The Mere Future

July 20, 2009
The author of several New York novels (People in Trouble
; etc.), Schulman makes an unfortunate shift with this madcap satire set “in the future, when things are slightly better because there has been a big change.” New York has been transformed by the Retrocrat party: franchises have been banned, the minimum and maximum wages are set at $45,000 and $100 million per year, and Staten Island has been declared a part of Texas. In this semiparadise, the unnamed copywriter protagonist has been offered a rare opportunity to have lunch with Harrison Bond, author of the fabulously popular novel My Sperm
and the fiction editor of the Brand New York
magazine. Bond assigns her a profile of a local artist (word count: eight words) and in the process pitches her into a maelstrom of interlocking relationships, chaotic self-revelations and, eventually, a murder, all of which reveals the dark truth about the new New York. Schulman, however, seems most interested in filling the pages with puns and breathless quirkiness, and while she's got some good ideas, the insistent zaniness of her prose is aggravating at best.