Transmission

Transmission is the story of the havoc wreaked on society by a computer virus named Leela, named after a fictional Bollywood star named Leela Zahir. At its center is a young Indian computer programmer, Arjun Mehta, who releases the virus when his tenuous, exploitative job with a Silicon Valley antivirus company comes under threat. Kunzru interweaves this main story with several other threads: the rise and fall of Guy Swift, a British new-money entrepreneur who runs a company called Tomorrow*, which seems to specialize in marketing empty rhetoric to various multinational businesses; the career of Gabriella Caro, Guy's girlfriend, who works as a public relations manager and suffers from her family's old money; and briefly, Leela Zahir herself, who has been thrust into the world of show-business by her pushy mother.Kunzru has a brilliant eye for satire. Guy Swift's proposal, for instance, that Europe be rebranded as a sort of "VIP zone" for elites in the same way that certain nightclubs market themselves toward the rich and the famous is comedy gold, especially given what happens to him later in the novel. The only problem, in my opinion, is that most readers are a little too used to having their hands held: that is, they often want authors to reveal the satirical facade, just for a moment, to drop a wink after delivering a piece of searing irony so as to say "hey, it's just satire, I'm only kidding." What I admire about Kunzru is that he doesn't do this, and so those who don't get joke, well, they miss out. It's a daring strategy, one that, as a quick perusal of the academic criticism about Kunzru's novels suggests, leads to some overly literal interpretations of his work.The main shortcoming I found in Transmission was that Kunzru struggled to find a consistent range for his considerable comedic talents. A deliberately flat character like Guy Swift, for example, seems better designed for a much broader kind of comedy than was on offer. Mostly, I think this problem had to do with how Kunzru deals with social class, since the grand conceits of those in charge generally make them a perfect target for the kind of humorous poetic justice which is conferred on characters like Swift or Darryl Gant, Arjun's passive-aggressive boss at Virugenix. The strategy works less well when it comes to the more difficult aspects of society, for disillusionment, poverty, and exploitation are much harder to laugh at from the bottom up.Kunzru usually manages to address such issues without seeming preachy, but it does make it seem as though the novel proceeds at two different speeds that don't quite gel with each other. Thus, there is the touching story of Arjun, who seems like a kind of holy fool, on the one hand, on whom is conferred a mixture of innocent sincerity and frustrated pathos, and on the other hand, the broad satire of the delusional Guy Swift, who could easily have wandered out of the pages of a Martin Amis story. The result is an entertaining but uneven novel, one in which the various threads are tied together competently but a little too glibly for my taste.

I bought a used copy of Transmission because I was thinking of buying Hari Kunzru's  Gods Without Men  and I wanted to see what sort of writer Mr. Kunzru is. The answer is: he's OK, but not great. After I finished the book (which was in excellent condition) I gave it to the library for resale, since I'm not going to read it again.The major problem with Transmission, and the reason that I could not give it a better review was plotting. Transmission is one of those novels where characters that seemingly have no connection are separate plot threads. Usually the author brings the threads together as the characters unexpectedly intersect each other's lives. The intersection in Transmission is tangential at best. There is a weak attempt to pull the threads together, but it's tenuous at best. What partially saves the novel is that the characters are interesting, but Kunzru could have written of those novels made up of separated stories, since there is so little real connection between the characters.Reading Transmission I was prompted to think about the use of stereotype in novels (and life). Stereotype is a shorthand. If you describe someone as a "surfer dude" or as a "computer nerd" that paints a partial picture. Kunzru does this, but creating broad brush characters from stereotypes. There's the vacuous "high concept" marketing guy, there's the beautiful rich girl, the Indian software engineer and the tattooed Girl Computer Nerd. To Kunzru's credit the characters all have personality, but they start out as an archetype that he fleshes out.Kunzru is a good writer and he certainly does his research. If it were not for the weakness in plotting, the book would have been much more successful. A novel with some similar themes, but with stronger characters and plotting is  Big If: A Novel , by Mark Costello.

I very much enjoyed Hari Kunzru's more recent books, so I picked up Transmission not knowing at all what it was about. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that its main character was a Non-Resident Indian (NRI) named Arjun who comes from Noida in NCR, India. (All while reading this book while I was sitting in Delhi!). The book is about a young man named Arjun who is a techie in India and signs up with a shady recruiting firm and gets placed into a job in the US that doesn't quite work out. He is out of work and despondent down to his last few dollars and then gets called to work at a security firm in Redmond, WA--very close to Microsoft. He starts work and befriends an alternative-looking and acting girl named Chris who introduces him to many aspects of "free" America including teaching him how to drive. When his company falls on tough times, he is laid off and as a result will be deported back to India. In an last ditch effort to stay, he unleashes a massive virus on the world named for a famous Pakistani actress. I found to be the book quite exciting and quick moving. Kunzru does his typical good work developing the various main and side-show characters including a super interesting and devoid of intelligence marketing consultant. I highly recommend the book to Kunzru readers and to anyone up for a solid well-written read.

I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting from this book. Maybe more of a counter-culture feel? It was there, but it was subtle and not what I thought I'd be getting when I bought the book. There are separate stories that eventually end up intertwined, but it takes longer than I thought, and they didn't interact with each other as much as I expected. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. The characters were real and well-developed. The story was interesting and realistic.

The first 60 pages of thi book are the funniest I've ever read. For computer and Silicon Valley literates especially. After tha the author gets over his head is attempting characters and areas he does not really know.