Isn't It Post-Ironic?

By Daniel Okrent

I know Kurt Andersen. Everyone knows Kurt Andersen (especially here at TIME, where he was on staff for six years). I just know him less well than everybody else does, so it falls to me to review Turn of the Century (Random House; 659 pages; $24.95), his novel about the world in which "everyone" can be defined as the people Kurt Andersen knows.

This, if you're wondering, is a compliment. Since his time at TIME, Andersen has been a founding editor of Spy, the editor in chief of New York, a producer of network specials, a staff writer for the New Yorker. He knows the three points of the buzz compass--Manhattan, Hollywood and the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash.--as well as anyone. Or at least as well as anyone who has so keen an appreciation for the pomposities, vapidities and idiocies that constitute the murmur of our times. As his chief characters--a former journalist edging into sleazy television infotainment, the journalist's software-entrepreneur wife, the wife's vulpine media-mogul boss--alternately cavort and limp through the very near future, you get deep inside the tent of both old and new media, where the egos are as large and as tasteless as the limos.

This is one big mama of a book, its very size a hint of its ambition. Put the same characters and story into 250 pages, which Andersen could easily have done, and you'd have an amusing satire; at 659 pages, you're trying to create something Important. There are two problems with this strategy: first, to get it all in, Andersen is forced to spin scenes in which one character sort of asks another, "Tell me about how that works"--whereupon Andersen hijacks the character's voice for an invariably brilliant riff on news anchors or online stock trading or the politics of software.

Worse, you just don't end up with a novel. While he capitalizes handsomely on the freedom afforded by fiction (so many more people you can zing without fear of libel!), Andersen is hamstrung by the overall structure that the genre demands. His sentences may sparkle, but the book's forward motion is a sputtering lope. Its loose, digressive shape makes Turn of the Century awfully easy to put down.

But as nearly every page on its own is alive with wit and observation and sparks of inspired nastiness, it's thrilling to pick it back up, for exquisite set pieces on the man who introduced "female butt cleavage" to network TV, on the four meanings (three of them ironic) of the term "your friend," on corporate travel (flying business class is "a protection racket--you pay extra, or you just might get roughed up in coach").

So fecund is Andersen's satiric gift, and so broad his scope, that he almost incidentally sprays tiny rat-a-tat bullets at Alec Baldwin, Rupert Murdoch, Stephen Jay Gould, AIDS-awareness ribbons and the word lite. With a sweeter brand of malice, he takes direct (and hilarious) aim at Wall Street money-manager/pundit/provocateur (and TIME columnist) James J. Cramer, who is clearly the model for one of his more memorable characters.

Andersen wisely sets his satire in the Tomorrowland of the year 2000, where he is free to imagine things that are two degrees beyond plausible. But, you soon realize, the culture's capacity for cheesiness is so vast that everything he imagines could, and probably will, happen. "Push TV," for instance, which can't be turned off: "Pressing the off button only switches the set to a low-power mode, during which advertising copy appears noiselessly on the screen." Or a network's "Seamlessness Initiative": the characters in each show connect to the characters on all the other shows, so that "the star of the afternoon soap opera The Naked and the Damned (formerly Trailer Park) would appear as a contestant on the game show Quacks like a Duck." Or, in one of the book's funniest running motifs, the transplantation of a pig liver into the female protagonist's father, a Hollywood hustler of exceptional charm and exceptional coarseness. (Son-in-law to daughter: "You had a whole childhood to get nauseated by show biz. I was vulgarity-deprived.")

"Irony," Andersen writes at one point, "is now embedded in the language, ubiquitous and invisible." He's right, of course, and his own ironic take sometimes makes him seem so arch you could almost drive through him. But it is nonetheless a joy to watch him at work, ricocheting off everything putrid and tinny in our culture. Whatever you call the thing after postmodern, Turn of the Century is it--something post-postmodern, a commentary on commentary. That may not make much of a novel, but it sure is fun to read.