Feed [Paperback]

MT Anderson's "Feed" is the best novel I have read so far this year - "The Catcher in the Rye" crossed with "Brave New World". Titus and his authentically horrible buddies are the way the world is going. It is a vision of hell.

The world of Feed is only one remove from our own; what seem like exaggerations at first are really too close for comfort to the way we live now. Anderson presents this nightmare society with devastating clarity, so that you can't help but see its seeds as you look around you today.

Please don't be put off by the (very plausible) futuristic slang or the inarticulate dialogue - the speech of people who have forgotten how or why to read, and who have no need of learning. Every so often Anderson - in the voice of Titus - produces an astonishing image, a piece of poetry in the midst of it all. His satires on advertising, fashion and corporate youth-speak hit exactly the right note.

Inside the satire is a love story - a tragedy - and like all the best tragedies, the plot has a wounding inevitability to it. I don't agree with the reviews who find the ending unsatisfying. It's the only possible ending because this is a novel about the horror of entropy: that things, and people, fall apart, gradually, unstoppably. There's the grain of hope that caring enough can hold back the tide, if only it is not too late. But perhaps, by the time Anderson's world comes to be, it already will be.

Did I forget to mention it's also very funny? Well, it's also very funny, and also very moving.

Like the Feed, this book sticks in your head and won't let you alone. Everyone should read it.

I picked this book up in a second-hand shop a few months ago, thinking it would be something in the cyberpunk mould of William Gibson, but not realizing it had been aimed at a teenaged readership. It doesn't take long to read, but it's stayed with me for a long time. I was reminded of The Catcher in the Rye, The Machine Stops, Shampoo Planet, A Clockwork Orange and Snow Crash.

By using what seems to be only minimal extrapolation from where we are, Anderson posits a future where all media, commerce and advertising is processed by a networked computer that's been embedded into your brain. The result is a non-stop flow of information (the feed) which is tailor-made to what its providers think you're interested in. In the case of the teenaged protagonists this is - as ever - music, film, fashion, celebrity news and soap operas, along with the functionality for mutual chat sessions. Because of the deep connection between the hardware and the wetware, the feed is also adjusted according to your mood: for example, at one point when a boy is tongue-tied in the presence of a girl he likes, it advertises a site which offers great chat-up lines. More interestingly, the way in which information is fed directly into the brain seems to have led to the loss of literacy, which is one of the reasons for the much-commented-on slang used by the characters (and the narrator). In the presence of limitless amounts of information, knowledge has become atrophied: anything (for example, the meaning of a word) can be looked up instantly, but people prefer to use this resource for shopping.

I found this notion to be incredibly prescient. Thus, when I arrived on the Amazon site, it told me about books and CDs I might be interested in, based on my earlier purchases and what I've said I already own; it emails me regularly with similar suggestions. The technology in this book doesn't seem that much further along. As you might have already guessed, the story is about someone who tries to resist the feed, in an attempt to think for themselves. You can probably also guess what happens next. But that's no reason not to read this excellent, thought-provoking and deeply moving book.

In this cautionary book, YA (Young Adult) author Anderson takes a familiar element of cyberpunk fiction and applies it to American teenage culture in the far future. In this vision of "wetware", brains can be directly wired to the internet, creating a streaming"feed" of audio, video, and text that operates as a kind of second level of consciousness. People can mentally IM each other across the room, and as their brains process what they see, they are bombarded with targeted advertising. We are introduced to this future via narrator Titus and his cohort of friends. They are archetypes of vapid teens, blindly following the latest fashion trends (and in this ultra-wired world, girls change hairstyles by the hour), purchasing the latest clothing off the feed, getting wasted at semi-legal "malware" brain-scrambler sites, and generally ignoring anything beyond their immediate superficial concerns.

When the group goes to the moon (kind of a mix of Las Vegas and Daytona Beach) for spring break, they encounter the dark side of the feed -- the possibility of getting hacked (since the feed is wired directly to their brain, this can have calamitous effects). Titus also meets and befriends Violet, a home-schooled girl who takes a shine to him and wants to join his circle of friends. It's not really clear why a girl as smart and allegedly beautiful as Violet would be interested in the nice, but not particularly bright or introspective Titus, but their relationship becomes the basis for Anderson's rather obvious anti-consumerist message. Violet is the bright alternachick who'd figured out that the feed's main purpose is to get people to buy stuff, while Titus is the nice, but not too deep dude who just wants to get along and have a good time. His inability to accept her inconvenient truth plays out plausibly, as Anderson wisely avoids any cheesy moments of realization or transformation. But this is undercut but all the characters' two-dimensionality and the story's overall lack of nuance.

There's a running background story about unrest around the world resulting from America's massive consumption, and some unexplained lesions that are appearing on everyone's skin, but Violet is the only one paying attention as the group does the standard teenage stuff. The book does a very convincing job of sketching the lives of future teens, with particular attention to language (for example, instead of saying "Dude!", people say "Unit!"). Chapters end with blasts of the feed, giving a keen sense of the barrage of marketing directed at the characters. Unfortunately, the teens who are most likely to read a dystopian semi-cyberpunky novel about the dangers of capitalism and consumerism are the ones least likely to need to hear the message.