![]() ![]() He becomes Straw's "life coach," which mostly just requires him "to find the man’s rambling soliloquies compelling, pretend to see meaning in them, then offer some not too transparent but not too opaque homily or parable that confirmed what Straw already thought." These duties do not interfere with his robust substance abuse, but they do boost his self-loathing. In a thrice, Mark's essay is unrecognizably repackaged into a self-help bestseller called "Bringing the Inside Out," his bank account filled with speaking fees and his calendar with appearances on daytime TV talk shows. The essay became a viral hit, and the next thing Mark knew, he'd been swept into the orbit of Jack Straw, "squillionare" owner of SineCo, a "digital-search-and-storage conglomerate" manifestly based on Google. Lastly, and most deliciously, there's Mark Deveraux, a former flack who once, while "bombed on Ox圜ontin and Pouilly-Fuissé chardonnay," sat down at his kitchen table and wrote a pretty good, Camus-infused 10,000 word essay "on how a person - no, how Mark, how he himself should arrive at right decisions," then published it on a friend's website. He persuades them he just needs rehab, although one does ask, "What about all that stuff you wrote on your blog? About the shadow government, the plan to sneak tyranny into our lives through convenience, the massive plot to control all the information in the world?" Turns out she wasn't the only one to notice those posts. ![]() On the basis of his increasingly demented Internet posts, his older sisters stage an intervention. This precipitates a plunge into one of the trenches of his wide-swinging mood disorder. Meanwhile, Leo Crane, possessor of a modest trust fund in Portland, Oregon, loses yet another low-prestige job. The next thing she knows, she's asked to leave the country and her father, a school principal in California, has been busted on trumped-up charges of hiding child pornography on his computer. Peeved to find herself tailed afterward by what she assumes to be government minders (they frighten off all of her carefully cultivated local contacts), Leila shoots out an email about the encounter in the jungle to her contacts back home, including several reporters and an investigator for the UNHCR ("Whoever is doing work up there, I think they’re flying in tech-support guys with bodyguards. Leila Majnoun, an Iranian-American working for a rinky-dinky NGO in Myanmar, accidentally stumbles over a couple of English-speaking private security contractors standing around the entrance to something out in the forest. They are three Americans in their 30s whose lives have been commandeered by forces beyond their control. "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" is, by contrast, much more focused on characters - as in, it has actual characters. Then, of course, an objectionably youthful tech billionaire will be found lying in a pool of his own blood in his fancy modern mansion because no security system, no matter how sophisticated, can stop these guys. So, while I can see why David Shafer's smart and often very funny first novel, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot," is being marketed (and praised) as a techno-thriller, part of me balks at the categorization, which conjures up images of square-jawed men ordering other square-jawed men to strap themselves into hazmat suits or state-of-the-art fighter planes, while, in an underlit room, the obligatory freakish keyboard cowboy hacks into somebody's mainframe. ![]() But the whole life-and-death angle has a lot less impact when you can't believe a person like this has ever lived in the first place. The brooding hero has typically been airbrushed of all the incidental pettiness, self-consciousness and ineptitude of an ordinary human being, presumable to make him (or, occasionally, her) someone we can look up to. This is the real deal, the author seems to growl, the stakes are life and death, and let me tell you life is cheap to these international operatives/organized criminals/mercenary thugs. Sometimes, however, those are the only good points, and if you spend a couple of weeks reading a bunch of these books, the predominance of a certain terse, self-important and weirdly earnest tone can get pretty tiresome. ![]() We all know the selling points of thrillers: exciting milieus and speedy pacing. ![]()
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