper-thin characterization really takes away from the overall story. There is virtually no depth to any of them. Seriously. Sit-com television characters have more depth. While that adds to the absurdity of the plot, and overall humor, it just makes this work of fiction feel very, very lightweight, and not what one usually expects for the novel form of media. It also hurt the satirical message the author is attempting to make. (Is he even seriously making such a pro-socialist argument about capitalism or just fooling around?). Note that the dust jacket comparison of Jennifer Government to Catch-22 fails completely under this aspect.

In Catch-22, Heller's characters, are very well developed and complex - this is one of the things that make that a classic piece of literature. Again, one usually expects a lot more depth from a book than is what is served up for television and even full-feature length movies. Perhaps this is why various reader-reviewers think this will make a better movie than a novel. I certainly agree with that assertion.

Rating:
Summary: Latter-day "1984" with superior sense of humor
Review: Welcome to the future; there are no nations, per se...only international trade alliances. The "New World Order" is strictly profit-driven, not ideologically motivated. George Orwell's much anticipated Big Brother has instead turned out to be Big Business in Australian satirist Max Barry's rich (and completely absurdist) dark comedy that looks at commerce and the future in a very similar manner to Norman Jewison's only loosely-based sports film "Rollerball".

This is a book targeted toward the would-be twentysomething activists who failed to show up in droves in order to vote George W. Bush out of office this past Election Day; the anti-globalization angle is obvious, with all the usual international MNC villains (Nike, McDonald's) as well as the usual current cronies of the US right (law enforcement, the National Rifle Association) given the obvious reviling that one would come to expect. Amidst all of this is the story of a small group of people whom the author desperately attempts to humanize within the cogs of the machine that is hypercorporate society.

Being both outside that demographic as well as far from sympathetic to the antiglobalist cause, I found the book to be more entertaining from a humorous angle than effective as a moralistic literary crusade; perhaps the author is skilled enough as a storyteller to at least partialy mask his own agenda, a skill that eludes certain other authors who have also won Academy Awards for directing "documentary" films. However it is also at least somewhat likely that the author's work lacks sufficient passion to motivate the reader, to steer the reader to the place where the author wishes to take them.

In the end it was an enjoyable enough read. The plot twists were rather predictable (and I won't divulge them here) and the ending can likely be foreseen several chapters in advance. However, the author does succeed in creating a rather interesting vision of Dystopia worthy of comparison with the all-time standard set by Orwell's "1984". It's a book that probably should be read by more people of diverse age groups and social/political leanings and a suitable page-turner if you want to get a little deeper than standard summer light-reading fare; more accurately rated at three and-a-half stars.

Rating:
Summary: Max Barry is a visionary!
Review: Or a marketing executive with an evil plan for the future. I was really impressed with this book, especially when the genre seemed dead for a bit. But this book breathes new life back into it. Incisive as incisive gets!