Oligarchy

Mallory Towers for our late capitalist age. It's bleak, full of disconnection and isolation. Characters are distanced from their families, refuse to speak the same language as others, sneer at other social classes. Everyone in the book seems to have an emptiness at their core, a void that they try to fill with social media and consumerist aspiration, neither of which work. If Thomas' earlier work, like PopCo, was a sally against corporate rule of our lives and a hurrah for sticking it to the Man, this one seems to be an admission of defeat, a surrender of power and slipping down into helpless acquiescence. It's a depressing book but a strangely readable one (and as a parent of a twelve year old girl, it's frankly terrifying).