Beware What You Ask For

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Helena Echlin wonders where the dotcom novels are: "Very few novelists have tackled the dot-com-obsessed late '90s, and none have taken the Bay Area as their setting."

Actually, she's wrong on that, but because she appears by all accounts to be a recent British transplant, it's understandable that she's never heard of Carla Sinclair's godawful Signal to Noise, which another SFBG reviewer panned seven years ago as "an extended gossip-inspired fizzle with all the hilarity of someone else's high-school slambook." (Actually, the review in toto is an excellent cheat sheet on how not to write a roman a clef, so it might be worth a look for would-be writers; lord knows the novel sure isn't, and rightfully deserves its obscurity.) More surprisingly, she doesn't mention Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, but then, I can't remember anymore where exactly that's set; it might have been Seattle. And wasn't there a Doug Rushkoff novel set in the Bay Area, though it was about a cybercult rather than a dotcom?

And, hey, if you know any candidates, name them in a comment, won't you?

Echlin also dismisses the best candidate for the novel she's looking for, Po Bronson's The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, because it takes place in a research lab rather than an actual Internet startup. But Bronson's best (in my opinion) book neatly spotlights what I think may be the key to the puzzle. After he wrote this second novel, he pretty much transformed himself into a journalist, to tell "real" stories. And I think that's where all the major interest in the left coast dotcom scene has been. Think Michael Lewis' The Next Next Thing, for example. I'm sure there are other novelists mining the territory, but my hunch is they're taking their time to craft good stories. I took a stab at it in the late 1990s, but could never come up with the right ending, though I'll probably recycle at least the characters some day. Or it may be, as she says:

The reason for the dot-lit dearth may be that East Coast publishers don't want to buy them. Local novelist Noah Hawley was unable to sell his second novel, only tangentially about the boom, because no matter how many times he revised it, editors found his characters unsympathetic.

Though if it's really only tangentially about the boom, it sounds more like a problem with Hawley's book, not with the dotcom culture.

I disagree with some of her later points, particularly the idea that the dotcom boom is essentially a west coast story; Silicon Alley was just as big a story as Silicon Valley, with its own twists and turns, and I think we're going to see some interesting fictional spins on it. (Take, for example, Lynn Harris' Miss Media.) And I find this ending just a teensy bit hyperbolic, don't you?

But banishing a memory is always unhealthy. If novelists choose not to look back, then literature will present a partial and therefore distorted view of our history. The writer's task is to investigate the dark, messy side of the human condition, to scrutinize what we shrink from, whether it is death, adultery – or dot-coms.

Me, I think the writer's task is to tell a good story wherever he or she finds it. Come to think of it, I'd be interested in seeing what Bay Area novelists have done in the years Echlin wishes some dotcom novels had come out, because I'm sure there's some major gems among them.