Random Reads

My latest random read was, appropriately, Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack (1993), another work from the Dr. Mystery collection. The back of the book calls Womack a "cyberpunk" -- all this made me think of was the Billy Idol album, so i looked it up in the dictionary and found that it means "science fiction dealing with future urban societies dominated by computer technology," either that or a opportunistic hacker. After seeing that, another search showed me that cyberpunk culture is actually very complicated. Who knew?

Womack's other books may be more cyberpunky, but while this one does deal with a dystopic future society, it really has no technology in it at all, beyond television. This book takes place in a not-so-distant-future in New York City, and takes the form of six months or so in the diary of a twelve-year-old girl named Lola. Her parents are both professor/writer types, and they have a nice apartment in Manhattan. But then both parents lose their jobs and they have to move to a run down apartment right outside of Harlam. Lola continues to commute to her private all-girls school, where most of her classmates tease her because of a rumor that she is a lesbian. Through the course of the book, Lola pretty much decides she is a lesbian too, and falls in love first with some of her white girlfriends at school, and then with her new black girlfriends by her apartment. In the background of all this junior-high exploration of sexuality, there are riots going on all over the country, a series of presidents keeps getting assassinated, inflation is out of control, and there is a TB outbreak in the country. As she slowly realizes she can't count on her family to protect her, Lola turns more and more to the streets and commits some rather random acts of senseless violence to match the violence going on around her. Oh yeah, and once she starts hanging out with her new friends in 'the streets' she quickly adopts their very Clockwork-Orange-type new future dialect.

This all sounds rather exciting in capsule form, and the book is engaging and interesting to read. The problem is that there just isn't enough there. We don't get many explanations or context for any of the world problems (which would have been interesting), the new dialect quickly moves from being intriguing to being boring and more an exercise in linguistics than an encompassing new language -- something that really works in A Clockwork Orange but not here. The diary form works better at the start of the book, but soon the diary entries are full of transcribed dialogue and read more like traditional book chapters than twelve-year-old musings, which makes the tone of the book rather uneven. Plus, does this guy really look like he can consistently write like a twelve-year-old girl?

This is Womack's fifth book, and I would be interested to read some of his other books, so I'm not discounting him entirely. Overall an interesting book, and worth reading, but don't expect perfection here.