Sarah's Reviews > Sewer, Gas and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy

(Preliminary apologies: I kind of sped through this book, and I will kind of speed through this review- my apologies to the author and also the the lady who recommended it to me! It's not been much of a week for dawdling, which is too bad- I could use some dawdling (although, of course, the fact that I dawdle so much is precisely what makes this a non-dawdle-able week, so perhaps I really could not use that dawdling)- and of course quality suffers where quantity prevails, but I want to add this review to my done list before I forget everything about this novel!).

Ok! So! This novel was recommended to me by a friend of a friend in the course of a conversation which was leading me towards an implicit trust of her literary opinion (under the principal that interesting people are, generally, interested in interesting things). I'm grateful for that- because honestly, had I passed by this novel on the library shelf, I would have just kept on going. Neither the title nor the cover recommend itself to me: as a city worker, I'm sort of blase about utilities as a topic, and as a reader, I'm kind of turned off by surrealistic book covers, which this one, or at least the version I'm reading, has (you can't really tell by the icon, but that blue thing at the bottom left is a shark. A shark. Sort of swim-floating in a crimson sky alongside several columns. I'm not saying it's an invalid art form, surrealism, it's just thoroughly not my cup of tea). And while I know the old adage, I'll admit, I am definitely a judger of books by their covers.

So don't make my mistake, is my point.

This novel is set in the year 2023 as imagined by the author in 1999 (in Boston, at the time). Like David Foster Wallace, Matt Puff envisions a future where consumerism has fully pervaded every element of human experience (essentially, a hyper-concentrated version of now), and like David Foster Wallace, he uses absurdity to explore class and consumerism (this particular book even comes, at the very beginning, with a social register, handily denoting the characters as the Rich, the various degrees of Middle Class, and the various degrees of poor). Unlike David Foster Wallace, who seems to imply that consumption has more or less drained the world of its inate grace and vitality, Matt Ruff seems to focus on the absurd, irrational, subversive inclination of humans to- well, to be fully human, in all of our joy and our piques and our passions and our gritty determinism. This is a novel with a lot of dead people in it (several million, possibly billion), and some extremely troubling racial undertones (the novel hinges on a mysterious plague that *only* kills people of African descent), and some very ambiguous judgment calls- yet which still manages to make you feel generally optimistic and hopeful about our future.

Mostly, I think, this is achieved by the creation of some extremely likeable characters. I felt, as I read this novel, split between focusing on the the incredulous but entertaining romp (the novel's cover does not lie- sharks feature in this, as well as submarines, pirates, androids (both evil and benign), AI, industrial espionage), the utterly bizarre (I was promised this would feature Ayn Rand reincarnated in a lamp- and I'm not going to lie to you, this novel, dedicated to Ms. Rand, gave me a strange sense of the warm fuzzies for her!), and the incredibly likeable and warm characters. These characters are not perfect, but of course that is a huge reason why they are likeable (Ayn Rand, take note!)- in spite of their many imperfections and contradictions, they are characters who you can imagine just really having some fine moments of deep enjoyment in the world, and in their love for each other. (Also, this featured a fleeting, but to my mind, very very touching, depiction of polyandry, which I think is a hard act to pull, so well done with that, Mr. Ruff!)

As a person who loves conspiracy theories with the skeptical loyalty (comparable to the love a lapsed Catholic has for the Church, I think), this novel handily indulges in all manners of fantastical world weaving, implicating beloved and not so beloved cultural and political figures; I wouldn't say this novel brilliantly reveals anything that the average American adult hasn't already considered about the dangers of technology, the role of capitalism, or the relatively futility of activism, but that's a minor quibble.

I will say that as a white American, this novels treatment of race made me deeply deeply uncomfortable. I can't say whether this is the author's intention, or if this is a criticism of the author- I kind of feel I need to take the tack of familiarizing myself with Mr. Ruff's work before I know for sure. But I do offer that as a head's up- pretty much my soul reservation about this novel is that I am not sure if his treatment of a plague that wipes out an entire race of people is flippant or brutally satirical- I lean towards the latter, but I'm just not sure.

All in all, a book I highly recommend you read. And then talk to me about it when you do.