Saturday
Feb072009
Ecstasy Club reviewed by Randall Lyman for The Bay Guardian
Saturday, February 7, 2009 at 5:16PM 
A NOVEL IDEAOn not joining any club that would have you as a member
Ecstasy Club
By Douglas Rushkoff. HarperEdge, 256 pages, $17.50.
By Randall Lyman
FOR THOSE of you just joining this thread, we're talking about Douglas Rushkoff, one of the most controversial analysts of the complex media culture that has arisen since the birth of the World Wide Web. His first book of cultural criticism, Cyberia, sought to lead us civilians through "the trenches of hyperspace," where the battle for designer reality was being fought -- a battle involving computers and modems, role-playing games, psychedelic drugs, shamanism, raves, and experiential art. Next appeared Media Virus!, both more revolutionary and more sober-minded in its argument that the events and ideas that shape our culture are not merely like viruses, they are viruses that spread through the media and infect our minds just as biological viruses infect cells. Finally, last year's Playing the Future contended that if we grown-ups are to get along in this virtual new world, we need to abandon our stiff, outmoded thought patterns and learn to surf the cultural wavelengths the way kids do.
Not surprisingly, Rushkoff takes as much flak as flattery for his ideas. But now this advocate of nontraditional, nonlinear thinking has delved into one of the most traditional and linear thought forms there is -- the novel -- and the question naturally arises: If Rushkoff doesn't practice what he preaches, does that mean his ideas are just empty talk?
Perhaps to the most literal-minded. After all, the guy's a writer, and writing is a linear activity; no technology will ever change that. So he felt like writing a novel for a change. It's a novel about the clash of ideas. (FWIW, Rushkoff's ideas about media culture are fascinating, lucid, and grounded in a way that the ravings of a McLuhan could never approach.)
Ecstasy Club offers a new take on all the cerebrating, philosophizing, and hallucinating in Rushkoff's first three books. The first line of dialogue, "This is a great place for a party," grounds the novel in the house-music world Rushkoff explored in Cyberia, and in fact, many of the novel's key characters and events are lifted nearly intact from the earlier book. But while Cyberia suffers from its aura of boosterism for megalomaniacs on mushrooms and some not too credible use of poetic license, Ecstasy Club exercises that same license to drive a cynicism Rushkoff must have been repressing. Cyberia often frustrates because the author focuses so hard on finding the glorious otherworld that he often misses the obvious contradictions of the real world staring him in the face. Paradoxically, Ecstasy Club refreshes with its dose of reality -- as if by transcending the merely factual, Rushkoff could express something closer to the truth. Or maybe just to his true feelings.
At its most literal, the novel follows the harrowing adventures of a cultish group of disaffected young people and their mad British cybershaman leader, Duncan, who's trying to raise humans to a new evolutionary level by throwing themed dance parties in a large abandoned warehouse in Oakland. At its most metaphoric, the book is a descent into the increasingly paranoid surreality of an acid trip. Oscillating in between is the story of Zach Levi, the narrator, trusted Levite steward to Duncan's high priest, torn between loyalty to Duncan's otherworldly ideals and his own very this-worldly love for Duncan's girlfriend, Lauren. "I'd throw it all away to have a girl like you," he tells her, possibly the corniest yet easily the most sensible thing anyone says in the entire book. And ... she takes his hand! If Duncan were a communist, Zach would engineer his revolution and then be among the first ones purged, like Trotsky.
But that's not what happens. Zach and Lauren remain loyal to the cause, even as it becomes progressively harder to justify it to themselves. Yet their love for each other grows too, and it's those competing claims, of the material and nonmaterial (and possibly immaterial), that form the heart of the novel. Ecstasy Club reminds us of what the battle for cyberspace has done to our human priorities.
Ecstasy Club is a solid first novel but not a great one. Rushkoff's got the basic novelistic moves down, but he's not adroit yet. Zach, Duncan, and arguably Lauren are the only personae to emerge in three full dimensions, though the flatter "character parts" are still drawn vividly enough to be engaging. Too often Ecstasy Club made me feel as if I were still reading Rushkoff's other books, as if he hadn't broken free of their stylistic momentum.
For all that, however, Ecstasy Club comes off somehow better than the sum of its parts, borne by the force of its ideas, like the dramatic completion of a literary quartet that's three parts fact and one fiction. Modern times being what they are, it's the fiction that brings the rest down to earth, that makes it all seem real.
For Randall Lyman's interview with Douglas Rushkoff, see the Bay Guardian Web site, www.sfbg.com/Guides/lit35/index.html. --Randall Lyman is an editor at the Bay Guardian.
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