It's easy to be smug in hindsight. The dot.com bubble already seems as silly as tulip mania 400 years ago. Who were those foolish Amsterdamers trading entire estates for a single bulb? Imagine investing millions to sell groceries over the Web and send them through the mail! Does anyone know how much a 10-pound bag of potatoes weighs?As Yale University economist Robert Shiller writes, in Irrational Exuberance, "Human nature continues to be the way it has always been and probably always will be: People always feel that innovation has somehow changed the equation."A new novel by Jonathan Raban calculates the radius of the Internet bubble with the cool eye of an investor who can spot real value. Raban wrote a perceptive travel book in 1999 called Passage to Juneau, and he demonstrates that same sharp eye for the spirit of place again in this novel, his first in 18 years.Waxwings, the first of three novels to be set in the Pacific Northwest, opens as the millennium closes. Wall Street is throwing ticker tape, but the real pixie dust is coming from the other coast. In cloudy Seattle, under the glorious sunlight of Microsoft, a thousand e-tulips bloom. Internet millionaires bid the city's real estate into the stratosphere. Mercedes crowd parking lots. Bathrooms are tiled with stone cut in Zambia.Seattle in 1999 is a presatirized, virtual setting, and it's a testament to Raban's control that he can integrate personal and public catastrophes so deftly in this witty novel.Tom Janeway is a creative-writing professor living in the fog of his own self-absorbed domestic bliss. He spends his days reading novels and thinking up clever things to say in a weekly column. He adores his 5-year-old son and his wife, Beth, who works at a barely plausible Internet start-up called GetaShack.com. A Hungarian-born Englishman, Tom can hardly fathom his good fortune in this lush land of opportunity.He's living the ideal that draws a desperate man named Chick all the way from China hidden in a container ship, a voyage described in all its horror. While Tom sails along lost in reverie, spinning phrases into money, Chick arrives near death, without a word of English, but with a keen eye for observation.Over the course of the novel, these two immigrants ride the waves of a city in flux. Riots break out at the World Trade Organization meeting, children disappear, airplanes fall from the sky, terrorists sneak into the port, and Y2K is about to destroy every electronic device in the world.Boring his students with passages from Victorian novels or jotting droll commentaries for All Things Considered, Tom fails to notice that his son is spinning out of control or that his wife is drifting out of love. "He was incorrigibly innocent," Beth thinks, "utterly thoughtless in his bookish self-absorption, believing himself observant because he could observe things in novels." Even though she's busy accumulating stock options and losing herself on a scheme to design virtual neighborhoods, she finds Tom's abstraction from the world unbearable. What's worse, he only comes out of the clouds to make ironic quips about her work and colleagues.Obviously Raban identifies with this fellow Englishman, but when Beth announces that she can't endure their marriage any longer, Raban has Tom on the end of a pin. Exhibit A: The pompous nice guy caught completely unawares by his wife's smoldering dissatisfaction. During Tom's dissection, you can hear divorced women everywhere muttering and newly single men whimpering.Once Tom's life starts downhill, it picks up speed along a path of disastrous coincidences, wheels greased by Tom's obliviousness. Chick, meanwhile, keeps crawling up the labor ladder, scurrying away from the INS and the extortionists who provided him with illegal transportation. Soon, he moves from toiling alongside Mexican workers to managing them.These two very different stories finally intersect when Chick offers to fix Tom's roof. For a moment, the two immigrants — one concocting a useable identify, the other losing his — are weirdly equalized, huddling over TV dinners for a bleak Christmas meal. There's an unnerving symmetry here in the way Chick awakens to the American dream, while Tom descends into a nightmare of domestic and legal terrors.If tackling the giant social novels of Jonathan Franzen or Tom Wolfe makes you wish for a book that isn't quite so full, Waxwings may be just the corrective you're after. Raban captures this exuberant era with striking efficiency. He prods us to consider that we're living in a period that makes us all somehow foreigners, desperate for residency.Originally published in The Christian Science Monitor.
I wasn't sure whether to class it as American or British fiction, but settled on American. While Raban writes within the British tradition, this was written in American, and is very much a novel of America... more specifically, my lovely adopted city of Seattle. I'd never read a novel set predominantly in Seattle before, and Raban writes about it almost rhapsodically, treating it with a reverence and sweetheartedness, even when he's describing the vacuous, emotionally hollow lives of its techies. Hey, I'm a vacuous, emotionally hollow wage slave at a start-up in Seattle! Woooo!!!!While his characters are wonderfully sketched, I can't say I'm terribly enamored of his writing by and large. He's a fantastic travel writer, but his witty, journalistic, descriptive tone doesn't translate all that well to the novel form. His exposition was chunky, almost stagey. The dust jacket compared him to Tom Wolfe, and in this sense, they're right, and that's not a compliment. However, I'm much more OK with Raban salivating over his own words than Tom Wolfe. When all is said and done, I enjoyed reading it, but I'm afraid that's largely because it's set in my world. Even so, it's a fun read. I can safely call it a great accompaniment to the beach... especially if that beach happens to be Golden Gardens, Mathews, Madison, or Alki.
Do You like book Waxwings (2004)?
This was the first time I've read anything by Raban and on the basis of this book I will be going back for more - and better prepared this time!There are no spoilers here, don't worry, but the book - especially its blurb - wrongfooted me. By a third of the way through I was sure I was heading for the dark heart of Seattle so when it ends on a relatively upbeat note (all the major characters get something of what they want, if not all of it) I was really rather surprised.Raban writes with verve and a love of words that gives a lot of his work a manic energy reminiscent of Michael Moorcock's Mother London, he likes to play with words and that is sometimes a little intrusive, but his love for his characters and his ability to fillet a city in the boom years and lay out the hidden mechanisms stops it being a pain.His Chinese character resonated with entrepreneurs I met in Beijing a few years ago and the dissolution of the marriage between his protagonist Tom and wife Beth is neatly delineated. Their son, Finn, is an interesting character who seems to be heading for darkness too but is redeemed by that most venerable of discoveries, the love of a good (or at least sometimes good) puppy!I did enjoy this novel, would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been misled by the jacket notes, and I really liked the energy and enthusiasm of the material which is a fantastic contrast to the morose cynicism of many contemporary writers. I think it's given me a yen to visit Seattle, so definitely Raban has worked some magic on me.
—Kay
A meandering collection of Seattle characters through most of it, tightening around Tom (a writer bearing some resemblance to the author) toward the end, but with a surprisingly meaningful and succinct ending that sneaks up on you. As a Seattleite who moved here just after the tech bubble burst, the descriptions of life here just before (the WTO riots, etc) are enlightening, though many small tells sprinkled throughout the book tell me that the author is not quite as up on the local lingo as a native or someone in the tech world would be. Still, enjoyable, and worth the read.
—Julia
Having recently moved to the Pacific Northwest, one way I'm learning about my new surroundings is through literature. Waxwings is a joyful and painful book that tells the tale of one moment in Seattle's recent history. Jonathan Raban moved from England to settle in Seattle, and his description of the dot-com boom and the perspective of two immigrants is fascinating. The flawed characters and the details about Seattle's neighborhoods are very real, and the interwoven elements of the plot and relationships among the characters are hilarious.
—Wendy Feltham
