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HAILEY’S
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Mindwash!
Soft!
by Rupert Thomson
Alfred A. Knopf, 1988
307 pp.; S24
The tale of the soft-drink company that dia
bolically wins over customers via subliminal
advertising is one of the consumer age’s most
enduring myths — right up there with the Life
cereal kid OD-ing on Pop Rocks. The way
Madison Avenue psycho-spam is actually
embedded in our systems, of course, is much
more obvious though no less frightening: for
examples, see Larry Tye’s recent biography,
The Father of Spin: Edward L. bernays & The
Birth of Public Relations.
Even so, yvilh Soft!, British novelist
Rupert Thomson gets away with build
ing a book on the goofy premise that a
company would actually stoop so low
by using it as a tool to get at a subtler
disconnect and dissatisfaction with
market culture.
It helps that Thomson is a masterful
writer. The author’s youth and comedic
sensibility have led to the inevitable
comparisons with countryman Martin
Amis It’s a great compliment —
Thomson shares with Amis a flair for
the dazzling sentence and a keen
insight into a class-based anxiety spe
cific to the English character. But
Thomson is also his own writer. He’s a
bit more economical than Amis, more
comfortable with what painters call
white space. The first pages of Soft!,
Thomson’s fourth book, introduce
Barker Dodds, a small-time Plymouth tough
who is being interrogated in a police station for
a murder he didn’t commit. The police ques
tioning gives a sense of the sparse rhythm and
dry humor that propel this story:
*So you pushed him," the policeman said.
'And he fell off the balcony," said amAher.
' And he died," said a third
"Murderer," the first policeman said.
Barker’s seasoned reaction to such strategies:
You had to have the patience of
Buddha, if that was what he was
famous for. you had to sit there like you
were fat and foreign and made of gold.
Barker leaves town for London, where he is
eventually, and reluctantly, hired by a beverage
conglomerate to bump off a human guinea pig
from a soda-pop brainwashing experiment gone
awry.
The guinea pig is Glade Spencer, a middle-
class postcollegiate waitress at a fashionable
restaurant whose case of slacker catatonia
approaches girl-in-a-bubble status. It’s an afflic
tion Thomson limns with a deftness you’d
never find in a Douglas Coupland novel, though
he does so with a similar eye toward capturing
the Zeitgeist. The same can be said of his char
acter Jimmy, the young advertising executive
who hatches the brainwashing scheme. By
night, Jimmy ,s a night-clubbing playboy who
quaffs half the luxury pharmaceuticals floating
around go-go London. By day. he is a cog in a
shiny multinational machine who inflicts his
damage on human consciousness with no con
ception of conscience. The only better satiriza-
tion of the Details magazine lifestyle is Details
magazine itself.
The character in Soft!that lends the book an
air of timelessness, however, is tough guy
Barker Dodds. He possesses the soul of a poet,
but was born with the brawn of a bouncer —
and in the wrong
caste, to boot.
When he moves
to London, he
finds an example
of sublime beau
ty (after years of
implied search
ing), but it turns
out to be the
innocent young
woman he has
been coerced
into killing.
There is some
thing Tarantino-
esque in Dodds'
embodiment of
both bloodlust
and tenderness,
but, unlike many
Tarantino char
acters, Dodds moves consciously across this
moral spectrum. It’s chilling to feel that move
ment with the knowledge that it win be ham
pered by the cold realities of circumstance and
social station conspiring against him. But
Barker Dodds moves anyway, and Thomson
shows us the devastating price of the luxury.
It’s this payment that lends weight to this oth
erwise frothy satire.
Richard Fausset
Book Report
By Judy Long
Wall Whitman said that “to have great poets there must
be great audiences too." Read the most recent issues ot
The Chattahooche Review and The Georgia Review to
be among the greatest ot audinces. Judson
Mitcham’s beautiful poem, “Boys Playing Ball after
Dark," written in memory of Raymond Andrews, is in
the most recent issue ot The Chattahooche Review. The
Georgia Review offers poetry by John Updike, Paul
Zimmer, John Engels and many other fine poets.
Mark your calendars now tor Tuesday. Sept. 22 at 7 30
p.m. at the UGA Chapel, for The Georgia Review, along
with a multitude of other tine sponsors, will bring
acclaimed poet Donald Hall tor a reading. His works
include The Old Life and Without.
Library of Contemporary Thought: If you think you are
tired of hearing about Monica Lewinsky, you aren't
half as tired as Peter Gethers, an editor-at-large at
Random House. In the hopes of giving Americans
something else to talk about, he has launched the
Library of Contemporary Thought, a series of short
paperbacks that wifi be published at the rate ot one per
month. Gethers says the series draws on “a long legacy
of the angry pamphlet" in both American and European
publishing. In the vein of Thomas Paine’s 1776 clas
sic Common Sense, Gethers wants to give contempo
rary authors the chance to “mouth off about the things
they care about.” Titles so far include Vincent
Bugliosi's No Island of Sanity: Paula Jones v. Bill
Clinton: The Supreme Court on Trial, Carl Hiaasens
Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World, and
Pete Hamill's News Is a Verb: Journalism at the End
of the Twentieth Century. In the coming year. Joe Klein
will have the opportunity to “mouth off about the histo
ry of alienation in America, and Donna Tartt will
enlighten us about the meaning of modem art.
Southern Festival of Books One of the country's
best book fairs is held annually at War Memorial Plaza
in Nashville. This year's 10th celebration of the written
word will be held on October 9-11. Judith Ortiz
Cofer, Whit Gibbons, Terry Kay. and Jim Kiigo
will b c featured authors, and the University of Georgia
Press will be recognized by the Southern Book Critics
Circle tor the Flannery O'Connor Short Story Award
series, now celebrating its 15th year. Call (615) 320-
7001 for more information.
Congratulations: Stephanie Gordon is one of 14
finalists for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a national award
judged this year by David Bottoms, John Frederick
Nyms, and Joseph Parisi
m FLAGPOLE SEPTEMBER 9, 1998