The Boost by Stephen Baker

Published by Tor Books on May 20, 2014

If you have a processor in your head, you don't need a watch or a cellphone or a DVD player or a GPS device. Of course, you don't need a computer because you are hardwired to one, and you don't need all the complications of real sex because virtual sex is almost as good. You can eat vile-tasting vegetable cubes and fool your brain into believing you are having a delicious meal. If you do not have a processor giving you all these benefits, you are "in the wild."

In the future envisioned in The Boost, annual processor updates come from China which, having established itself as the world leader in uniformity of thought, has become the world leader in the technology that integrates computer chips and brains. The Chinese chips permit the government to download the user's memory from every chip, but privacy laws require those gates to be closed on the chips sold in the United States. Of course, you know where this is going, as does the reader after a few early chapters. You also know that allowing the government to control the content of the update isn't a good thing, at least if you prefer freedom of information to censorship and propaganda. There is, however, another nefarious scheme embedded in the chip update that is less obvious and even more intriguing than the chip's surveillance capability.

Ralf Alvare, a character in The Boost who was involved in the processors' annual update, is in the wild for the first time since his first birthday. Ralf's processor was removed after he discovered something he wasn't supposed to know. Ralf makes his way to Juarez (where the wild people go) along with his brother, who isn't wild but would like to be. Their parents, revolutionaries in their own ways, also play significant roles the story. You can pretty much guess the rest of the story.

The day will probably come when everyone has a boost, or something like it. I'd love to have one. But The Boost illustrates a plausible downside to welding dry technology into a wet brain. The cautionary aspect of the novel is more interesting than the lifeless plot, which too often features characters sitting around and talking to each other. The Boost is more a novel of interesting ideas than it is an interesting novel. Some parts of the novel suffer from an excess of expository writing and other parts seem to drift aimlessly. A number of aspects of living with the boost go unexplained, which is surprising given all the expository content.

More disturbing is the novel's absence of dramatic tension. Attempts at humor work reasonably well, but on the whole, the tone is incongruously light given the dark subject matter. Imagine the result if Orwell had added jokes and funny characters to Nineteen Eighty-Four so it would appeal to readers who are turned off by gloomy stories. There's nothing wrong with humor but I got the sense that Stephen Baker couldn't decide whether to write a funny novel or a serious one and didn't quite manage to succeed on either front.

Still, The Boost has entertainment value. It isn't dull and it moves quickly. Secondary characters have an appealing quirkiness. The ideas that are expounded are always interesting. Had the story proceeded with greater zest I would be more enthusiastic about it, but The Boost tells a fun story, even if it doesn't live up to its potential.

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Bread and Butter by Michelle Wildgen

Published by Doubleday on February 11, 2014

I enjoyed reading Bread and Butter, in part because I enjoy a good meal as much as I enjoy a good book. There's also something romantic about the restaurant business. Like many people, I love the idea of owning/managing a restaurant even though I know nothing about food preparation. I do know that most restaurants fail and that I'm much too lazy to put in the hours that a successful restaurant demands. Reading a book that's set in the world of fine dining is therefore a vicarious pleasure that appeals to my culinary fantasies.

Two brothers, Leo and Britt, have been in the restaurant business for ten years, having grown a successful upscale restaurant in the economically deprived soil of Linden, Pennsylvania. Britt is the restaurant's handsome face; Leo the brains. Britt knows how to manage people while Theo is adept at managing finances. Their younger brother Harry, long absent from Linden, has returned to start a restaurant of his own. Britt is bugged that his little brother would have the audacity to compete, particularly without paying his dues in the business. Britt is also bugged when Harry turns up for dinner with Camille, a beautiful regular at Britt's restaurant who nonetheless remains a mystery to him.

While always written in the third person, the novel shifts point of view among the three brothers. They have very different personalities, all brought into sharp focus during the course of the novel. Their outward personalities -- Leo is withdrawn but ultra-competent, Britt is outgoing and relaxed, Harry is charming but high strung -- often mask their true selves. Each is doing his best to conceal his insecurities from the others and the brothers' perceptions of each other (like the reader's perceptions of each) are constantly evolving. Getting a better understanding of the characters as their depths are gradually revealed is a highlight of reading the novel.

Still, the best part of Bread and Butter is its fascinating behind-the-scenes look at restaurant management (in the case of Britt and Leo's established venue) and restaurant development (in the case of Harry's startup). The drama of the restaurant business is complemented by family conflict -- sibling rivalry combined with personal and professional jealousies. To make an innovative high quality restaurant work, you might need to be a little obsessed. All three brothers are obsessed in their own ways. Bread and Butter drives home the point that obsessions might help you succeed professionally while destroying you personally, particularly when obsessions begin to clash.

Some portions of the narrative are too expository and some of the relationship drama is too predictable to be dramatic, but those flaws are overshadowed by the lush descriptions of food and the quirkiness with which line cooks, dessert chefs, and other members of the gossipy and insular restaurant community are portrayed. This isn't a perfect novel but it is one that I imagine most food fans will enjoy.

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Hangman by Stephan Talty

Published by Ballantine on May 13, 2014

Marcus Flynn, convicted of the serial killing of several teenage girls, escapes from prison under unlikely circumstances. How he manages the escape is one of the novel’s mysteries. The killer known as Hangman soon resurrects his career, sending panic throughout Buffalo. Police Detective Abby Kearney is charged with stopping him.

It’s a challenge for crime fiction writers to find a fresh angle on the “hunt for a serial killer” plot. Hangman follows a predictable formula -- the reader gets to know a teenage girl who eventually ends up in the hands of the killer as the detective races against time to save her -- but the formula is well-executed. While Hangman offers little departure from a standard police procedural storyline, the clues Kearney follows to find the killer keep the reader guessing. The ending is somewhat surprising without being overly contrived, a trick that scores points in this genre.

Hangman is worth reading for several additional reasons. The killer is suitably creepy. The steady pace never wavers and Stephan Talty generates a fair amount of excitement as the story rushes to its climax. Talty writes convincingly of Irish culture in Buffalo, particularly in the city’s police agencies, and of the class division between working class South Buffalo and the Ivy League North. He gives Kearney a strong, believable personality. Instead of turning her life into a soap opera or telling us in every third paragraph how much she cares about victims (as too many current crime fiction writers do when they create a female character), Talty gives Kearney a moral crisis to confront and allows her to confront it without becoming self-aggrandizing or self-pitying. For all those reasons, Hangman is formula fiction done well.

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Fatal Enquiry by Will Thomas

Published by Minotaur Books on May 13, 2014

If you can imagine Sherlock Holmes as a bulky action hero, you might have a picture of Cyrus Barker. Fatal Enquiry, the sixth novel in the Cyrus Barker series, takes place in 1886. Barker is a private enquiry agent in London. His younger version of Watson is his assistant, Thomas Llewellyn, who narrates the story. Barker's Moriarty is Sebastian Nightwine, who made an appearance in a previous novel in the Barker series. Barker is no match for Holmes as a thinker but he is clearly a better brawler.

In Fatal Enquiry, Barker reveals how he came to know Nightwine and explains why Nightwine is his mortal enemy, a tale that has Barker fighting with and against the British in China during the middle of the nineteenth century. Early on in the novel, Barker falls victim to Nightwine's scheme to frame him for a crime. He and Llewellyn spend the first half of Fatal Enquiry prowling the alleys of London at night, trying to avoid arrest. Much of the second half belongs to Llewellyn as Barker hatches a plan behind the scenes.

Meanwhile, Llewellyn has a chance encounter with the lovely Sofia Ilyanova, who wishes to become a client of the Barker Agency. Her problem, of course, is related to Barker's, much to the smitten Llewellyn's dismay. Unlike Barker and Llewellyn and even Nightwine, Sofia does not come across as a credible character. She is the novel's only weakness.

Fortunately, the strengths of Fatal Enquiry overcome that misstep. While Barker is no Sherlock (there is very little deduction in this novel), his backstory is intriguing. Most of Fatal Enquiry centers on Llewellyn, a sympathetic character for whom it is easy to root. On the whole, this is a flavorful novel that tells a fun, engaging story in literate prose with a Victorian flair.

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Cubed by Nikil Saval

Published by Doubleday on April 22, 2014

I did not know that more than half of working Americans work in a cubicle (or even that more than half work in offices) but since they tend to be hidden from the public, I suppose I'm just not aware of their pervasive existence. I have no trouble believing that 93 percent of those workers dislike their cubes. The cube world has been lampooned in Office Space, The Office, and Dilbert, among other sources of comedic fiction, but Cubed takes a more serious approach to understanding the world of cubes and the workers who inhabit them. Nikil Saval's wide-ranging discussion is largely a history office workers and their changing environment. Saval explains that he wants to tell that story from the perspective of office workers, but that's the book's least successful ambition.

Cubed discusses the history of clerical workers from nineteenth century counting-houses to their role in modern American life. Some early clerks (like Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin) rose above their stations while most (as is true today) toiled in obscurity. In the nineteenth century, clerks in literature received little respect (Bartleby and Uriah Heep are notorious examples) while clerks in the real world were mocked for their aristocratic pretensions by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman. But growing membership in "the clerking class" arguably gave birth America's middle class. At that point they were mocked (by Emerson, among others) not for pretension but for whininess, a convention that continues in modern satire.

The urbanization of America gave birth to the large office buildings that form the environment Cubed explores. Clerks were lined up in rows to mimic the factory floor until an anal-retentive mechanical engineer named "Speedy" Taylor made efficiency in the factory and in the office a managerial obsession. Cubed gives detailed attention to Taylor, to Frank Lloyd Wright's contribution to modern office design, to skyscrapers, to the growing role of women as clerical workers after the Civil War (with the concomitant fear that they would seduce their unwary bosses in order to secure raises and special workplace privileges), to the impact of labor unions on office work, and to the evolving way in which political movements and political theorists viewed office workers. He also covers the psychology (and pop-psychology) of office workers, the competition between humans and machines, the language of white collar business (complete with sports metaphors), competing styles of office management (from rigid hierarchies to Zen-like naturalism), potted plants as status symbols, and office sex, little of which takes places inside cubicles.

Cubed also offers an introductory course in the theory of office design, illustrated with pictures of office buildings and their interiors. Work spaces themselves become the focus of the last third of the book, including the "action office" (i.e., an easily disassembled cube). As one critic noted, it is a design that works well for office zombies, the working dead who are crammed into small, disposable spaces. Perhaps deliberately, the spaces create no sense of permanence. Still, the Action Office caught fire and spread across America, with managers taking little notice that nearly all the workers hated their cubes, particularly after they started getting smaller ... and smaller ... and smaller. Attempts to reinvent cubes have largely been futile (unless you count Nerf basketball as a serious workplace improvement). Most experiments to replace cubes have failed although Saval suggests that some (like Google's environment) show promise. He also notes that more employers are recognizing that many skilled employees work better at home, a concept that frustrates the controlling desires of middle managers.

Cubed is well-researched and informative but I'm not sure it is anything more than that. The book told me more than everything I always wanted to know about skyscrapers and the history of office workers, but I'm not sure it gave me much insight into how the world is perceived from the confines of a cube, which is Saval's declared intent. I do like the book's pithy characterization description of "the unholy expectations of the modern workplace, which asked for dedication and commitment, offering none in return." And of course I like all the quotations from Office Space and Sinclair Lewis. Cubed is informative and enjoyable, even if it is a bit scattered and doesn't quite meet its stated goal.

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