Bug Jack Barron
★★★★★
In at the new wave deep end…
Wikipedia tells me it’s Beatnik influenced, a movement of which I’m ignorant and so feel unable to opine on its literary merit in the context of that counterculture. For me, it just came across as lewd, sexist, and racist - clearly satirically so in places, but my gut reaction to the narrative overwhelmed any deeper points it tried to make as it broke its taboos.
Spinrad vomits out page after page of run-on prose, a sliced-up stream of consciousness that feels like the whole book is one long high-energy rap battle - it’s exhausting to read. If you like the idea of the Rick and Morty end-of-season rant drawn out to 400 pages, then this might be your shtick. Personally, I found it repetitive and low on meaning - by the last quarter, I was skimming. All the characters end up sounding the same angry male. All the female characters were fawning sex objects. Everyone shouts and overreacts and seems to lack even the most basic empathy.
If you can stomach putting all that aside, there’s some interesting examination of power and corruption and some spot-on foresight of the power of media and celebrity (though even Spinrad didn’t foresee that the billionaire industrialist would also be the media influencer with 100m followers!). The interview scenes of Jack’s TV show are particularly gripping and stylistically call to mind Max Headroom. But in the end, there’s only a skeleton of a plot filled out with pages and pages of internal monologuing. It may be an important work of its time, but today it just doesn’t deliver enough to overcome its very significant red flags.
