Consumer Transactions (University Casebook)

Rating:
Summary: Greenfield's Ending a Letdown
Review: Michael Greenfield makes an admirable attempt build to expose the reading public to a new type prose that utilizes many different conflicts and characters while also detailing much technical information regarding the law. However, Greenfield apparently has bit off more than he can chew since his novel simply does not tie his many expository strands together in a satisfying ending.
The reader is exposed to hundreds of characters and businesses that have all been involved in separate disputes regarding their separate consumer transactions, but these individual consumer never unite for love or conversation or play or any other type of meaningful exchange. Greenfield seems to view the world as one where people are atomized and isolated. He shows how they communicate through complex and impersonal legal and commercial systems. The reader is left waiting to see if any particular persons are able to use the human spirit in order to break out of this Foucault-esque prison of a society and interact live together in a deeper way.
However, Greenfield offers now such hope. The novel's ending leaves the characters where Greenfield found them: alone and caught in the tangle of a complex, bureaucratic world. While Greenfield may one day fully articulate the themes he draws on in "Consumer Transactions", he right now offers no more than a cynical, mechanical worldview that leaves both his readers and characters both unfulfilled.