Turn of the Century
Kurt Andersen
Random House, 659 pages
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One of the more radical conjectures of Kurt Andersen's brilliantly funny, semi-speculative novel, Turn of
the Century, is that nothing terrible happens on January 1, 2000. Set in the high-powered world of media, finance,
and computer technology--sectors that current disaster theorizing expects to be hard hit--Turn of the Century
assumes a completely uneventful transition. Unlike the novel's other futurisms, this premise is so underplayed
that it's almost possible to miss it. The only real reference to millennial madness is a piece of software developed
by a company owned by one of the novel's protagonists: Y2KRx, a program which cleans up the messes resulting from
bad Y2K fixes.
That doesn't mean that Turn of the Century doesn't deal with breakdowns and disasters, however: they're
just of a more universal nature. It's failures of communication Andersen is concerned with, and the havoc that
results from the age-old human tendency to confuse fact and fiction. And the way that modern technology, with the
power to place the whole world at our fingertips and invade the most intimate corners of our lives, not only doesn't
clarify things, but blurs the lines still further.
George Mactier is a hot new television producer for the emerging Mose Broadcasting Company. He's married to Lizzie
Zimbalist, entrepreneurial owner of Fine Technologies, a software development company. George and Lizzie have three
alarmingly precocious children, a host of eccentric friends and co-workers, a huge Manhattan home, scads of possessions,
and an impossibly over-scheduled lifestyle. They're venal enough to enjoy being rich and want to be richer, and
socially conscious enough to feel guilty about it. Unlike the capitalist overachievers of former generations, they
have no sense of entitlement to their success: they sometimes find it hard, in fact, to take themselves seriously.
Things begin to go awry when George's controversial new show, Real Time, goes into production, and Microsoft
makes an offer for Lizzie's company. The offer is based on a misunderstanding of Lizzie's future R&D plans;
when the Microsoft execs finally realize this, the offer is seriously downsized. At this vulnerable moment (Lizzie
was already counting her millions), George's boss, media mogul Harold Mose, makes Lizzie an offer she can't refuse:
he'll buy Fine Technologies as part of a market diversification strategy, and Lizzie will go to work for him--at
a corporate level considerably higher than George's. Just about this time, George's new show, deemed too radical
by both audiences and TV network functionaries, is cancelled. George becomes convinced that Lizzie is responsible,
and also that she's having an affair with Mose. Missed phone calls, stray e-mails, accidentally deleted computer
files, and bad personal choices compound the confusion.
Turn of the Century's wildly complex plot also involves insider stock trading, cyber-porn, old-fashioned
blackmail, experiments in cat telepathy, and a plot to fake the death of Bill Gates. Nearly everything that happens
hinges on miscommunication, and the ease with which people mistake the invented for the real (and vice versa).
George makes up an elaborate story about Lizzie which, though based on facts, has no relationship whatever to the
truth. Lizzie, to a lesser extent, does the same about George. George's cancelled TV show combines fictional episodes
about the life and adventures of a news crew with a hour-long real news broadcast; when the show scoops a sensational
news story, it's variously thought that the story was faked for the show, or that the show somehow was responsible
for the truth of the story. Lizzie's father receives an emergency transplant of a pig's liver, vaulting Lizzie
and George into the midst of a newsmagazine feeding frenzy; in the end the operation turns out to have been a fiction--for
which George and Lizzie are, obscurely, blamed. A plot by a group of hackers to virtually kill Bill Gates mixes
fact (a scuba expedition in the Caribbean) with fiction (a tragic accident), precipitating a series of events in
which real life, briefly and eerily, winds up mimicking the hoax.
An unending flow of satirical details fleshes out Andersen's near-future world: BarbieWorld, a Las Vegas theme
casino; E-squared, an offshoot of the E! channel, which broadcasts nothing but footage of celebrity events; a talk
show hosted by Al Roker and Monica Lewinsky ("maybe they cast Al to make her look slim by comparison,"
George muses); Finales, a program composed entirely of obituaries; a company that uses bleeding-edge special
effects technology to update religious ceremonies; the "Adam Sandler Koyaanisqatsi remake" (my
personal favorite). These clever fictions, all completely plausible but just outrageous enough to be recognizable
as invention (although one never quite knows: maybe there really is a Chopper Channel) are seamlessly blended
with our own real present, allowing Andersen to illuminate with hilarious, dead-on accuracy the absurdities of
modern times. It's a virtuoso comic performance, all the more impressive because it's sustained without flagging
over the full course of a very long--but not over-long--novel.
Because it's fat, complicated, ironic, and shows rich people coming to grief, Turn of the Century has been
widely compared with Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. It's not a totally accurate comparison, for
Wolfe's novel is a savage social satire, while Andersen's is a far gentler comedy of manners, with, at its center,
benign values such as love, fidelity, loyalty, and trust. But the two books are alike in one important sense: both
provide a diamond-sharp snapshot of a particular moment and a particular group of movers and shakers, in a way
that distills with absolute precision the essence of a decade. The year may be 2000, but George and Lizzie are
still very much a '90's couple.
Turn of the Century is a perfect time capsule, an over-the-top parody, a compulsively readable entertainment,
and a dazzling literary accomplishment all in one: by any standard, an extraordinary debut novel.
Copyright © 1999 Victoria Strauss
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