So Yesterday, by Scott Westerfeld
After reading Westerfeld’s previous trilogy, I decided to check out his most recent offering. It is a hip and oh-so-modern coming of age story following the “boy meets girl, boy admires girls pluck, boy decides to become member of adbusters” genre that is sweeping the young adult market these days.
Hunter Braque is 17, lives in New York, and already has a job pulling down big bucks and product samples as a “cool hunter.” He spots trends on the cusp of their creation developed by “Innovators”, which he then sends to corporate marketing entities to be focus-grouped, demographically analyzed and eventually incorporated into next weeks commercial offerings.
His life and world view change when he meets Jen, a young girl who can’t not be an innovator. Hunter breaks the first rule when he gets involved with Jen, who drags him often kicking and sometimes screaming into an adventure about New York’s marketing world, Culture Jamming, and a really nice pair of shoes.
Media Literacy is what this book is about. Teenagers in America are the most media-inundated population ever to exist, and it is a sea they swim in effortlessly. Radio, TV, IM, Cell phones, Myspace, txting, billboards, graffiti, magazines, videogames- Modern young adults will look at all of these nearly every day, and almost every time they will also be served a dose of advertising. They view it with a jaded, experienced eye, holding it to standards that other times and even other countries couldn’t imagine. Not that this renders them immune, of course, but they do demand impossibly high production standards to be catered to.
Modern corporate marketing and youth culture go hand in hand. Both want, desperately, to be taken seriously. Homogeneity and “fitting in” are the only thing more important than “being yourself” and finding an identity. (Or is that the other way around?) So Yesterday captures that parallel very well, painting a picture of media savvy people easily dealing with technology as an enabling mechanism, but stumbling on the question of “Enabling for what?”
The book’s ending is the letdown, as neither Hunter nor Jen can clearly articulate what they want to do next. Maybe that is supposed to be emblematic of their lack of experience, or simply a matter of not wanting to delve past the superficiality of the subject matter, I don’t know. I expect that when the inevitable movie deal rolls around, the ending will be more satisfying.
Sum up:
I liked it.
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:55 pm
This book is confusing!! Why is it about shoes???!!! It makes no sense. Why couldn’t it be about something interesting like watching grass grow!! Come on people when will people figure out what real entertainment is???!!
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January 23rd, 2008 at 12:01 am
I think that the shoes are essentially a Macguffin- an element that is simply there to be chased after. The shoes could have been anything from the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, to the trade secret formula of Coke.
I’ve heard that there are people in this world that make all sorts of judgments about you based on the shoes you wear. I am not one of those people, so I can’t speak to it. But it may be that there are people to whom the idea of The Coolest Shoes in the World is a powerful and intoxicating idea.
I’m curious which parts you found confusing. Was it the way the book ended?