Customer Reviews

Beemer: A Novel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The word "Pynchonian" gets tossed around a lot when it comes to literary phenoms these days, but BEEMER (TM) is the real thing. This novel is an answer to where you go when you reach the end of the road, what you do when irony fails you and all the old modes of dealing are suspect. The language is fluent and stark at the same time, bringing a new life to what most writers treat as background noise.
And it's funny. Because, God knows, in a world like this, we need a few laughs...

This is a fun read. Newbie author Glenn Gaslin takes loving aim at the wonders of America, while poking fun at absurd cultural institutions like monster SUVs, militant gated communities, ... boy bands, giant convenience-store beverages and the emerging, soon-to-be-dominating power of the next generation.

The story centers around Beemer Minutia, a young man alternately living and hunting for the American Dream. All he wants to do is drive and discover, but he's willing to settle down for love. As long as it's in the biggest, most extreme housing development ever.

For the record, my favorite lines are:
"Ask him what kind of name's that: Beemer."
"Hey, what kind of name's that?"
"German."

The story if fun and the cover is pretty. Buy it. You'll like it. If not, the cover is still pretty.

A cautionary tale, told in the form of a heavily-exaggerated satire, that, after looking around middle America for a while, seems none so exaggerated. These people are real. This absolutely CAN and HAS happened.

Funny enough to depress. Real enough to induce laughter. Far out enough to be real.

What does this mean?

Marx, bless his heart, believed that the Future was communism, an idea whose time would inevitably follow and replace--in some trans-historical Hegelian fashion--capitalism. Of course, when the revolution came a century and a half later it was televised, but not by state-run media; it was Marx's own great idea we watched being smashed to rubble in Berlin, accompanied by the warbling of (alas, poor Karl! the final insult) David Hasselhoff.

Beemer Minutia, the hero of this perfect-in-every-way debut novel, saw this revolution live on TV too, and at a very impressionable age. With History officially over, the Future belonged no longer to nations, but to individuals. In a dramatic come-from-behind, the Future turns out to be capitalism after all, and Beemer Minutia wants his share: Beemer™, the archetypal Brand Me, with a media empire of books and movies and maybe a talk show and, in case you get thirsty from it all, Beemer™ soda, which we are led to believe will taste a lot like Mountain Dew ™, only better. So start like'n it.

The business plan for Beemer™ includes an equally driven girlfriend (the impetus for a lot of car-top sex), a black-ops advertising agency, an appallingly well-organized group of pre-teen domestic terrorists, a boy-band of questionable masculinity, and lots and lots of ice-cold super-sized fountain soda. Unfortunately for Beemer, the funding never comes through. But like all business visionaries failure is just a stumbling block, propelling him to greater, more profound endeavors.

From identical metropolises of 1.1 million people to a desert periphery where some still search for an `authentic' America, author Glenn Gaslin hints at an alternate or future U.S. of A. now increasingly familiar. His cynical view of suburban sprawl is fresh, but not new. The world of Beemer Minutia is a prelude to well-known literary futures: a child born in Beemer's bulging Orange County might find herself coming of age in the militarized burbclaves of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and having mid-life cosmetic surgery in the Shinjuku imagined by William Gibson. Gaslin is not simply imitating, however. His America, Beemer's America, feels like it is almost here. And the writing is original, too; each page brings precious, collectible sentences (like the combination of the US highway system and Mountain Dew bringing about a state of "transcontinental meditation").

Equal parts commentary, irony, and perhaps even auto-biography, Gaslin's novel goes down like all 44 sweet ounces of a Super Big Gulp™--leaving you sucking, slurping, then finally chewing on the ice.

Beemer is a hilarious tale of a journey through the Southern California world of media consultancy and related industries. The story has some related nudges towards Max (Maxx) Barry's SYRUP, yet the writing is more towards Chuck Palahniuk or J.G. Ballard. As he self describes: "I lecture their CEOs and COOs and C-whatever-whatevers on the importance of sublime irony in marketing to twentysomethings, the clued-in earnestness of talking to teenagers, the subconscious product-placement opportunities of video games. I sell them manifestos on whatever detail of their global empire they're sweating at the moment..."

As the story grows on, it becomes a tad crazier (Beemer's girlfriend becomes a publicist for a boy band made up of Eunuchs) and you really have to take what is going on with a grain of salt.

But the writing is marvelous and a fun, and even thought-provoking, read. Worth the cover rprice.

A wicked satire of Edge Cities, where gas stations are the size of shopping malls, and shopping malls are the size of nations. The descriptions of suburbia alone are worth the price of admission. This is the novel McG should have based his television show on. So don't watch TV, buy this book and read it instead.

When I read that Glenn Gaslin was drawing comparisons to Arthur Miller (The Washington Post), Jack Kerouac (Kirkus Reviews), Lewis Carroll and Douglas Coupland (The Rocky Mountain News) I thought, "That's a little much isn't it?" But Gaslin's debut novel, "Beemer," proves that his name soon will be the one summoned when reviewers are trying to explain a book as simultaneously fantastic and clear-headed as this. We hear much talk about what it means to be American these days. Gaslin's answer is provocative, unpredictable and, despite its politically charged atmosphere, apolitical, so much so that this book should be a hit with the Green Party, the Atlas Society and everyone in between. If you like Julio Cortazar, you'll love Beemer. If you like Mark Helprin, you'll love Beemer. If you prefer watching TV and playing Doom to reading, there's still a pretty good chance you'll love Beemer. How can you not like a novel that begins with a great sex scene? It ends with the creation of a desert Eden. Along the way, Beemer explores a child's disillusionment with his parents, the rapidly widening gap between generations and, in a bit of pre-9-11 prescience, the marketing power of domestic terrorism. The Washington Post wrote: "It would be easy to make "Beemer" a manifesto, in which a flat glyph of a character dutifully incants none-too-subtle broadsides from his creator's fevered brain. Such indeed is the run of consumer-hip pomo lit, from Bret Easton Ellis to Chuck Palahniuk. But Glenn Gaslin, who toils by day as an editor for Entertainment Weekly, is too good a writer to give in to such reflexes, and so "Beemer" is a blisteringly funny satire on the acquisitive self, a welcome detour out of the mounting rubble of Terminators, Hulks and Living Histories into the dark heart of the American dream." I concur.

I don't understand how this qualifies as a book. It seems more like the web-based ramblings of an overindulged young adult who doesn't realize one can no longer be precocious in adulthood, only insufferable.

This "book" is a tedious read that strings together every '70s and '80s cheesy pop culture reference under the sun and multiple fulminations of snarkiness with the thinnest thread of what might generously be called a plot. This might be Douglas Coupland without the humanity and talent, or Hunter S. Thompson without the genuine gonzo insanity. Or, what (again) a precocious child might produce if he read both and understood neither.

If there's one good thing, this piffle lacks the intellectual heft to spawn the avalanche of post-modernist deconstruction that afflicted David Foster Wallace, for example.

A note to all pretentious young writers: living in a down-at-the-heels, off campus apartment during your college years doesn't confer bohemianism.

This book was much, much better the first time I read it, when it was titled "Choke." Or when it was "Microserfs."

Actually, that's not fair. A knock off of one of those would have a lead character who changed over the course of the novel. Beemer Minutia is a jerk on page 1, and he's a jerk on the last page. Someone should hit him in the face with a shovel. Or, as Gaslin would write it, in the face with an xBox(tm) or a can of Mountain Dew(tm) or something else with a "tm" at the end of it. This isn't really violence, since Beemer isn't really a person -- just a one-dimensional idea. He's the kind of person a shallow person thinks he is. Beemer thinks he's special because his desperation is loud and narcissistic. Would that he were right.

New! Giant! Shiny! Beemer Minutia is the hero a nation of TV-addled, ADD hipsters have been waiting for. A fantastic read. Funny, brilliant and at times too damn on-the-money for comfort. You won't regret buying this book. Or even 15 copies of this book.