Description:
Reading Dog Days will give many readers a strange sense of déjà vu: characters and lines seem oddly familiar, conjuring up thoughts of a book just read or a TV show watched last week. This is no coincidence. As Evan, a software developer, Star Trek fanatic, and the protagonist's sidekick, notes, "Nostalgia used to have a twenty-year lag. In the seventies everyone was into the fifties. But then in the eighties everyone was into the seventies. Now, in the nineties, we're into the nineties. What's left? Nothing. Time folds in on itself, like a black hole. It's the millennium, the collapse of culture." While Dog Days may not embody "the collapse of culture," it certainly employs the technique of folding in on itself, and Daniel Lyons uses this approach to its fullest extent. Combing pop culture, he amalgamates the mobsters of Elmore Leonard, Wired jargon, and the Gen-X characters of Douglas Coupland, all the while throwing in sly references to everything from Planet of the Apes to Starsky and Hutch to Pulp Fiction. The result is a clever romp through the software industry with a wide detour into the workings of the Mafia. Reilly and his business partner-roommate, Evan, are creating a program to allow shopping on the Web at Ionic, the fifth largest software design firm in the world. At 24, Reilly is the luckiest guy around--he has a beautiful girlfriend, a job he loves, a vintage BMW. But, as he points out, you can't think that you deserve what you have, because the minute you do, everything will vanish. Which, of course, is just what happens. His girlfriend dumps him for a VP in marketing, his project is slated to be canceled, and when he parks in the wrong part of his Boston neighborhood, his car is sabotaged by the local Mafioso. Reilly has had enough. When the opportunity presents itself, he kidnaps the mobster's prized greyhound. The prank, though, escalates into serious crime, and Reilly finds he has taken on way more than he expected. Reilly and Evan are two of the more engaging characters in pop fiction today. Though they are software geeks, they have enough depth and energy that--despite the full Trekkie costume Evan keeps in his closet--they make the stereotype believable. Lyons is at his best when describing Reilly at work and the politics of the software industry, but it's too bad he didn't mine this more. His writing, though, is compelling, and you can't help but root for the hapless antihero, even as he gets into more and more trouble. --Jenny Brown
|
