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 The effect of many of the final pages recalls the harrowing end of Day of the Locust and the very final pages the cold agonies of Stanislaus Lem at his best. D. B. Weiss has written an exciting book. He has successfully kept complexity in play throughout. Many individual expressions are deftly turned and the entirety of the book remains fresh and arresting from beginning to end.
Reviewed by Bob Williams
Lucky Wander Boy
by D. B. Weiss
Plume (Penguin)
276 pages, ISBN 0-452-28394-9, $13.00
This is a heady mixture of past and present and video games. The style is direct and has impact. Its hero is a young man accustomed to the leisure of unemployment and with a restless and inquiring mind. He can remember his childhood and early adolescence with a precision that captivates and moves the reader.
The book is divided into three unequal parts, each part bearing one word in sequence from the title.
The hero who is also the narrator lives turbulently with Anya whose patience with her immature lover is frayed and fragile. While he plays video games on his computer - while he is supposed to be doing research - she plays the television, each of them increasing the volume on their respective machines until she confesses defeat and walks out. In the resulting quiet his long considered plan matures and he begins to write - electronically of course - The Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments. This constitutes a history of every video game ever made. Through this project Weiss's hero weaves knowledge of a strange and wonderful sort (the Marxist basis of Pac-man) or unbearably painful memories (the death of his grandmother).
He elaborates on his meeting with Anya in Poland where he was holding a job under false pretenses. When he is fired, he brings Anya back with him. A reflection of their now stormy relationship, he incorporates into his description of Donkey Kong with a meditation on the demiurge and the participation of the primordial woman in evil.
In the process of writing his catalogue he has acquired working - perhaps one should say playable - copies of the games. But one eludes him - Lucky Wander Boy. He has begun his entry on the game but it is mostly an explanation of its rarity. It is then that he meets an old school chum, Sexy. He identifies himself as a writer since this seems appropriate to the conversation - just as to get himself the job in Poland he had claimed to be a graphics designer. His friend tells him that, among the far-reaching ramifications of his business, it has an interest in old video games. He lists a few and one of them is Lucky Wander Boy. Since the narrator has been identified at last by a name, we will use it henceforth. His name is Adam Pennyman. And the name has significance. In his second game of Lucky Wander Boy - played when he was a youngster - the synthesized voice of the game addressed him as Adam Pennyman.
Adam goes to work for Portal Entertainment and Development. The characteristic product of Portal Entertainment is the Eviscerator, video game and movie. The company has little demand for subtlety. He works for Tamar, a very intimidating young woman, and tries to get to work with the Lucky Wander Boy game. In the course of playing Eviscerator he meets Clio. Their rapport is immediate as they imitate sounds of various video games and identify them correctly but the rapport does not carry over into normal day-to-day relationship. Clio is strange, a little goofy. Sexy promises to get Adam on the Lucky Wander Boy project but he takes a job with Warner Brothers and leaves before he is able to do so. Without Sexy, Adam feels insecure about his job at Portal.
He and Anya celebrate his new job with its abundant pay and go dancing at an exclusive club where the men watch Anya and she watches specifically a waiter that had served them on the night that they met Sexy for the first time. Adam suspects that their relationship may be drawing to a close.
Despite the departure of Sexy and the threats of a typically despicable CEO at Portal, Adam seems to be secure of his job, which he describes in terms of a video game with special instruction on work and how to avoid it. The tone of the article is impersonal but the deadpan humor is obvious. But in the real world Adam finds the situation grim. "I started to question whether superior intelligence could truly be considered an advantage if you kept your brain off all day."
His unsatisfied obsession with Lucky Wander Boy continues. The game is untypical in that it denies all reasonable expectations of the player and subjects the player to a battery of randomization. Stage II of the game is a very very long trek through a desert. Adam has heard rumors for years that the game has a Stage III. What appears to be good fortune turns into a questionable sequel. The inventor of Lucky Wander Boy is still alive and has rights over what Portal does to her game in its movie version. She has read the script and dislikes it. The nasty CEO assigns to Adam the job of placating her. He expects to talk to a woman with imperfect English. Instead her English is flawless and her shrewdness is more than a match for anything that Portal has to offer, especially anything in the shape of Adam Pennyman who is entirely on her side. He has read the script (through the generosity of the author so have we) and it is garbage.
Adam sees no way to salvage the situation, no realistic way, but he determines to rewrite the script despite the CEO's guaranteed indifference and stupidity and Anya's disruptive home influence .He is convinced by the implications of the inventor's strictures on the script that the rumors are true, there is a Stage III to the game.
He has shown Clio his Catalogue and in her oblique way she is very enthusiastic except for the entry on Lucky Wander Boy. She senses that there is too much personal involvement on Adam's part. This is a triumph in an otherwise bleak situation since the inventor of Lucky Wander Boy, Araki Itachi, refuses to talk to him. Clio agrees to help him with the game.
Adam succeeds in his sexual designs on Clio. He experiences no guilt over this and invokes the gamer's philosophy that there are different worlds. Anya inhabits one and Clio another.
There is to be a copywriter dinner in a few days and Adam, as Portal's only copywriter, will attend. Krickstein, the CEO, will be there too and Adam plans to confront him over Lucky Wander Boy. Since Krickstein has the rights with perpetually renewable options to the game, its survival is in his slimy hands. Unless the movie based on the game is outstanding, the game itself will perish. In an imaginary scenario the scene at the restaurant plays out disastrously.
The actual event by an unfortunate coincidence takes place in the restaurant where Anya is a waitress. Krickstein and she flirt openly. Another copywriter ruins Adam's planned presentation and the appearance of another man reveals the true purpose of the meeting. The stranger is a motivationalist and the copywriters are there to listen to him. While he spouts the typical nonsense Adam assesses his own position. It is obvious to him that the others are doing piecework for Krickstein at sweatshop wages. He is the only salaried copywriter and survives only because Krickstein has never paid any attention to him. He leaves without confronting Krickstein over Lucky Wander Boy. He writes an entry for his Catalogue to describe the game Frogger. Between the lines he expresses his sense of defeat and helplessness.
Anya leaves him and as a farewell gift she destroys his game-playing emulator and all the games that he had collected. In her farewell note she says that she did this for his own good.
Weaving in and out of the novel have been references to Leng Tch'e, an obscure novel with a brutal theme treated with reticence and formality. It had been the subject of Adam's unfinished thesis and some of its details have cropped up in - of all places - video games, perhaps not surprising when one considers that most video games came fro the same country as the novel, Japan. Adam, less distressed by Anya's vandalism than by the difficulties in restoring what she has destroyed, visits a video store for distraction from his problem. There he finds a movie based on Leng Tch'e and takes it home. Under its influence he experiences a surge of recognition, a fearlessness that echoes in a more meaningful way the spoutings of the motivationalist. He acquires gaming machines and cassettes instead of replacing the lost material on his computer.
The result of the new clarity of perception, based on something very like a hallucination, appears a regression. With his newly acquired games he begins playing one after the other in a ritual designed to invoke a magical result. Clio rescues him from this with an offer of action in the real world.
She takes him on a long ride without explanation. At a small and very tacky convention of gamers they meet a man of Japanese ancestry who takes them to a site overlooking a parking lot. Beneath the parking lot are buried Atari cartridges. Tetsu, their guide, knew and worked for Itachi. He, in fact, reached the legendary Stage III of Lucky Wander Boy. And Stage III is as fantastic as Adam had supposed. Under the influence of Tetsu's revelations and the stress of working at Portal where Krickstein has been on a rampage of firing employees, Adam begins to hear and to accept as real the voice of his dead grandmother.
Normally I dislike reviews that avoid spoilers but with this novel I think that the first time reader is entitled to his or her own discoveries. The effect of many of the final pages recalls the harrowing end of Day of the Locust and the very final pages the cold agonies of Stanislaus Lem at his best. D. B. Weiss has written an exciting book. He has successfully kept complexity in play throughout. Many individual expressions are deftly turned and the entirety of the book remains fresh and arresting from beginning to end.
For more information visit:
Lucky Wander Boy
About the Reviewer: Bob Williams is retired and lives in a small town with his wife, dogs and a cat. He has been collecting books all his life, and has done freelance writing, mostly on classical music. His principal interests are James Joyce, Jane Austen and Homer. His writings, two books and a number of short articles on Joyce, can be accessed at:
http://fracman.home.mchsi.com/
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