Confessions from a Dark Wood, by Eric Raymond (A Review by Chris Vola)

$15/204 pgs

No other time in history has been more inundated with public creative outpourings than our current Internet-seduced zeitgeist. With every tweet, Tumblr, and wall update, content is generated at an ever-maddening pace, arguably devaluing itself because of its sheer mass and filter-free characteristics, shrinking an already near-extinct collective attention span. No surprises there. But have all the worthwhile ideas already been spewed? And if so, can it be possible to profit, vastly, by simply plucking from a storage bin of useful but already used templates, and regurgitating them with a new-car foamy, pixilated sheen? Armed with Douglas Coupland’s mass-cultural savvy and a satirical panache that might be a bit more restrained than Bret Easton Ellis’ and less grim than Don DeLillo’s but no less biting, Eric Raymond, in his first novel, Confessions from a Dark Wood, chronicles one young man’s immersion into the post-idea marketplace, and his hilarious and heartbreaking search for meaning in an economy where authenticity is the least fashionable commodity.

Nick Bray is a 33-year-old San Franciscan by way of Florida who toils at a temp job for Purv, an Internet company specializing in “the unity of woman and machine,” basically videos of young ladies fornicating with reassembled dishwashers. After getting fired, Nick returns to his childhood home for his English professor father’s funeral and is accosted by an “intern” who provides him with a mysterious invitation to interview for an executive position at LaBar Partners Limited, a global capital brand management consultancy firm whose CEO, Pontius J. LaBar, is a former student of his father. After an epic round of bullshitting- in which his ‘exemplary moral lassitude’ is lauded profusely- Nick begins work as a highly paid vice president at LaBar, joining a coterie of likeminded “utterly [otherwise] unemployable” corporate swindlers (including an orangutan named Shelby living in his own glass-walled office) who attempt to subdue clients with avalanches of impenetrable jargon and carefully orchestrated urbanity. Nick’s suddenly opulent lifestyle is funded by the outlandish Pontius, a man who keeps a full-size replica of his “driving” Porsche in his penthouse office and lives in constant fear that his faceless competitors’ “air of exclusivity” surpasses “his own manufactured enigma,” and who funds Nick’s endless days of travel and lackwit brainstorming that are only broken up by Sadie, his possibly underage quasi-girlfriend-slash-apartment-mate whose hobbies include getting tattoos of major corporations and making plans to be the nation’s first domestic suicide bomber, and the constant, inconvenient appearances of the smart-aleck ghost of his father.

The aura of global brand management consultancy is of course a sham built on the relentless illusions of trendy opulence and meaningless technical drivel, the executives trying to sell a fairy-tale ending where the “bad things that have happened are undone and what has troubled us along the way teaches us. The ghosts go free, the princesses are married, and the kingdom is restored,” but as Nick promptly reminds us, “people forget they built the Magic Kingdom on swamps.” His aw-shucks delight at having wealth quickly spirals into a desperate need to come to terms with his past, with working for a company for whom PowerPoint is more valuable than gold and intern rape is an almost daily (and really funny) occurrence, whose clients include ex-military men who provide vacations for CEOs pretending to be prisoners of war in preference to running board meetings. But the non-corporate segment of Raymond’s reality isn’t immune from emptiness and ridicule, a place where everything is carefully orchestrated and where everyone wants to be something else but they don’t know what, where it at times feels like we’re living in a giant ant farm that Nick’s father’s ghost so aptly describes when Nick asks him what he’s learned in the afterlife:

How the hell should I know? I just got here. Get back to me in a hundred thousand millennia. But, son, all the ant does is dig a tunnel and move the food around. That’s it. That’s what I want you to take away from this visitation.

If this all seems super heavy, good, because it is and should be, but thankfully Raymond’s deft satire, dripping from every carefully crafted scene, injects humor as it leaves no facet of our crumbling culture- reality television, plane travel, inherently unsavory commercialism, the underground flimsiness of the self-described literati- unscathed. Even moments and characters that seem initially less appealing are handled with a frightening clarity. A thugged-out rising football superstar who gets caught running an illegal dog-fighting operation with his entourage might not seem like the most original or interesting trope to be blasted, but we must remember that the world Raymond has created is far from fictional, and here the writer takes the naive, misbehaving athlete and thoroughly dismantles him with a caustic wit and social ear that is as ruthless as it is omnipresent.

Raymond’s prose is lush but precise, perfectly inclined towards a unique perspective that implores him to draw from his massive bucket of pop-culture runoff and his own acute observatory knack to describe things the way they’ve never been described before but they probably should be and we always know (and feel) what he means. A convenience store is “the color of a dirty tube sock,” downtrodden off-the-strip Vegas emerges as a “shifting sherbet tide of shadows,” an ad agency’s creative director looks like “a cross between a Devo tribute band member and a refugee from Dachau.” The constant jolts of postmodern levity that nevertheless do little (or try) to squelch the darker truths that lurk closely behind every rental Bentley and artificially arched eyebrow.

Though not quite Rothian, there is also a clear intent on the part of the author to muddy the thin screen separating Pontius LaBarâ€™s outrageous yet carefully constructed world, his personal reality, and the reader’s, going beyond the traditional confines of the text by including “blurbs” written by characters in the novel and an impressively ornate LaBar Partners website . Most of these dabblings in coy self-awareness pay off, except for a brief section where Raymond appears as a character in a way that is oddly cute and vaguely nostalgic, a too-easy wrap-up for a book that is anything but. However, this minor incongruity does little to dampen Confessions’ power as a stunningly frank, pinpoint dismantling of a disturbingly hollow era, almost every sentence doused in the blackest humor, of which only the finest satires are capable. And make no mistake, Raymond’s debut is the best kind.

For more, take a look at this Interview with Eric Raymond, published on the [PANK] Blog in January.

Chris Vola is the author of Monkeytown. His book reviews appear in The Collagist, PopMatters, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. He lives in Manhattan.