Published: 2020, Faber and Faber
Genre: Fiction
Themes: Social media, single parenthood, data algorithms
My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤
The story in this book is a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of social media, and how it can change from friend to foe in the time it takes to install an intrusive algorithm. Someone once told me that if anything online is free to the user, then you are the product, and that is exactly the message this book is presenting to us.
DBC Pierre is the author of the book Vernon God Little that won the Man Booker Prize in 2003, and that is one of the few book that have caused me to laugh out loud as I read it. However, I have been passing this new book over on the library 'bestseller' shelves for some weeks now, as the title didn't particularly appeal to me, and I had the impression it would be heavy going. (It's amazing what conclusions you can come to without even reading the blurb inside the cover of a book!) Anyway, last week I gave in and took it home, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.
Lonnie Cush is a blue collar worker in small town America, and since the death of his wife, he has been trying to raise his two children alone. His daughter, Shelby-Ann is nine years old and his son Eagan a couple of years older, and as the story begins Lonnie has just lost his job working underground in the drains.
Eagan is already an avid online gamer and spends most of his time in his room killing donkeys on the game Donkey Kull. Now Shelby-Ann is after a phone of her own and Lonnie fears she will be sucked into sites that she won't be old enough to handle, so he has been holding out. As the plot unfolds he bows to the inevitable and buys her a phone, and soon discovers he is also going to have to sign up to the social platforms, otherwise he won't be able to monitor Shelby-Ann's activity and keep her safe. Not long after he joins the platform a little hyena icon appears at the top of his screen and he discovers all users have been given scores based on the quality of their online activity. Viewing porn or sharing anything unpleasant reduces the score and the scores are quickly being picked up by the banks and used against mortgages and creditworthiness.
DBC Pierre deftly weaves together the coarse banter used by the men who work on the drains with the technical language of computer wizards. As a novel twist, parts of the book are written in double columns with the story running on the left and the constant flow of the online social media feeds on the right. When I first encountered a page in this format I found it a bit off-putting as I imagined I would have to read first one column and then the other, but the social media is faded back to a very faint grey and it is only necessary to be vaguely aware of odd words when working down the page. Much as you would when you scroll down through all the posts on a phone.
It took me a chapter or two to get my bearings with the book, but once I got myself comfortable, I found it cleverly written and well constructed. One issue I had at the beginning was Shelby-Ann picking up a slang word in class at school for a certain sexual practice, and I didn't know what it meant. The word is quite important to the plot as Lonnie has to visit the school to raise the matter with the teacher, but I never did find out the meaning as I didn't want to google it and I couldn't very well ring up a son and randomly ask 'What's t******ing?' Obviously I lead a sheltered life.
The style of this book is quite masculine (if there is such a thing) but it is well worth a read.
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