The geek shall inherit the earth
Personalized online marketing is a curse of the 21st century. You know, an email pings into your inbox that reads: “If you bought Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, why not buy Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone?” You delete the email in a white fury and shake your head, wondering if the end of civilization is nigh.
Eric Muller, the nerdish lead character of Gabriel Roth’s sparky, neurotic debut novel has become a dotcom millionaire through analysis of such online marketing, and with a laconic honesty spends his life judging people by their consumer habits and cultural references. Unsurprisingly, he is never satisfied by his discoveries.
It’s 2002 in San Francisco and everyone is jittery about the impending war in Iraq. The uncertainty America faces is paralleled in Eric’s own mind as he heads into the unknown, using his data-analysis skills to solve the past of Maya, a girl he is in love with, who has either been sexually abused by her father or is suffering from false-memory syndrome.
Roth has a sharp awareness of trends and this comes out, hilariously, in Eric’s dry commentary. He ponders “the need for white girls to transcend their whiteness via Frida Kahlo and salsa dancing.” Houses are cluttered with “neo Buddhist iconography” and lavatory walls in chain restaurants are decorated “with photographs of tailfinned American cars and decaying neo-Colonial palaces.”
The tragedy of Eric is that he is fully aware of the hollowness of his success, of the insidious monoculture that masquerades, treacherously, as multiculturalism, the promotion of choice when choice is, in fact, contracting. Roth fleshes out Eric’s character by the use of a double narrative in which we follow him from adolescence in the early Nineties. We see him programming a turgidsounding adventure game (remember those?) and then, in a prefiguration of his later field work, carrying out analytical research on every girl in his school year. The earnestness of youth is wittily depicted, such as when Eric describes the work of successive computer programmers as being “like a Medieval cathedral, built by five generations of stonemasons.”
Eric could be a creep but Roth has imbued him with such a hefty amount of humorous self-doubt that you can’t help but root for him. Roth is also very good on the fractured relationship of Eric’s parents; his father, a sort of Western Willy Loman, aches with desperation, “a man held together with chicken wire and hopeless dreams.”
The Unknowns is a confident novel that manages to be both funny and sad. Buy it, although if you do so online don’t be surprised to receive an email that reads: “If you bought The Unknowns by Gabriel Roth, why not buy The Humblings by Philip Roth?” Please delete.