We're not good at reviews unless we can complain about
Hollywood producers not understanding what "ion propulsion" means, or
not knowing about the ambient temperature on Titan, the Saturn moon,
or/and so on.
So this is not a review but a post about the third chapter of
Dave Shafer's debut novel "Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot." We're jealous of the success of his book, of course, but that doesn't keep us from really loving the third chapter. The book is about a global conspiracy (data, computers, etc) but we have no clear idea of the conspiracy yet in Chapter III where we meet the main protagonist of the story,
Mark Devreaux. Mark graduated from
Harvard, like his ex-friend Leo, another important protagonist---amazing how many people graduate from Harvard in American novels (although Shafer graduated from Harvard himself, so he holds some poetic license).
|
Dave Shafer |
Mark is/was a copy writer at some internet upstart---amazing how low Harvard graduates can fall in American novels---but then he has a creative night with
OxyContin (the drug),
Pouilly-Fuissé (the chardonnay, usually overpriced in our opinion---
St. Veran, also a white Beaujolais, has a much better quality-price quotient) and with an
IBM selectric (that was/
is a typewriter, a technology not quite up to the tricks of ion-propulsion). So Mark pulls an all-nighter and writes a piece about "Motivation in an Unjust World." The piece is discovered by
James Shaw, the quasillionaire and godfather of the conspiracy we don't know of yet, so Mark is duly booked for
Margo!, a talk show hosted by Margo, the
Oprah Winfrey look-alike.