Day 1: What Have I Gotten Myself Into
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Wait. Shit. Wrong Brother. Let's try that again.
I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world.
Is this comparison unfair? I don't think it's unfair. Doctorow has chosen to allude to Orwell in the title. He could've called the text Magical Adventures in Libertarianism, or The Founding Fathers, but with Leetspeak, or whatever, much like Orwell could've easily dropped the April part. He didn't; he constantly keeps invoking Orwell, and so the spectre of old George must come when called.
(April -- I hope it will not be too condescending to explain -- is the most literary month, because of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the cruellest, because of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. I don't particularily like this allusion, it feels like Orwell lays claim to Great English Writerdom right there in the opening instead of just telling his damn story, but that's neither here nor there.)
Do I even need to say anything about how these two sentences compare? Say "bright cold day in April" to yourself, run your tongue around the resounding diphthongs. Now say "a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Mission district". Be sure to take a deep breath first, and pretend you're a great big lumbering Komodo dragon as you hiss out the sibilants. Contrast the second clauses: the clunky "one of the most surveilled people in the world" and the clocks striking... wait, thirteen? In England? Isn't there something ever so subtly off about that, something ominous?
At least we know from the outset what to expect from Little Brother: definitely not subtlety. That's fine, though. Not everyone likes understatement, and not everything needs to be understated.
My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced "Winston."
Young and callow Marcus Yallow, pronounced Winston, is called to the vice-principal's office:
The Man was always coming down on me, just because I go through school firewalls like wet kleenex, spoof the gait-recognition software, and nuke the snitch chips they track us with.
From this sentence we learn two things: that Pronounced Winston is arrogant and full of himself, and that Doctorow is probably a big cyberpunk fan. Being a "fan", by the way, is not mutually exclusive with being a "critical reader", so he really doesn't have any excuse here.
You see, I believe cyberpunk took to filling its characters' mouths with cocky technojargon for a number of reasons. First, it was a reflection of language barely keeping up with, and being transformed by, the breakneck speed of technological advancement, combined with the blood-red dawn of a new political and economic paradigm -- neoliberalism. It produced a sense of the new electronic world as a frontier, but a frontier very explicitly understood not as the romanticized birthplace of a nation, but as a site of conquest and pillage. And second, it sounded really cool back then.
It doesn't sound cool anymore. It sounds tedious and out of touch, like what adults imagine teenagers talk like.
My boy Darryl gave me a smack on the ass as I walked past.
Should I get my hopes up? Is this homoeroticism? Well, of course it is, but is it because the characters are men who have sex with men, or because it's a supposedly witty reversal, an appropriation of locker-room football-team masculinity by the nerds, without actually trying to understand how that masculinity works?
(If you've read this, please don't answer that. I don't have high hopes for this text, but I want to find out by myself.)
On the way to the vice-principal's office, Pronounced Winston gets an email on his phone (an email! on the phone! how cool is that!) about some mysterious new feature in some videogame he plays.
I grinned. Spending Fridays at school was teh suck anyway, and I was glad of the excuse to make my escape.
Look, it's not even about "teh suck". We've already established that Doctorow has a peculiar idea of how his characters should talk, and that he intends to use as many cringeworthy Internet references as possible. It's that our protagonist is a person who gets genuinely excited about receiving phone spam.
Have you ever met such a person? I haven't. It's either some sort of Uncanny Valley of characterization, making Pronounced Winston seem profoundly unlike a human being, or a chilling suggestion that some people -- possibly the same ones who read websites about consumer electronics and "killer apps" every day -- might actually enjoy being assaulted by automated advertisements.
Note also that the school being like a prison, which was mentioned a few paragraphs back, manifests in phones being banned. Okay, I guess? Not the most draconian measure I can think of -- so far the setting seems relatively harmless and light-hearted, with the butt-pats and all -- but let's give it a pass. It's a plausible detail.
"If it isn't Doubleyou-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn," he said.
Fredrick Benson -- Social Security number 545-03-2343, date of birth August 15 1962, mother's maiden name Di Bona, hometown Petaluma -- is a lot taller than me. I'm a runty 5'8", while he stands 6'7", and his college basketball days are far enough behind him that his chest muscles have turned into saggy manboobs that were painfully obvious through his freebie dot-com polo-shirts. He always looks like he's about to slam-dunk your ass, and he's really into raising his voice for dramatic effect. Both these start to lose their efficacy with repeated application.
The vice-principal is a jock. A hulking, brainless brute, delighting in crude physical activity instead of nobler intellectual pursuits, the sworn enemy of the righteous and oppressed nerd. I thought I started complaining about awful characterization too early, but this? This is the worst. I'm just waiting for Winston née Marcus to comment on the inborn moral deficiencies of men of common descent.
(I hate the word "manboobs", by the way. It's supposed to evoke disgust -- oh no! a man with breasts! unnatural! Fuck right off with this sort of thing.)
You'll have noticed the litany of personal details Pronounced Winston lists off about his adversary. It's a counterpoint to the physical imbalance between them -- okay, says the nerd, this guy can kick my ass or get me expelled, but I can, uh, order pizzas on his credit card and make prank calls to his mom! Or something! (Correct me if I'm wrong here, but knowing someone's Social Security number strikes me as absolutely worthless unless you also know how to forge a credible fake ID, and the rest just seems like public Facebook details. Marcus wants to sound like a master hacker, but so far he's just been embarrassing himself.)
(Okay, that's enough for now, and I'm all burned out already, even though it's the eighth page or something. I think I'll need to revise my schedule. I can promise you a post a day, but not a chapter a day, unless I start skimping on the details. And you wouldn't want me doing that, would you.
See you tomorrow, dear readers.)
