Airport Pulp for Progressives

Here’s Lucy Bengstrom, the journalist heroine of Jonathan Raban’s “Surveillance”: “Next time she’d bring her cassette recorder, small enough to nestle unnoticed in her bag. … After her New Yorker piece on Bill Gates came out, Gates himself had dropped her an e-mail complimenting her on her ‘great memory.’ Little did he know.”That reporters use dictaphones? This is news to a tech savant who’s interviewed probably 24 times a day? (He might be surprised by something as antiquated as a cassette recorder, but let’s not niggle.) In another scene, a schoolgirl marvels at “streaming video.” Readers will yearn for a time when everyone under 75 wasn’t glued to YouTube. I have seen the future, Mr. Raban says, and it looks like 1984.This is the gimlet eye that, according to the Guardian, comes closer than any other to “distilling the particular attitudes and anxieties of our time.” As its title insists, “Surveillance” is deeply (or at least punctiliously) worried about the excesses of security in the post-September 11 age. The big concern isn’t that liberal democracy will be chiseled away by Islamist totalitarianism. It isn’t that a random city will reap the radiological whirlwind. It’s, Am I on candid camera?If it seems a fatuous question, well, it isn’t entirely. Still, dressing a story in this high-visibility cloak doesn’t make it literature. A novel in which every character, scene, and detail is a red-tagged reminder of the theme is nothing but the CliffsNotes to itself. We know what the cassette recorder “means,” but what’s it *mean*? To be wary of surveillance and to have anything to say about why we are wary are entirely different things. One is to solicit easy approval; the other is to make a serious inquiry into the reasons for our fear.If “Surveillance” can be said to “distill a particular attitude of our time,” it’s loathing of complexity. This is typically imputed to the far-right forces of panic that Mr. Raban thinks he’s addressing, but it can be found anywhere. “Surveillance” is airport pulp for progressives.Consider the characters. There is Lucy’s neighbor Tad, an HIV-positive actor and activist who — when he’s not combing the Internet for evidence of governmental malfeasance — finds fulfillment in “playing stepfather” to Alida, Lucy’s precocious daughter. (“[S]he was Tad’s sole heir. Only the attorney who’d witnessed his signature knew this.”)Tad is a convenient secular saint and martyr, a little loony but never dangerously so. His own suggestive foray into surveillance is meant to inject some ambiguity into our understanding of the term, but it falls well within reasonable bounds: a check-up on his shady landlord, Mr. Lee. Lee is a jaw-droppingly bogus figure, a straw man on the verge of spontaneous combustion. His time is divided between buying prostitutes, reading “Who Moved My Cheese?,” and fantasizing about a marriage of convenience to Lucy. His lips move when he reads, as if we need any help grasping his status as a moronic ne’er-do-well.That leaves Lucy and her journalistic quarry, August Vanags, a reclusive writer whose memoir of a World War II childhood may or may not be a passel of lies. Mr. Raban depicts their encounters like a Clarice-and-Hannibal intellectual tango, but Vanags speaks like a GOP press release and Lucy, in her private thoughts, is the kind of equivocating bore that nowadays passes for a nuanced thinker. We never learn whether Vanags is a fraud, only that Lucy feels guilty for trying to find out — that is, for doing her job.Neither a visit to the Hall of Records nor a piece of investigative journalism has anything in common, in degree or in kind, with a government spying on its citizens. The former examples are good grounds for a detective novel, which this is not; the latter might make for a thoughtful book in more capable hands than Mr. Raban’s. The sad fact is that the kind of political and social climate Mr. Raban hopes to critique exists, dramatically so, in countries all over the world. The happy fact is that it doesn’t exist in America, except in the imagination of someone who might enjoy “Surveillance.” We suffer from nothing more sinister than bureaucratic bloat, on the one hand, and too much marketing on the other. Neither is worth 272 pages.That’s not to say things couldn’t get worse. But to address how and why would require a far broader outlook.Suppose Mr. Raban had taken the trouble to exercise his imagination. He might have stepped outside our familiar world of credit card offers, courtesy calls, Google ads, webcams, peepholes, deadbolts, security wand, and Homeland Security. He might have assumed we despise it already. Then he could have envisioned a cowardly new world of his own — one capable of persuading us with subtlety and artistry that it isn’t safety we hate, but safety taken out of our hands.Mr. Beck last wrote in these pages on the novelist Dave Eggers.

Airport Pulp for Progressives

Airport Pulp for Progressives

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