Oh, Jennifer! or The Girl
With The Bar Code Tattoo

Jennifer Government (Doubleday $19.95), birthed by the same Max(x) Barry who not long ago delivered a delirious take on the marketeering behind the launch of a soda called Fukk (sic), is an infinitely diggable creation. Put La Femme Nikita into a corporate War of the Worlds and run the juxtapose on a lotta Leonard-like fast talk and you come close to its genesis. Make it a mockery and you begin to see its revelation: a Grave New Globe of impending misorder.

Jennifer GovernmentSnap ahead a few minutes the Government's a taxless contract player, the Police have been privatized, NRA Ltd. is a publicly-traded army-for-hire, and two competing consumer loyalty programs - Team Advantage and US Alliance - run what's become of the free world (that is, the U.S. and the Territories of Britain, Australia, et al). Call it a bully market free-for-all.

Or is it? A gecko-dwarfing John Nike would like to make freedom ring for all that is he and he alone; conversely, so would his adversary, cut-throat corporate chieftain Nathaniel ExxonMobil. In Barryspeak people take the name of their employer - no job, no name. Combined the two make the bad folks at Enron look like goodwill monkeys working a charity circuit, which means - yes - they're the very bad guys. To make badness worse, Nike's got the NRA watching his hairy back and doin' his down-and-dirty work; Nat's got the Police. In their way they have only each other.

And of course a wicked good chick named Jennifer Government. A Malibu Barbie (dig the bar code tattoo) cum Melbourne Mommy, now-Agent Jen's got a marketing beef as raw as the markets she used to exploit. Somewhere, somehow, this dame was wronged; now she's determined to do right. Thrice. Despite the sad fact that Jennifer's government doesn't have the budget to do much of anything.

A kid-killing Nike Mercury campaign ("it redefines edgy") kicks off the carnage, and earns John bones enough to get in on the diabolical deeds needed for Shell's hostile takeover of ExxonMobil. ExMo, of course, is not a company for capitulation, nor are they averse to some strong-arm sabotage and subterfuge overturning the tables. When the guns hit the greed - and they indeed hit the greed, hard - it's with enough force to floor trading, get the president killed and galvanize the heretofore ho-hum government, alas, only into inaction. For when the threadbare troops do at last respond, it's headfirst into a well-armed wall of privatization. The rest is all divinely-inspired love, blood, bullets and bomb blasts.

Actually as a skewed and acute critique of capitalizm (Barry's term), this cat's-eye-view packs enough action-packed punch to make Hollywood heroes of concepts previously charted - and now fully twisted - by the Orwells and Huxleys and Tofflers and Gibsons of yore. (Always hunting hot, Soderbergh & Clooney have already optioned Jennifer Government for their Section 8.) But as much as Barry couldn't exist without the aforementioned fearless foursome (never mind Burroughs & Ballard & Dick & Coupland & Self & many worthy others), this is no mere treatise of regurgitated futurism, cyberpunk or otherwise. It is though a terrifically jaunty slap at the better living we might soon be meant to endure.

Mention should be made of the befuddled "reviewer" who accused the young and gifted Aussie word slinger of a "lack of written depth;" a hack who presumably would prefer a map to the navel. First - despite "me" memoirs to the contrary - not everyone needs to navel-gaze to go deep; nor does every navel-gazer possess depth. Further, whatever happened to reading between the lines? Might not actions as well as words reveal a character? Or perhaps this intrepid do-nothing is too stuck to know that what you do is who you are.

Ahem.

In Jennifer Government, the increasingly-sleek - now single "x" - Max Barry strings a high tension wire walk over a vertiginous precipice of unexpected consequences. That he delivers his precautionary tale with a lotta razzmatazz and rat-a-tat-tat should be applauded not derided. Barry's got in him a snap and a crackle few pop novelists can muster, let alone match. And he cooks up some fine hot-buttered popcorn for the soul. My advice: read him and reap uproariously.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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