Colin Murphy

Each successive page was an excruciating step closer to total despair. It's a relief when Jurgis finally stomps all over on the garden of his soul. By the end just reading the socialist revival section is almost an ecstatic experience when compared to the misery that precedes it, which I suppose was the point.

2008/05/31
It strikes me that religious nature of Jurgis' conversion is pretty apt and probably deliberate. Although the connections he makes help him find a job and the cause gives his life meaning and purpose, the movement itself is sustained by promises of a soon coming utopia that never actually arrives. The parallels to the commonly cited communist critique of Christianity are glaring.

The protagonist's (and, with increasing clarity across his career, the author's) contempt for ‘baseline' people and the book's increasingly ridiculous deification of academics is embarrassing. The world building is fun and the plot is engaging, but the major mystery is whether the cloying fetishization of intelligence is primarily cynical audience flattery or troubling personality defect.

A disturbing thought experiment that paradoxically neuters itself with overtly fetishized ultraviolence and perverse sex shit. The scenario is horrific by its nature, or it would be if the torture porn wasn't constantly upstaging it.

When I first read this book in grade school it left an indelible mark, such that it still stuck with me more than a decade later despite forgetting the title and author and most of the plot. Finally rediscovering and rereading it has only given me a greater appreciation. The decent imagery and even nuance that characterize the writing and plot was largely lost on my ten year old self. For example, I had remembered the ending as a total downer, a defeat. Recognizing it as the assumption of adult responsibility this time around was pretty peak.

Terse and lightly ornamented, the book's unhurried tour through the inevitable collapse of a startup is strongest as a kind of counterexample in form and function to the trite parables that plague business books. A similarly succinct moral can be drawn, though: reality always wins in the end.