{"id":161,"date":"2003-08-24T23:56:20","date_gmt":"2003-08-25T03:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=161"},"modified":"2003-08-24T23:56:20","modified_gmt":"2003-08-25T03:56:20","slug":"lucky-wander-boy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=161","title":{"rendered":"Lucky Wander Boy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lucky Wander Boy<\/em><\/a>, by D. B. Weiss<\/a>, is a smart, funny, and ultimately poignant novel about love and illusion, creativity and commerce, and video game addiction. The twenty-something narrator is obsessed with the (now obsolete) video games of his youth; these games are not only the focus of his passion, but provide a mythical template for his life. The novel itself plays with this as a metafictional conceit, in a way that is totally compelling (rather than, as it could easily have been, corny): the video game as the codification of dream logic, or of the desires, or better, the self-deceptive fantasies, that animate us. Along the way, we get – among other things – disquisitions on the Gnostic subtext of Donkey Kong, the best definition I have ever seen of what it means to be a geek (“A geek is a person, male or female, with an abiding, obsessive, self-effacing, even self-destroying love for something besides status”; which is true – I should know – although the most painful part of it is that this configuration does not exclude, but is indeed usually coterminous with, narcissistic self-absorption, such as the narrator exhibits throughout); and a great satiric account of the dot-com boom and bust. This is a novel that remains light on its feet, even as it goes ever further out on a limb that it keeps on sawing off behind itself (a strained metaphor, I admit, but a good account of the book’s actual accomplishment; and if it sounds too much like a back-of-the-book blurb, so be it; the inextricability of commerce and commercial promotion from our innermost fantasies is something that this book doesn’t insist on, so much as it simply takes it for granted as an aspect of The Way We Live Now).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lucky Wander Boy<\/em><\/a>, by D. B. Weiss<\/a>, is a smart, funny, and ultimately poignant novel about love and illusion, creativity and commerce, and video game addiction. The twenty-something narrator is obsessed with the (now obsolete) video games of his youth; these games are not only the focus of his passion, but provide a mythical template for his life. The novel itself plays with this as a metafictional conceit, in a way that is totally compelling (rather than, as it could easily have been, corny): the video game as the codification of dream logic, or of the desires, or better, the self-deceptive fantasies, that animate us. Along the way, we get – among other things – disquisitions on the Gnostic subtext of Donkey Kong, the best definition I have ever seen of what it means to be a geek (“A geek is a person, male or female, with an abiding, obsessive, self-effacing, even self-destroying love for something besides status”; which is true – I should know – although the most painful part of it is that this configuration does not exclude, but is indeed usually coterminous with, narcissistic self-absorption, such as the narrator exhibits throughout); and a great satiric account of the dot-com boom and bust. This is a novel that remains light on its feet, even as it goes ever further out on a limb that it keeps on sawing off behind itself (a strained metaphor, I admit, but a good account of the book’s actual accomplishment; and if it sounds too much like a back-of-the-book blurb, so be it; the inextricability of commerce and commercial promotion from our innermost fantasies is something that this book doesn’t insist on, so much as it simply takes it for granted as an aspect of The Way We Live Now).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}