REVIEW : The Futurist’s world melds business and government
Posted on Sunday, November 12, 2006
The Futurist, by James P. Othmer, Doubleday, 257 pages, $ 23. 95.
James P. Othmer’s debut novel, The Futurist, is touted by its publisher as “the book we all deserve,” and no doubt many will agree with this lofty assessment regardless of the book’s literary merits. What The Futurist does well it does very well, and what it does well is take a fictional skewer to any pretense of separation between big business and government in America, two entities linked so closely, in this novel, that if there is a difference between them, it’s too small to matter. Our protagonist, whom we know only as Yates, is a super successful consultant who operates under the title of futurist, someone who identifies trends and predicts how they will affect business and government. He is a “VIP speaker, a bona-fide A-list player in the culture of expectation, a highly compensated observer of the global soul, with press clippings a yard high to prove it.” Yates runs in the same circles as real life futurist Faith B. Popcorn (who, amusingly, thinks Yates is a hack ), and many of the chapters open with litanies on the bigshot activities that are all in a day’s work for Yates.
“He once fired a man on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. … He once wrote the introduction to a book he never read …. A recent lecture circuit saw him speak on successive days to a leading pesticide manufacturer and the Organic Farmers of America and receive standing ovations from both.” The litanies show not only Yates’ influence but also what a people-pleasing chameleon he is. To provide the “sycophantic projections” his clients want to hear is what Yates is expected to do, and he has gotten good at it, so good that anytime he tries to be realistic and earnest about what he sees, to go deeper than the surface, to question and appear uncertain that the future is bright, or — God forbid — mention the need for individual change or responsibility, he meets with disdain or anger and threats to yank his honorariums. To be a corporate creep is almost too easy, and outrageously lucrative, while swimming against the tide is difficult if not impossible. As the novel progresses, we see how Yates has accepted a “gradual tarnishing of the self, a long series of delusional compromises.” He is corrupted by his own decisions, and he is also a victim of his environment, a man whose talent might have been used for good, were there any market for it.
Memorable characters abound in this novel, one of them being U. S. Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Amanda Glowers, a “sixty-twoyear-old advertising legend appointed by the president to raise the favorability of Brand America in the eyes of the world.” Glowers is ruthless, utterly jaded, unquestioningly mercenary, and connected to who knows whom. She and Yates frequently exchange cynical banter about their work.
“I thought that’s precisely why they [the rest of the world ] hated us [Yates says to Glowers ]. I thought the problem wasn’t their understanding of Brand America but our lack of understanding of Brand Third World … I thought the sharing of cultural knowledge would be better if it was reciprocal.” Amanda Glowers rolled her eyes. “You just rolled your eyes.” “ Right now we’re conducting focus groups in five of the markets that despise us most. ” “Wow. I didn’t know they had twoway mirrors in Fallujah. Have some more M&Ms, Muhammad, and tell me how you really feel about democracy.” CORPORATE-SPEAK No doubt Othmer’s former career as creative director at advertising giant Young & Rubicam contributed to his ability to write entertaining corporatespeak that reliably rings true. We get a sense of the derision he must have felt for the industry when Yates confronts Glowers about the depths of her venality. She looks at him and says, “I was the CEO of the second biggest advertising agency in the world. Advertising. I had the U. S. Army for a client. Raytheon. Global pharma companies. You act like I spent the last 50 years in a … convent.” Early in the novel Yates crashes and burns at a conference called Futureworld, showing up to give a speech hung over and utterly disgusted. He chastises business and government at large, and he declares he is forming the Coalition of the Clueless. After the speech, Glowers slyly draws Yates into a job with a nebulous outfit called the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, which asks Yates to travel wherever he wants and “take the pulse of the world.” His new bosses, whoever they are, have him beaten up or worse if he doesn’t do their bidding.
Yates, ambivalent and again under the auspices of a gigantic salary, takes his job less than seriously, traveling to Greenland, Milan, Italy, and Fiji and making up fictional reports for his employers and hiding out when he has to. He keeps this up until he is forced to go to a bombed-out Middle Eastern city recently “nationalized” by the United States and participate in a media blitz designed to show the world that the city is a thriving success for democracy. In this far-flung and dangerous place, many of the characters Yates has run into during his travels start showing up (some for rather thin reasons ), including Glowers.
The convoluted plot is easier to overlook than Yates’ ambivalent but not terrifically interesting relationship with his father, or his quasi-philosophical speculations about past, present and future. Othmer’s talent for satire and the illumination it provides are strong enough to have carried the book without the attempts at “deeper” themes that come off as distracting and self-consciously writerly. Still, I’ll ignore these things in appreciation of Othmer’s uncompromising outlook.
At the beginning of The Futurist Othmer quotes Jon Stewart saying that The Daily Show is about “not knowing what the truth is.” Othmer makes much of this idea, and while Yates’ personal revelations and metaphysical musings may fall short at times, his prescriptive efforts do not. That arrogance Yates discusses with Glowers is ridiculed effectively throughout the book. It puts me in mind of one of the 2004 presidential debates, where George W. Bush called John Kerry a “waffler” many times, prompting Kerry eventually to address the charge directly and say something along the lines of, “I believe it’s OK not to know all the answers.” Othmer is telling us it’s not only OK to admit you don’t know; it’s essential.
The idea of going deeper than the justification of policies that are nothing more than money grabs, as Yates phrases it, or what happens when American power has no interest in listening to the rest of the world, was the central message of a story titled “Ears Wide Shut” in the November issue of The Atlantic. The story follows the comings and goings of Karen Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy (how close Glowers’ title is to Hughes’ ), who, for more than a year, has been trying to sell Bush’s America to the Middle East. Ears wide shut. For those horrified by America’s arrogance in the world right now, whether or not The Futurist is the novel we all deserve, it’s certainly the message we crave to hear. Melissa King’s most recent story was published in the current issue of The Oxford American. She lives in Fayetteville.
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