The Futurist: A Novel [Hardcover]

James P. Othmer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 6, 2006

WHO IS THE FUTURIST?

He once fired a man on Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

He once was asked by the New York Times to write an Op-Ed piece on the death of literacy in America and had his assistant ghostwrite it.

He once began his week ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange and ended it giving a speech about the future of greed to a group of seminary students.

He once wrote the introduction to a book he never read, Beehive Management: How Life in the Honeycomb Translates to Winning in the Workplace.

He once was an adviser for HeresWhatIDoMom.com, a company that made videos that explained people’s nebulous jobs to their confused parents.

He once took batting practice with the New York Mets, pretending not to notice the eight-year-old boy with leukemia from the Make-A-Wish Foundation whom the PR director let him cut in front of because he had a plane to catch.

He once gave a rousing motivational talk at the base of a spouting fountain before the West Coast sales force of an erectile dysfunction pharmaceutical maker.

Yates is a Futurist. Which is to say he makes a very good living flying around the world dispensing premonitory wisdom, aka prepackaged bullshit, to world governments, corporations, and global leadership conferences. He is an optimist by trade and a cynic by choice. He’s the kind of man who can give a lecture on successive days to a leading pesticide manufacturer and the Organic Farmers of America, and receive standing ovations at both.

But just as the American Empire is beginning to fray around the edges, so too is Yates’s carefully scripted existence. On the way to the Futureworld Conference in Johannesburg, he opens a handwritten note from his girlfriend, saying she’s left him for a sixth-grade history teacher. Then he witnesses a soccer riot in which a number of South Africans are killed, to the chagrin of the South African PR people at Futureworld. Sparked by a heroic devastation of his minibar and inspired by the rookie hooker sent to his hotel room courtesy of his hosts, Yates delivers a spectacularly career-ending speech at Futureworld, which leads to a sound beating, a meeting with some quasi-governmental creeps, and a hazy mission to go around the world answering the question: Why does everyone hate us?

Thus begins an absolutely original novel that is fueled by equal parts subversive satire, genuine physical fear, and heartfelt moral anguish. From the hideously ugly Greenlander nymphomaniacal artist to the gay male model spy to the British corporate magnate with a taste for South Pacific virgin sacrifice rituals, The Futurist manages to be wildly entertaining and deadly serious at the same time.

It’s the novel we all deserve.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. As Young & Rubicam ad exec Othmer's satirical first novel opens, famed pop pundit J.P. Yates, having emptied his hotel minibar, experiences an epiphany: he's a fake. After years of peddling insights to any group willing to pay him well—one week he assures a Bible college's graduates that God has a future, the next he assures adult video distributors that porn has a future—he stuns attendees at a Futureworld conference in South Africa by declaring himself "founding father of the Coalition of the Clueless." Ironically, his career takes off: he's more in demand than ever and is even recruited to travel the world asking why everyone hates the U.S. Othmer takes amusing swipes at the likes of (real-life) futurist Faith Popcorn, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and billionaires Ted Turner and Bill Gates, but the real target of this blistering tale is the American government's post-9/11 arrogance, come home to roost in the fictional Middle East nation of Bas'ar, where press release cant substitutes for untenable reality. A short story excerpted from the novel was a National Magazine Award finalist; this spirited dissection of the contemporary cultural and political zeitgeist is a stylish winner in its own intelligently weird right. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Unexpectedly dumped by his girlfriend, Yates, the Futurist--a man who's made his living as a paid spokesman for the wonders that await us--rewrites his keynote speech for a high-profile conference, admitting that he has no idea what's going to happen, much less what's going on now. It's career suicide, but, perversely, he finds himself more in demand than ever. He accepts a job from two shadowy government agents who give him unlimited resources and ask simply that he take the world's pulse. Trying also to take his own, Yates jets around, finding shallow consumer culture, callous corporate manipulation, and fervent anti-Americanism. It's inventive and sometimes funny, but Othmer's risky opening gambit--opening with a denouement, essentially--fails to pay dividends; despite Othmer's attempts to create tension, Yates' journey feels curiously slack. A promising idea--using one man's existential crisis to examine a world in crisis--leads to a story that sometimes feels (as when Yates tries to sort out his relationship with a beautiful South African prostitute) like just another portrait of midlife crisis. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday (June 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 038551722X
• ISBN-13: 978-0385517225
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,462,054 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James P. Othmer spent the last 20 years seeking the title, "Former Adman." It was not until the first chapter of The Futurist appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and was named a finalist for the National Magazine Award in fiction that his dream (sort of)came true. A graduate of the creative writing program at New York University, Othmer has had stories and humorous essays and op-eds published in the VQR, The New York Times, Nylon magazine, The Chattahoochee Review, Madison Review and other publications. His long strange path to publication included gigs as, in no particular order, soulless ad guy, newspaper reporter, gofer at a wine magazine and, for parts of four glorious summers, a brick layer at a mental institution. He lives in Mahopac, NY with his family and is working on his second novel.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You'll laugh, you'll feel queasy, you'll get tired of the over-the-top scenarios., August 2, 2006

By 

J. V. Lewis (secure undisclosed location) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Futurist: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is a damned entertaining book. Very funny, very well-written characters, a believably-rendered world stageset of airports, boardrooms, hotel rooms, etc. But between out-loud laughs are stretches of air-sick realism that unsettle and disturb, and give the book a kind of chilling subtext that doesn't feel at all like summer fun. The book feels like sincere cultural criticism delivered by a manic, almost soul-less white-collar drudge, the twinges of whose remaining conscience are drowned-out by hysteric laughter.

I downgrade to 4 stars because I don't see why the author resorted to such drastic, almost slapstick juxtapositions: the main character consults Bible churches and the porn industry, for example. His cynicism is evident without such hamfisted hyperbole.

I noticed frequent similarities to David Foster Wallace's fiction, certainly a promising association, but Othmer kept needlessly augmenting an already forceful story, to the point I felt manipulated and disrespected as a reader. I am happy to forgive him these overindulgences, since the book is so fun, but I do feel that he missed the oportunity of writing something truly excellent. Describing a person and a culture that eschew constraint needn't require storytelling that eschews restraint.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Its sheer exuberance, its epigrammatic style, and its wit and irreverence are a hoot!, July 16, 2006

By 

David M. Gordon (Summerlin, NV) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Futurist: A Novel (Hardcover)

While reading The Futurist, I used words such as clever, hilarious, and insightful to describe the experience of reading such a fun and intelligent novel. The truth is these words do this book little justice. Its set pieces alone are worth the price of admission. It is laugh out loud funny. And its many characters contain great depth, and even their own tales. (Perhaps in Othmer's second novel...)

"Oh, shit. I've given back tens of millions. Some of these guys, these billionaires, make me sick. They think that now they're rich, they can satisfy their egos, alleviate their guilt, by thinking their accidental windfall somehow means they are geniuses, cosmically ordained and therefore eminently qualified to solve the world's problems -- AIDS, loose nukes, illiteracy. They're delusional enough to think that they matter more than others in a larger sense. They think, Now that I've made billions on a search engine that can locate highly specialized subgenres of kiddy porn at thrice the speed of light, I'm going to teach the world to read. When in truth they're rewriting history to say that their original business models, the ones that made them obscenely rich, were driven not by greed and hubris but by some larger calling to transform the world."

William Faulkner once instructed that good fiction is "about the human heart in conflict with itself." Author James P Othmer seemingly knows especially well this writerly commandment. Othmer conflates the personal and professional conflicts that rage in the heart of his protagonist, Yates (the eponymous Futurist) with his, and our, attempt at understanding "why they hate us (Americans)."

It has been a long, long while since I devoured a novel as voraciously as I did The Futurist. Its sheer exuberance, its epigrammatic style, and its wit and irreverence are a hoot! More to the point, however: I believe you would enjoy this novel every bit as much as I did. And still do. Yes, it is that memorable.

Check it out!
David M Gordon

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sobering, hillarious., July 11, 2006

By 

J. P. Spallina (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Futurist: A Novel (Hardcover)

While much of what I read about The Futurist seems to be aimed at jaded corporate players and expats, this book struck me as just as relevant to the dormroom Stewart/Colbert fans who, without knowing the specific machinations behind the world that Yates existes in, that has been shoved down their throats since infancy, clearly feel that something is amiss. The heart of this book, encapsulated by Yates' admission of being a "founding member of the Coalition of the Clueless" should resonate with anyone who not only seeks the truth in a world programmed to cloud it, but has enough humilty and respect for it to throw their hands up every once in a while and say "I don't know". Therein lies Yates' likeablilty. His selfish pragmatism, obnoxiousness, and warped moral compass fittingly push that likeability to the edge, in a way only the best written anti-heroes can, but ultimately couldn't squelch it. That conflictedness of Yates' character, along with Othmer's spot-on satire and just plain witty prose made this book for me, and I'd highly recommend it to just about anyone else who comes across this review. In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, "the future aint what it used to be," and there is no better or more entertaining example of that today than Yates and The Futurist.