Customer Reviews

Eastern Standard Tribe

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book starts out so damned strong. The first couple of chapters were the sort of writing that made me stop dead, put the book down, and say 'wow' out loud. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Doctorow is an incredibly talented writer, as well as a truly clever man.

But somehow, the cleverness seems to out-pace the writing. This book is packed with clever ideas, but they never go anywhere. Plot twists don't make a lot of sense, the setup at the beginning never develops into a meaningful plot.

Ultimately this is a frustrating book. So much good up front, so little on the back. As if Doctorow had a beginning and tossed off an ending just to get the book out. This is possible since he's released it under the Creative Commons license; it may be he was in a hurry to make the statement by getting it out there and didn't take time. Or it may be that he's just an idea guy and has trouble with the plots (as I writer, I've been known to suffer this).

This book is worth reading for the first few chapters. Truly, truly worth reading and re-reading. But it's not a satisfying book; my hope is that Doctorow lives up to his potential with the next one. because when he's good, goddamn, he's incredibly good.

Believe me, I love Cory Doctorow. I follow his blog, get his newsletter, and have read very good short stories written by him. That's why I expected more from this novel.
Its strong points are the ideas: the concept of Tribe, the focus on User Interface, the ubiquity of the comm, the use of language. But it has weak points, and the main one is the plot, which is quite conventional, using plot devices straight out of Creative Writing 101: starting 'in media res', 'deus ex machina' for solving the 'someone flew over the cuckoo's nest'/'catch 22' problem, overheard conversations, dialogue for background...
However, I think this book is a promising second book of somebody that, in the future, will become an excellent writer. Maybe it's worth reading just for the 'I discovered him first' value.

Art Berry lives in a world just slightly askew from the rest of us. In our increasingly wireless world of instant and constant communication, he gives his loyalty not to a state or a company or family and friends he sees regularly, but to the Eastern Standard Tribe-a largely faceless collection of people whose home time zone is the Eastern Standard Zone, who are locked in cutthroat competition with other tribes aligned with other time zones. Art himself is currently working in London, engaged in industrial sabotage against the Greenwich Mean Tribe. Virgn/Deutsche Telekom thinks he's working for them, improving their user interface; in fact he's trying to make it almost unusable. He's got a partner and supervisor from the Tribe, Federico, and a new girlfriend, Linda, whom he met when she staged an accident with him as the fall guy so that she could claim the insurance.

For some reason, that doesn't suggest to Art that perhaps Linda is fundamentally untrustworthy and not looking out for his best interests.

Art's having fun, screwing with V/DT's user interface, dreaming up a really good, fun, and profitable idea for EST to sell to MassPike, involving rights management for downloaded music. There are frustrations, too, of course, as he begins to dimly realize that Fede might be double-crossing him, trying to steal his idea and cut him out of the deal. There are more frustrations as Linda and Fede make increasingly contradictory and irreconcilable demands on him. Eventually, on a trip which he thinks is to pitch the idea, and a side trip home to Toronto to introduce Linda to his Gran, Art finally figures out that Linda is not his friend, either. He reacts very badly, and winds up on the roof of a mental institution in Massachusetts, trying to decide whether to stick a pencil into his brain.

There are some neat ideas here, and the story moves along briskly, alternating between the main story and Art on top of the asylum, trying to figure out what he does next, with quite adequate amounts of suspense. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite satisfy. Except for Art, neither the characters nor the book's main conceit, the Tribes, feel fully developed. I was left feeling that this will probably be a fun book to read when Doctorow finisihes writing it.

After the success of "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" and "A Place so Foreign and Eight More" I expected better from this work. The story of Art Berry and his membership of the EST in the near future lacks most of the elements that have enlivened Doctorow's previous works.

I never got very involved with Art or his companions in this story, I didn't really care much in the end if Art got out of the mental asylum or not. He really was better off there! The writing is generally good but not up to his previous standards alas. The story is only moderately interesting and many of the jokes and in-humour about US-English cultural differences are pretty old and uninteresting. The supposed "busines venture" that forms the basis of the action and the characters motivations is just plain silly. The characters of Art's girlfriend and his business partner are two-dimensional and not very believable either.

The sudden wrap-up and rather contrived happily-ever-after ending was rather a letdown too, Doctorow is a better writer than this book indicates.

To be fair there is some good work in this book and some interesting observations, so it's not a total loss. The "fartmobile" methane-powered cars were great touch for example. I quite liked Art's grandmother too, she was one of the few appealing characters in the book.

Another thing I can't help noticing is that both Art in this book and the main character in "Down and Out...", Jules, get very angry (and violent) very easily and seem to have very poor impulse control. They both come across as spoilt and rather teenagerish personalities. It might be time for Doctorow to try for more adult characters.

Doctorow has released EST as a free download again as per "Down and Out..." and I'd recommend you try it that way first before forking out good money for what is likely to prove a rather disappointing and expensive experience otherwise. If you've not read any of Doctorow's work before don't start with this book.

I just finished EST, and I'm still not sure what I read. The storyline seems as if it isn't fully developed, as are the characters, the story ends abruptly, and the whole book feels rushed and too short. As I read, I kept waiting to be 'hooked' by the story (which had potential), but I wasn't. Perhaps the book was oversold to me- I've heard great things about Mr. Doctorow's writing. Several other reviewers here mention that this isn't his best work and that readers who haven't yet read any of his books should start with something else. I have to agree.

I really found this book to be a wonderful mix of old and new. The story telling, to me, smelled very strongly of some very classic literature. I'm not really sure why. Perhaps it was the concise descriptions: they really worked well. Also, one of the main themes of the book is the tribal mentality. These two elements mixed very nicely with the use of modern, and futuristic, language and a futuristic setting that was refreshingly(!) recognisable. All in all, I was very pleased while I was reading this story. And, when I finished, I was very surprized that the story was over when it was-- but not in a bad way. I think I was just expecting more excellent story telling and was disappointed when the tale had been told.

Eastern Standard Tribe is Cory Doctorow's second novel. It is very much of a length (short, in a good way) with Doctorow's first, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It's also set in a tech-driven future, though not the same future as the first novel.

The novel opens with the narrator, Art Berry, on the roof of an insane asylum in Massachusetts, contemplating whether or not to kill himself. The story proceeds on two tracks, one concerning his business ventures and adventures in London, the other concerning his time at the asylum leading to his escape attempt which ended up with him marooned on the roof. Art is an agent provocateur for the "Eastern Standard Tribe", a group of like-minded individuals who all keep EST hours no matter where they live. His job, along with his boss Fede, is to make a local company agree to a nice-sounding but idiotic scheme, the failure of which will enhance the reputation of the EST companies. But while in London, Art manages both to come up with an actual good business idea, involving downloading music on the freeway, and to meet and fall in love with an unstable American woman named Linda -- the meet being, naturally, a "meet cute": Art runs over her in his car.

Before long they are forging a relationship, while Art is trying to market his idea. So how does he end up in the loony bin? Well ... perhaps Fede isn't as much of a friend as he seems. And perhaps ... best let the story tell that ... At any rate, it's only fair to say that none of the main characters comes across as exactly "stable".

I liked it OK, but couldn't love it -- it's a fun, breezy, read if you can tolerate the jerky characters, with some sparkling ideas, but no really "big" ideas. The characters are interesting if not exactly likeable -- even Art seems to probably need some time in the loony bin, though perhaps not the treatment he gets once there. The plot is cleverly constructed, though also on occasion a bit implausible. The apparent central notion of time-zone based "tribes" is totally unconvincing, and Doctorow himself doesn't really push it in the book.

Haven't heard of Cory Doctorow before reading his recent novel, "Eastern Standard Tribe", but I'm glad I have. This is a hilarious, quite engaging, and well-written novel that's as irrelevant as Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", and, maybe, just maybe, far more accessible. Doctorow is a most perceptive observer of contemporary Internet culture, tweaks it up a bit, and offers a near future world that's not so radically different from our own. His chief protagonist, Art, an "interface designer", comes across as an online version of Job, replete with his own peculiar brands of bad accidents and other hilarious mishaps. Without question, Doctorow is a relatively fresh face in science fiction, and one destined to blaze his own particular path to critical - and hopefully, commercial - success.

A fast-paced pseudotechno-thriller, EST kept me hooked from the very start. The timeline of the book skips back and forth, with the "past" timeline finally catching up to the "present" timeline at the very end. This leads to information revealed in the "present" chapters finally making sense in the "past" chapters, and vice versa.

The supporting characters were fairly static, but I think the main character, Art, developed nicely throught the book - personalitywise, he even seemed quite similar to my husband! *lol*

As a side note, even though I read the printed copy, you can download the book from the author's website - for free!

Does Eastern Standard Tribe represent a mature, perhaps the word is refined, Cory Doctorow? Possibly. The story has all the wise cracking style of his earlier work but it is somehow muted or melded better into the overall story. Art, the central character, is an adult that has always known and lived in a information connected world. It is not a steroid juiced techno-world like so many other novels, nor is it an iron fisted corporate state. It's real, where people have to work, eat, and get from point A to point B without getting mugged, and earn a living. Art is associated with a group of people on-line that represent the Northeast U.S., the Eastern Standard Tribe. Art's main character trait is that he loves to argue, also he has a severely rev'ed up imagination that leads him and the reader to wonder if Art is really nuts. This idea is helped along by the fact that half the story takes place in a Sanitarium as Art waits for a competency hearing. He is accused of attacking his business partner, but claims he is being set up. Art's job is that of secret sabatour for the EST tribe, and he was in London acting as a consultant for the future Virgin/Deutch Telecom Co. Making sure they submitted a bad proposal so his tribe's company would win the job.

The Sanitarium parts are told in first person and the rest of the story, told in flashbacks, is related in third person. This is not as confusing as it sounds. Refreshingly short in length compared to other authors, this story is quite mundane. No one saves the world, no great catastrophe is averted with whiz-bang technology. It is a simple human story and Doctorow touches lightly on some social issues: loyalty, group identity, sanity. Some of these topics should have been explored in more detail as the dialog that Doctorow uses to present them is very entertaining. A light quick read that should get three and a half stars.