Silicon Valley in ferment
Author pokes fun at himself in a story of tech industry culture and home baking.
Sourdough. Yeesh. You are forgiven for assuming the man behind 2012’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore has come at us this time with sop and crusty cliché. Perhaps: ‘‘burnt-out financier winds up housesitting in a charming alpine village, her love for the local baker rising in synch with her loaves”.
Yeah, nah. Well, sort of.
Lois Clary is a brilliant young coder. She’s landed a plum job working in artificial intelligence. Her colleagues have had the marrow sucked out of them by horrific hours and a weird, insular corporate culture. She dubs them “the wraiths” – and blithely joins them.
Clock on, clock off. Lois comes to realise there’s not much else to her life. She lives alone in a sterile apartment, courtesy of her company. For meals, she sucks down a “nutritive gel” that makes Margaret Atwood’s menus seem appetising. She’s all but a robot herself. Leisure time? Lol. She exists “mostly in a state of catatonic recovery, brain flaccid, cells gasping”.
Then comes the magic. A strange sourdough starter enters Lois’s world
– a little crock of wildness, of culture, fermenting away on her too-clean kitchen bench. It becomes the push she needs to change her life.
To the writing: let’s just say that as with his first, bestselling novel, Robin Sloan
had a great deal of fun. It comes through in his slightly delighted tone, his lilt and the way he laughs at himself. In the hands of other writers, some of his little twirls would come across as indulgent, but Sloan gets them over the line with a happy, nerdy wink.
For example, he describes a woman mopping restaurant floors as a “smocked mopper” – then drops that clever, clipcloppy phrase four more times into the next two pages. He knows it’s affected, we know it’s affected, but everyone’s in on the joke.
This relishing of language – and Sloan’s awareness of the reader – forms a helpful lens, allowing us to “hear” the interior Lois, the one who deserves a life much richer than robots and Tetra Paks of slurry.
Feminist kudos where it’s due, too. For the most part, Lois enriches her own life,
thanks very much, with hard work, lateral thinking and calculated risk. She brushes aside romantic advances and, refreshingly, doesn’t bother justifying herself – to the suitors or to the reader.
So, does Lois fetch up happily ever after, cradling her starter, munching on ciabatta? Hardly.
In fact, I think that as much as Sloan ridicules Silicon Valley, he’s also gently mocking the whole slow-food, farmers-market movement, of which sourdough might as well be the spirit animal.
Google him and it turns out Sloan’s taking the piss out of himself, too: he’s worked at Twitter, still tinkers with “machine learning” – and, with his partner, leases a squeak of an olive grove in California. The couple are about to harvest their first oil – the slow and oldfashioned way, natch – and plan to sell it as “Fat Gold”.
Better than nutritive gel, I suppose.