Hypermediated Minimalism

BOOK REVI EWS Hypermediated Minimalism Steven Shaviro Spook Country William Gibson Putnam http://www.penguin.com 384 pages; cloth, $25.95 "The door opened like some disturbing hybrid of a bank vault and Armani evening purse, perfectly balanced bombproof solidity meeting sheer cosmetic slickness." William Gibson's prose is cool and precise : minimal, low-affect, attuned to surfaces rather than depths. It's overwrought, filled to bursting with similes and allusions; yet somehow it still manages to feel as if it had been executed skeletally, entirely without flourishes. There's a sense ofdensity built up in layers, but packaged inside a bland and featureless box; this writing is like a nondescript cargo container (one of the book's main images) filled with everything from expensive brand names, hi-tech geekery, and the detritus of popular culture to micro-perceptions of psychological shifts that take place just beneath the threshold of conscious attention. At times, the effect of this prose is one of deadpan absurdity, as when townhouses in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, are described as radiating "the sense that Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren would have been hard at work on interiors, together at last, sheathing inherently superior surfaces underhand-rubbed coats ofgolden beeswax." At other times, it's surreally dislocating, as when one of the protagonists is startled by the actions of her companion, so that "for an instant she imagined him as a character in some graphically simplified animation." At still other times, it's slyly mordant, as when one character is described as looking "like someone who'd be invited quail-shooting with the vice president, though too careful to get himself shot." But most of the time, Gibson's prose is just a little bit spooky, dislocated, and unbalanced. Some details stand out disconcertingly, like the teeth of one character, "presented with billboard clarity" when he smiles. Other details are blurred out by distance; or, better, they are muffled like when you're addicted to downers, as one of the three main protagonists, Milgrim, actually is. Milgrim thinks of his drug-cushioned perception as being like "one of the more esoteric effects of eating exceptionally hot Szechuan...that sensation, strangely delightful, of drinking cold water on top of serious pepperburn —how the water filled your mouth entirely, but somehow without touching it, like a molecule-thick silver membrane of Chinese antimatter, like a spell, some kind of magic insulation." Gibson's prose style is his way of perceiving, and presenting, the world. And the world he presents is the one we live in today: a postmodern world of globalized flows of money and information, driven by sophisticated technologies whose effects are nearly indistinguishable from magic, saturated by advertising and by conspicuous consumption run amok, undergirded by murky conspiracies and counter -conspiracies, and regulated by nearly ubiquitous forms of surveillance. Distant points are closely connected , as if space had been altogether abolished; so that when Hollis, another major protagonist, in Los Angeles, talks on her mobile phone with a friend in Argentina, she is startled by "a true, absolute and digital silence" on the line, "devoid of that random background sizzle that she'd once taken as much for granted during an international call as she took the sky overhead when she was outside." At the same time that everything is global, specific localities become ever more important. Spook Country is centrally concerned with GPS tracking and how it creates a "grid" so that every point on the earth's surface can be monitored and distinguished. There is also a lot about "locative art": which means site-specific multimedia installations that only exist virtually, and that can only be accessed by wearing a virtual-reality helmet with a WiFi connection, so that you see spectral 3D images (bodies, furniture, architecture) overlaying actual physical locations. Both GPS and locative art give new meaning to the local, and emphasize the point that, in our globalized world, every particular site is unique, not to be confounded with anyplace else. Gibson's prose style is his way ofperceiving, andpresenting, the world. William Gibson, of course, is best known as a science fiction writer. His 1984 novel Neuromancer was the...