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By David Gates
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Nobody doubts Kurt Andersen, cofounder of Spy magazine and now a New Yorker writer, is a hypersmart guy, but how many people want to hear him riff for 659 pages? His publisher guesses 100,000; that's how many copies it has printed of his first novel, "Turn of the Century," a lumbering vehicle for some zippy forays into big media, the software biz, Wall Street, upscale Manhattan and other cultural pestholes. Like Tom Wolfe's novels, it aspires to epic social satire, though it doesn't bother with Wolfe's dutiful vertical panoramas: except waitpeople, no one seems to make under six figures.
"Turn of the Century" bristles with sharply observed detail: suits, SUVs, restaurant menus and, above all, words--whose meanings fluctuate like stock prices. A TV producer tells an aspiring anchor he'd like to see her audition tape; "since he is interested, he uses like, which is a more serious word than love." Irony, one character muses, "is now embedded in the language," and a deadly knowingness filters all experience. When the moon rises above an outdoor party, one guest says it resembles "some wonderful black-and-white picture of old New York." And this sense of unreality pollutes the media culture and infects the body politic. "A majority of our test audiences thought 'the Kurds' were a fictional people," a TV news researcher reports. "The end of the story scored pretty high, but only because viewers thought the phrase 'Kurdistan' was, you know, a punchline."
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The problems come when Andersen has to novelize. With all the riffs and set pieces, the story--high-end rigmarole in the year 2000, involving a TV network, a fictionalized Microsoft, mystifying financial deals and a hacker prank that causes a profitable hiccup in the stock market--takes 300 pages to get rolling. He does his damnedest to breathe life into his main characters, providing software executive Lizzie Zimbalist with a mildly foul mouth and depriving her husband, TV producer George Mactier, of an arm. (He lost it in Nicaragua as a NEWSWEEK reporter.) But this conspicuously planted detail never pays off in the plot. And their "personalities" remain blurry sites of work and family anxiety, with spikes of class guilt in a baseline of self-complacency.
For all its sharpness and verbal energy, "Turn of the Century" seems oddly timid. Andersen spares George and Lizzie any severe test of character and they never significantly misbehave. After all the plot twists, their lives have hardly changed, except for a Capra-esque epiphany: that the simple, principled life is best, and that they can get by on the $2 million Lizzie's made on a business deal. When the penultimate chapter trots out the whole cast for a New Year's 2001 toast ("May we all continue to have the strength to live in these interesting times"), we're supposed to be pleased to see everybody again. But they're so pleased with themselves--why should we have to care?
Turn of the Century--Random House. 659 pages. $24.95.
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