August 16, 2004

The Pickup Artist

Terry Bisson is a truly fine writer; his short stories "macs" (searingly political) and "Bears Discover Fire" (sweet, ambling, gently weird and aimless) show his range, and he's capable of doing funny quite well, as with his well-distributed short-short, "They're Made of Meat". But I found The Pickup Artist to be a disappointment; the central conceit (an artistic-cum-political movement designed to wipe out the art of the twentieth century and make way for that of the twenty-first gets institutionalized) not terribly interesting; I would have loved a comic riff on a totalitarian society á la Farenheit 451, but this wasn't interested in that. Instead, it was a novel about... art, I guess, and one man's reaction to it, but it didn't really seem to have a core at all. Frankly, science fiction about art is almost universally unsatisfying. Reading rock criticism not by Lester Bangs on a benzedrine kick is usually a poor choice, because criticism of the unwritten generally fails to communicate the interesting things about its subject; the same problem hits almost all science fiction dealing with art (Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration is a notable exception, because it's not clear how good the protagonist is supposed to be, and he's rapidly losing his grip on reality). Bisson sidesteps that problem by simply ignoring it; what's the twenty-first century art that the pickup artists are making room for? Sadly, I didn't really care about the characters (not even the dog, because I have a heart of stone), and the told-in-flashback story of how the world came to be didn't do it for me either. The wackiness was no good; it felt like cut-rate Bradley Denton or, worse, Rudy Rucker by the end (drugs to bring the dead back to life! cryptic wizened babies! cloned Injuns!). Terry Bisson gets marks for making the protagonist's totem a Hank Williams album (I have no doubts about Bisson's taste) but this was just a disappointment all around. Read "Bears Discover Fire" instead.

posted at 11:21 PM | 2 comments

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