$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. Continue reading