Customer Reviews

Jennifer Government

5 star:		(64)
4 star:		(62)
3 star:		(45)
2 star:		(19)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Without rehashing the plot points of the book, suffice it to say that finishing "Jennifer Government" made me want more of what I had already read.

Max Barry states on his website that in the final edit, he cut about three-fourths of what he had written for this book, including one major character. After reading Jennifer Government, one wishes that he had not edited it so heavily. The book is a quick read - I finished it in about 5 hours - which is a shame for a novel which deals with such a heavy subject.

Character development is minimal - not surprising in such a relatively short book. True, Hack Nike develops a spine, and Jennifer gets even tougher than she was. But it would have been nice to have seen more.

Some plot points make little sense and/or could be developed better. For instance, why is Hack Nike such a sop? What is Buy Mitsui's background? If the Government is so ineffectual, why was John Nike (the one who didn't get crumpet-toastered) so keen on getting rid of it once and for all?

Also, it would have been interesting to see Barry bring what appeared to be a nascent anti-corporate movement to a bit of closure. The guerilla-style attacks on billboards and McDonald's restaurants seem to do little for plot development except to throw in some routine leftist slogans. I would have enjoyed seeing how this movement would have disrupted (or lent to) the growing intra-corporate battles.

All this aside, the book made me consider my libertarian/free-market principles in a way I had never done before. Science fiction is full of anarcho-capitalist fantasies (viz. L. Neil Smith's "The Probability Broach") which portray such a society as more or less Utopian.

Even Stephenson's "Snow Crash", which is a darker book than "The Probability Broach", doesn't really seem to have a problem with a government-free society. "Jennifer Government", obviously, does. It certainly got me thinking about the proper role of government in society.

Barry claims that this book does not intend to portray a futuristic society, but rather is an alternate history of what could have been. I disagree; some of the geopolitical and corporate changes set forth by Barry could easily happen in my lifetime.

If one looks at the growing dominance of global corporate power - and whatever one's political orientation, one cannot deny that this is occurring - it's not difficult to envision a future in which schools are funded by McDonald's and Mattel, or one in which 911 will not send out an ambulance without guarantee of payment.

I can't be too disappointed with the book. Barry has a fiendish sense of humor and a keen eye for the excesses of corporate America. I look forward to his future novels in the same way that Neil Stephenson's early books made it clear that a great author was about to be born.

Jennifer Government was a fun, light, satire of capitalism. It is very plot-driven, and as the novel unfolds you just have to smile at Barry's wry and dystopian view of the future. Privatized governments, frequent flyer programs causing major corporations to form two competing "teams" at war with one another, bar-code tatoos, and other details make the book a clever satire of what Barry calls "capitalizm."

The book itself is organized in very short chapters (2-5 pages each, typically) and Max Barry's prose is a bit plain, but it gets the job done. As I said, the book is very plot-driven, and it moves quickly. The book will be easily adapted to become a big-time blockbuster movie, if it ever comes to that -- it's filled with the requisite shoot-outs, superficial dialogue, an cliche'd characters. But it's all in good fun. Overall, I'd recommend the book as a light summer read. I polished it off on a long plane ride, and it made the trip pass quickly & enjoyably.

If you've gotten this far in the reviews, you already know the plot to "Jennifer Government", a book well-descended from Kornbluth and Pohl, "The Space Merchants", and striving toward Sheckley's classic "Victim Prime". There aren't a lot of funny science fiction novels in print, and the most successful combine an insightful backdrop with snappy dialog. "Jennifer Government" makes it partway, on both counts. In the novel, the Police and Government are both companies with a certain amount of residual brand loyalty, while the NRA has the best shooters. When the Police want kids shot, they hire the NRA, as opposed to the Government, who, with 20,000 agents in place, seem to be unable to do much of anything competently, including preventing murders that they have advance knowledge of. In order to "solve" the killings, they require advance funding from the victim's family. (Remember the desk sergeant in "Heavy Metal"?) There aren't really any characters to identify with, which doesn't necessarily hurt if you want to make your ideas the funny part---which happens often enough in "Jennifer Government" to make it a worthwhile read, even though you have to get over Your Primitive Desire for a "Plot" of some kind. Thanks to Bob, I have no need for artificial constructs of this kind.

Given Barry's level of wit, as seen on his site maxbarry.com, I expected a lot more from the book than it delivered. There's a lot of cool ideas that don't really go as far as you'd hope, and though that may leave us wanting more (the key to good writing, according to Dickens) we don't want to pay hardcover prices for it. Still, it's worth having this one in your collection, and encouraging worthy Oz writers, so buy the paperback. Look for more from Max Barry, I have a hunch his next will be better yet.

Max Barry's second novel, JENNIFER GOVERNMENT, is a wild ride through the near future, when American consumerism and culture have consolidated much of the world under a single government. People name themselves after the company they work for, and the unemployed are easily identifiable by their lack of surnames. The novel opens with a bang when a lowly merchandiser, Hack Nike, gets off the elevator on the wrong floor and meets two men, both named John Nike, at the water cooler. Hack is offered a guerilla marketing position and eagerly signs his contract before he realizes he has agreed to assassinate ten people as a way of boosting Nike's profits. Meanwhile, a savvy and ambitious government agent, Jennifer Government gets wind of the plans.

To reveal more of what happens would be to ruin Max Barry's rambunctious plot, which bends and folds and ties itself in knots as the action heats up, involving the CEO's of other American corporations, the NRA, a disillusioned stockbroker, and a computer hacker named Violet ExxonMobil. Although not as hilarious as Barry's first novel SYRUP, Barry's instinct for the absurd remains intact as he serves up his zany vision of a world run amuck. The pacing is flawless, never letting up, always leaping ahead with new surprises, although near the end these constant turns of plot left me confused about where a particular character was, what he knew, who he knew and how. Except during one heavy-handed scene near the end, Barry breezes his readers through the insanity of his futuristic world with skill and confidence.

Max Barry fans won't want to miss this novel. This is an entertaining satire best read in a few sittings. You won't find any deep insights here, but you will certainly get a few laughs and a sharp-eyed look at America's consumerism.

With Jennifer Government, Barry steps into the territory of better known traveler William Gibson-that of large multi-national amoral corporations, consumerism/marketing gone amok, personal technology's disorienting effects, etc. It's a world grown familiar to us over the past decade or so, made so by Gibson and others, and this new foray into it bears up fine, if not spectacularly so, in comparison (Gibson's newest, Pattern Recognition, in fact makes a nice companion novel to read with or just after this one)
By the time the novel takes place, the not-so-distant future, all facets of society, from entire countries to single individuals, have been suborned by large conglomerates such as Nike and the NRA. Employees take as their last name their company name (thus John Nike), assassination becomes just another marketing tool, "street cred" is literally to die for, the police subcontract out their work into a bewildering array of contracts and sub-contracts, and the government, while it still exists, is about as powerful as your typical independent bookstore is in comparison to the Barnes and Noble that moved in around the corner.
One of the main characters, Hack Nike, gets involved in the aforementioned assassination and the title character, on the scene at the time, makes it her mission to find him and then those more culpable. The plot is fast-paced, the characters enjoyable, and as a whole the work makes for a pleasant read-laugh-out-loud funny a few times, wryly amusing most times, but with a nice edge to it throughout. The pace does tend to bog down toward the end, the satire grows a bit heavy and tired, some contrivances of plot mar the last few chapters, and while the lack of background details allows for the quick pace, at times as a reader you wish he would have slowed down a bit to give us a more full vision of the world. Then again, there is room for more of Jennifer, so perhaps we'll get a more fleshed out vision in a later book. You won't be blown away by this book, and if you're one of those reader who does a chapter or two a night then you might be tempted to give it up toward the end, but stay with it; you'll surprise yourself by thinking of it now and then later on while watching a new commercial or reading another article on media consolidation.

It's not often you see car chases and satire together. But then this isn't your typical satire.

The book is set in an ultra-consumerist world where everything--even the government!--is privatized. Sounds like the lead-in for an anti-capitalist rant, right? Wrong. Barry uses the setting as a playground, happily propelling the characters through its insanities but never stopping to preach about how terrible it all is. There's no time for that, not when Jennifer Government is having gun battles with NRA assassins, corporations are massing private armies, and a main character is entangled in a love triangle with two sisters.

The story's the thing, and it's an awesomely fast one. There's more plot here than character, that's for sure, and at times you wish that Barry would just hold up for a second and take a breath. There are no deep insights into the human psyche. But this is probably the most entertaining satire you'll ever read, and one of the slyest thrillers.

Less comedy and more thrills than Syrup (Barry's first novel), Jennifer Government is a broader, more ambitious and more compelling book. Especially at this price, it's well worth the money.

First, to dismiss the cover quote that describes it as Catch-22 meets the Matrix -- more like Snow Crash meets Moby Dick. And it's clear that Max Barry is a big Neal Stephenson fan, as the world overrun by corporate America is a very Stephensonian theme. In Barry's world, corporate America controls not only the US (and the entire western hemisphere) but also England, Australia, and Japan, and the consumerist/corporate culture (referred to as "capitalizm") is so pervasive that a person's last name is determined by the company they work for.

Hack Nike works for Nike in Australia (a USA country). He gets himself involved in a plot by Nike.au management to gain word-of-mouth for their latest sneaker line by killing people who buy the sneakers (a la 1980s gangland fashion wars), which draws the attention of Jennifer Government, a former ad agency wunderkind turned FBI agent (or something like it) with a bar code tattooed below her eye. Hack goes to the Police, who instead of making an arrest on the plotters subcontract the murders to the NRA (now a heavily armed privatized army-for-hire), making an enemy of John Nike, the VP who came up with the idea in the first place and the subject of substantial obsessing by Jennifer. And the corporate world itself is a character, as the plot line that started with some very shady dealing builds towards an all-out corporate civil war between two megalopolies that started off as frequent-flyer incentive plans and grew into political factions dominated by big-name megacorporations like Nike, Reebok, AT&T, IBM, and even Boeing.

The plot goes from Australia to Los Angeles to London, its characters let loose in a world where a hostile takeover involves cyberterrorism and paramilitary action as well as stock market manipulation and the Government stands seemingly powerless against the idea that "free trade == anything goes". It's a very fast-paced read, to the point where the book's sense of timing is a little lost in the shuffle, but it makes for some definite popcorn-movie reading. The book represents a sharp rebuke to the forces of laissez-faire capitalism as both of its protagonists are shown journeying away from the corporate mindset that built this strange, homogenized mess of a world, and also shows a sense of just how strange reality could be.

This book isn't perfect. It is, as I said, very derivative of Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash, and that tends to mute the creativity of the book (though it does manage to avoid some of Stephenson's stranger plot twisting). Also, the book carries not one but two romantic subplots, one of which is absolutely critical to the story and one of which fits in but seems a bit forced and unnecessary at times. The title character remains a bit mysterious even at the end when the meaning behind her bar code is revealed, but she recalls the best of action movie rogue cop characters like John McLean or Martin Riggs. Like I said, popcorn reading. It will be interesting to see what the movie based on this book will be like -- it's hard to imagine this story being toned down by removing the controversial bits (like the namedropping of major companies).

I do recommend this book. It's not the humorfest implied by some reviewers -- in fact it's a remarkably gritty and occasionally bloody book, and it sacrifices realism to the plot on a number of occasions -- but it still works as a sort of grim reductio-ad-absurdum satire where laughs are beside the point. I think it will make an excellent movie, as long as the movie is kept reasonably faithful to the book, and I think Max Barry probably has a long future as a cult author along the lines of Chuck Palahniuk ahead of him.

With all the positive reviews this book received I was reminded of the current state of literature after reading it as it's really not that great. A catchy idea, and Max Berry can really write interesting, poppy prose, but the execution of this is as blunt as can be. This book is neither an incisive attack on corporate culture nor is it a cautionary tale with any merit. It's mostly a crass, shoot-em-up - a one-line joke that isn't all that compelling or well researched. Yet I finished it, so go figure. Max should be screenwriter, not a novelist!

I noticed this book when I was working at a bookstore but I didn't really take note of it until several friends began playing Barry's online game, Jennifer Government: Nation States. I'm glad I picked it up since this book turned out to be a quick and very enjoyable read.

The chapters in the book are extremely short which gives the whole novel a quick pace. The world Barry describes, a world dominated by corporations and the private sector, is both facinating and frightening. Since it is a satire, parts of the novel are over the top but everything fits in the surreal environment of marketing and sales that Barry puts forth. The characters are believable and Barry's biting sarcasm and wit literally had me laughing as I read certain passages.

On the cover, they compare this novel to The Matrix and Catch 22. I see where they were going with that but only agree to a certain point. The story is not as high-tech or philosophical as The Matrix. Nor is it post apocolyptic. I also hesitate to say that it has the depth of Catch 22. Barry shines in his understanding of marketing and corporate culture and the ways in which companies might one day cross the line that they so carefully walk these days.

All in all, I give it 2 thumbs up as an enjoyable summer read!

If Christopher Buckley had written Snow Crash it might have come off something like Max Barry's Jennifer Government. With great wit and satirism, Barry has painted a futuristic world in which capitalizm is the primary force of society to the extent that every individual takes the last name of the institution with which they are affiliated. Thus, characters like John Nike collide with Billy NRA and Jennifer Government in a high speed suspenseful plot.

The plot moves along quickly, although Barry does rely a bit too heavily on the "small world" phenomenon. Characters involved in different subplots know each other and it all smashes together in some fairly violent scenes. The pace of the book is definitely plot-driven, and Barry sacrifices some character development to make his points about capitalism and the death of the individual.

That said, this is a very funny book and an entertaining read, if a little on the fluffy side.