Maybe We Should Reboot America After We Reboot This Old TV Show
Review An assessment or critique of a service, product, or creative endeavor such as art, literature or a performance.
By Michael Malone
“Reboot” is an odd little novel. Its protagonist is David, who was in the cast of a hit teen TV show a generation before and is now bumbling through life battling alcohol, twice divorced, a not-all-that-present father, struggling to find a purpose other than voice-acting work for a video game.
There is a plan to reboot the old show, which is called “Rev Beach” (it is likened to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), and David finally has a purpose.
As one might expect in a novel about a TV show reboot, much of the story takes place in New York and Los Angeles, where David’s first ex-wife Grace, a co-star from “Rev Beach” who inherited her father’s showbiz clout in Hollywood, lives. But David lives in Portland, and slices of the novel are set there, which I enjoyed. His ex-wife Amber grew up in a neighborhood called Felony Flats, which now features “bike lanes and vegan patisseries, a pan-Hispanic food cart pod with a robust Instagram presence, pour-over coffee shops on opposite corners of any given intersection” the book says.
As the novel begins, both Los Angeles and Portland are on fire. In fact, extreme weather faces David in every locale he visits.
Tapped by Grace to get his old co-stars on board, David heads to New York, and meets up with Shayne, who moved on to bigger and better things after “Rev Beach,” at a dive bar near the Gowanus in Brooklyn. Tending bar is Molly, an influential figure in the “Rev” reboot, as she got the ball rolling on it with a speculative story on a gossip website.
Shayne and Molly, in fact, know each other well. When New York City undergoes monsoon-like conditions after David’s arrival, the three of them decamp to Grace’s Tribeca penthouse to wait out the days-long storm.
Much later, David heads to Florida to meet with another co-star, Corey. Corey was the goofball in the cast, and his castmates laughed at him off the set as well. Now he’s a guy running for office on a MAGA platform who harbors loads of bitterness for the way he was treated on “Rev Beach.” David’s trip to Florida, which includes checking in with his mother and stepfather and stepsister, is eventful to say the least. When he finally meets Corey, there is a bizarre act of God on the beach.
David is a vastly flawed character, but the reader does root for him. His long monologues are mostly funny to follow. He goes off on extravagant asides, and often lost me with his obscure – at least to me – references. Such as when he describes dinner with his mother and her family.
“It was a small and true contentment, evanescing even as it flowered forth into being, like the dinner scene in ‘To the Lighthouse,’ or, if we want to go with a reference that I would actually know and Molly wouldn’t, a commercial for Publix grocery stores like the one my mother had seen on TV earlier today, which had reminded her that she’d seen a coupon in the paper yesterday, which is why she and Gerry had abandoned their original plan to order a pizza, and thus why we were eating this for dinner now.”
A slim 284 pages, “Reboot” is a peculiar book. A wide variety of conspiracy theories and fringe groups, including a hollow-earth society and lizard people, inhabit the story. Author Justin Taylor also has some fun satirizing our ubiquitous online world, and the toll that may be taking on humankind.
Taylor lives in Portland and he’s the author of the memoir “Riding with the Ghost” and the novel “The Gospel of Anarchy.” Taylor’s writing is good. Did I enjoy this oddball tale? Most of the time, I did.
The novel came out this year. GoodReads has it at a modest 3.11, out of 5, with 346 people weighing in.
Joshua Ferris, author of the fabulous “Then We Came to the End,” reviewed it for The New York Times, and quite liked it.
“It’s a performance full of wit and rigor freed of the familiar polarizing semantics, making legible something the actual streaming-posting-retweeting world, with its relentless pace and all-too-real stakes, can easily obscure, which is just how much conspiracy theory and pop culture have fused,” he writes. “Not just QAnon and Russiagate, but Kate Middleton and Birds Aren’t Real.”
The Washington Post called “Reboot” a “very serious story about the perniciousness of conspiracy thinking, wrapped in a very funny yarn about the shallowness of celebrity culture.”
As David thinks about the show he’s trying to reboot, he notes how innocent the world was when “Rev Beach” first came out. He says of his character, “I was the boy the country wanted to believe it had been when it was young, or had grown up next door to, or might have for a son of its own someday.”
Journalist Michael Malone lives in Hawthorne with his wife and two children.
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