A contract writer struggles with a search-engine billionaire’s memoir in a novel laden with startup lore, but lit by flashes of sardonic humour
It’s always the trouble with literary imitation: without a specific parodic target, a consistent performance of bad style is still just bad style, and a dedicated simulation of boredom is still boring. Pages upon pages of a marketing person’s blog, or the mistyped emails of a narcissistic actor, or the office-politics reminiscences of a tech billionaire – such efforts certainly convince the reader that the author has carefully catalogued the linguistic infelicities common to such forms and human stereotypes. But they’re still a slog to read.
Joshua Cohen’s novel is about a writer called Joshua Cohen who is contracted to ghostwrite the autobiography of a tech billionaire called Joshua Cohen. The last JC is the founder of Tetration, which is a search engine, and shares most of its barely fictionalised history with Google’s. Cohen is Gulfstreamed around with Cohen to exotic and decadent locales, and Cohen’s braindump about the history of his company is given as verbatim transcript. Meanwhile writer Cohen is evading divorce papers filed by his wife and falling in love with a younger and more exotic model, and everyone is wondering what is going on with the other Cohen, a pioneer of online who seems to want to go off-grid permanently.
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