Big Tech versus childhood

MEANWHILE IN DOPAMINE CITY by DBC Pierre

(Allen & Unwin, $45)

Anumber of culprits have been fingered in the frequently diagnosed death of the novel. Writers themselves are sometimes held to blame, especially the modernists of a century ago for exhausting the novel’s form with their experimentations. Cinema, television and mass culture are commonly arraigned as chief suspects.

Even reality itself has come under suspicion. How can the fictional contents of a book compete with the preposterous excess of happenings that passes for fact these days?

DBC Pierre’s back-story itself slots into the “fact is stranger than fiction” category. Born Peter Finlay in Australia in 1961, he was mainly raised in Mexico, where his father, a pioneering geneticist, worked. A wayward young adulthood ensued, involving carsmuggling, film-making, drawing cartoons, itinerant travel and drug addiction.

His debut novel, Vernon God Little, was a black comedy about a high-school shooting in Texas. A surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 2003, wilder and more profane than the typical lit fic contender, it tackled one of the main causes of the perceived irrelevance of fiction in the present era, the restless,