I don't want to know your reasons. I don't care. Think of me more like a bullet. Just point.
So, what do you get if you cross The Sopranos with The Matrix, throw in some nods to 9/11 and Occupy Wall Street, have Chuck Palahniuk write the screenplay and ask Quentin Tarantino to direct? Why, a Shovel Ready project, of course. And if that sounds like a mashup of a lot of pop-cultural references, it might not be surprising to learn that the author, Adam Sternbergh, is the culture editor of The New York Times Magazine. (And that might explain why I've heard more buzz around this debut novel than it might actually deserve -- it must be nice to have friends in the right places.)
I don't think I've ever read any actual cyberpunk -- a word I see used to describe Shovel Ready -- so I won't be a poseur and throw that around, but I have dipped my toes in classic noir (note Spademan's name is a nod to Hammett's Sam Spade), and can understand why Sternbergh refers to his book as "future noir": After a dirty bomb has made Times Square radioactive and a further series of car bombings causes half the population of New York City to funnel away for greener pastures, Spademan, a former garbage man who has lost everything in the attacks, remains in the city as an assassin for hire. (I thought his weapon of choice would be a shovel because of his name but it's a boxcutter -- and that's an authorial decision fraught with significance, no?) When Spademan is hired to kill an 18-year-old runaway, complications arise (she's pregnant with her powerful Evangelist father's baby), and the hitman becomes protector -- he's not that kind of psycho, after all.
In this near-future world, people are able to enter the limnosphere: a Matrix/Holodeck virtual reality experience, complete with cybernerds creating the storylines with their laptops and nurses monitoring vital signs. In a not-too-subtle commentary on class disparity, regular people scrape together their change to escape their bleak lives in rundown Chinatown buildings, stacked up on cots cheek-by-jowl with their fellow escapees, while the super-rich have private beds in their homes and can stay tapped-in essentially forever -- taking in nutrition by iv and expelling waste through tubes, all under the eye of a starched and dedicated nurse. (What isn't made much of is the fact that the limnosphere is actually the great equalizer -- class pretty much disappears once someone taps-in.)
There are some Chandleresque wordplays: the slow exodus from NYC is called the "incremental apocalypse"; the sight of a man wearing ten silver rings is a "sterling graveyard"; prescription drugs are the "toothless tap-in". But I have trouble thinking of Spademan as a sympathetic anti-hero -- he's more Tony Soprano the cold-blooded killer than Philip Marlowe the flawed detective; as the quote I opened with shows, Spademan will kill anyone, no questions asked. So, while reading Shovel Ready, I wasn't exactly rooting for the protagonist (rooting for him to kill people?), and the dirty bomb dystopia/virtual reality escapism didn't exactly feel fresh or new (the laptops and heart monitors and bedlike capsules was exactly The Matrix in my mind). There were logical flaws in the plot, including characters saying things they couldn't have known -- for example, describing what Rachel was experiencing as she first tapped-in when she never told anyone about it -- and the climax was a little…anticlimactic. But, there were some twists along the way and I did think that Sternbergh did a deft job of filling in the characters' backstories as he went along -- no one's real motives were truly revealed until the end.
This was not my favourite book. I've recently heard the term "dick lit" to mean the masculine form of "chick lit" and I think that would describe this book -- kind of lightweight and pulpy and for which I'm not really the intended audience. And I hated the voice of the actor who read this audiobook. But I'm sure Sternbergh doesn't need my support -- I hear Denzel Washington is attached to the movie version of Shovel Ready and the author is hard at work on the sequel. Maybe he can work in some wikileaks and Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad and Fight Club and…
