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The Bug
In fact, The Jester seems to have an impish intelligence of its own, laying dormant for weeks somewhere deep in the libraries of the company's ground-breakingly new GUI front end. When it does surface, it's usually during a sales presentation, causing a complete system failure: garbage on the screen, frozen keyboard. It's enough to frighten any and every potential customer. For a start-up still living on venture capital funding, this is a bad thing.
As if the stakes weren't high enough, our hero, Ethan, isn't exactly a well-rounded Renaissance Man. He has a single friend at the office, and they barely talk. Otherwise, Ethan is irritable, distant, and often loses himself in his own logic-gated thoughts. He suffers moments of mild panic where he doubts his own competency and frets over not having an advanced degree. Plus, his fellow coders are a petty, snide-commenting bunch; meetings degrade into profanity-laden shouting matches, passing the blame, etc, all of which spurs Ethan to work harder. He autopilots through dinner while reading a Unix manual, works from home, and falls asleep in his clothes.
None of this leaves room for Ethan's girlfriend, Joanna. At the story's beginning, she goes to India for a month with her male friend Paul. Ethan can't go, citing the importance of his work. Paul's wife can't go either. We see where that's heading.
Ethan's life begins to unravel. He associates his personal problems with The Jester. Once that damn bug's squashed, he tells himself, the rest of his life will stabilize into some happier space.
The story's narrator is Roberta, who speaks to us from the early 2000s, remembering her job as the QA tester who worked most closely with Ethan. Roberta does have an advanced degree, in linguistics, but jobs in academia are scarce, and what else do you do with a degree in linguistics? At first, Roberta dismisses the programmers as a gruff, dismissive pack of dorks, just as they dismiss her because she can't code. A frosty wall separates the two sides of the product development team: those who write the bugs, and those who find them. In her evenings, Roberta composes poetry and suffers her own anxiety over abandoning a higher education for a plain job in IT.
Eventually, though, Roberta learns to program in C, and that's where The Bug shines brightest, touching on some sparkling insights: the nature of life, the nature of time, the cold beauty of code, and ourselves, living side-by-side with computers that are not, alas, alive. Stuff that will stick with you.
However...
I was disappointed with the book's end. If you program for a living (as I do), you will see parts of yourself in Ethan. But hopefully, you aren't Ethan. Even if you have no friends, no girlfriend, nothing, you still might play video games or watch TV or something (read?). Ethan, it seems, makes no effort to find even brief happiness. His life is joyless. And that's probably why I didn't like the ending. The book builds so well, keeps a quick pace, with smart dialog, rich characters, suspense, and very high stakes: I felt the pay-off could have -- should have -- been much grander.
Ellen Ullman, who also wrote Close to the Machine, was a programmer in the 80s. I caught her interview on NPR, where she explained that Ethan's story and The Jester were very loosely based on her own pursuit of a bug while working at Sybase.
You'll probably enjoy The Bug, even if you don't like computers and write poetry for a living. It's adult fiction and feels contemporary without trying to be 'zany' or 'hypercharged.' It's not a funny book, but rather a calm, wise walk into unexplored story matter, with lots of interesting bits to think about.
You can purchase the The Bug from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I write code for a living (wow big surprise huh?) and I can be as anti-social as the next guy (or gal, hey they do exist) but there comes a point when you simply move on to something else, only to come back with a vengeance when your subconcious clues you into the nature of the problem. Also, the bug sounds more supernatural than realistic. Sure I haven't read the book but judging by the description I'd just as soon pass over it.
You can be an atheist and still not want to succumb to some weird cross-over sheep disease -- AC
Do not read this book. It is a plagiarism of
Moby DICK. They just replaced some of the names.
The Bug = The DICK,
Roberta = Ishmael,
Ethan = Cpt. Ahab.
Just like Tanya Grotter! Melville WILL sue!
It's difficult to review fiction well. The reviewer has to tread a delicate line between failing to give enough information to engage the reader, and giving too much information, so that the reader's experience may be spoiled to some degree. In this review, the error seemed to be on the side of too much information-- the stuff about the unsatisfying ending. The reviewer might have profitably left that stuff out, and based his thumbs-down on less revealing matters.
Still, in this case, the reviewer seems hampered by what appears to be a bad case of literary fiction. Or so it appears. If that's the case, then there's not much point in criticizing the book's plot, since in literary fiction, plot is usually secondary to other concerns. No professional reviewer would ever make the mistake of criticizing an attempted literary novel on the basis of the ending, since in such a work, the plot would be subordinate to character development or the artful use of prose.
Of course literary fiction is most often judged on whether or not the thematic content appeals to the reviewer (as it apparently did in this case). Which is why so many literary novels about the angst of academic life get glowing reviews. Yuck.
A book that I actually read.
The mood is dark, but not too cypherpunk. I can almost hear the florescent lights buzzing through the whole book. Very harsh and simplified.
The descriptions of the team meetings and the QA vs. DEV rants rival Dilbert's distopia.
Buy it for the few sex scenes, and watch out, the PHBs are in their too, not just the 'jester'.
Also, there net admin is so raw. Bring her on!
Antiquated competence won't be a job skill forever.
Why is everyone describing the bug this guy is tracking down and commenting on it as if it were a literal problem to be solved? In order to make the metaphor clearer, the reviewer would have to pound you over the head with CowboyNeil's inbox!! Let's examine the plot summary. A guy has an unsolvable problem that always embarasses him. Doesn't anyone else's metaphor detector go apeshit on this description? And I'm not an english major... And I've never read the book... It must be /.
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I don't think (from reading this book) that she's quite made the leap to writing fiction. The characters were wooden and stereotyped, the problems with "the code" overly dramatic and in the end sorta phony, and the plot was a stretch at best. She was trying to create a tension where none really exists naturally. (A Bug? Big deal, fix it. I do that 20 times a week or more.)
I hope she continues to work on her fiction, because given how talented she is at expository prose and given her deep understanding of the geek existence, she has real potential. (Close to the Machine was excellent!) But for now I would much rather read a writer who learns geek (c.f. Neal Stephenson, William Gibson) than a geek who learns to write fiction. YMMV.
Since my local bookstores do not have it in stock, I have not read it yet... (I broke down and ordered it on-line).
But I'll go out on a limb here and guess that The Bug is not just in the computer. Some of the characters are also trying to debug their personal lives. Sorry if that is off the mark or just too obvious. But some of the comments about "I don't need to read about work" might be missing the mark.
It is interesting to see someone documenting something where coding is close to what it's really like.
On the one hand, it sounds interesting because it is about a programmer, and I am a programmer, too. On the other hand, why would I want to take all of the awful things that I fret about every day, and have them fed to me in what is described as a humorless novel about someone who is the manifestation of all of my inner fears.
I am reminded of that scene in This Is Spinal Tap, where the band is standing around Elvis's grave. "Really puts things in perspective." "Yeah, too much! Too much f**king perspective!"
Yeh, it is dark. But I have known at least
a couple of Ethan Levins in my 20 years of professional programming experience. They're not common, but not uncommon either.
For anyone who actually wrote C back before automated heap checkers, extreme programming, web- and script-based development, and other joys of the modern programming life, this book rings disturbingly true.
I have recommended it to my mom and other folks who don't understand what I do for a living.
Not a web designer.
Long ago I worked on a system that leaked memory so badly that part of the main event loop was a timer that exited and restarted the program every six minutes.
Yech.
A workaholic with a joyless job, no friends who's life falls apart because of an inexplicable bug? Sounds like the Metamorphosis, Kafka's classic.
Yes! Good! The bug is borne of the coder; the bug would not exist without the coder, though the coder seeks to destroy the bug. Yet, we see that the bug defines the coder -- it gives him purpose, even identity. So, in a sense, he *is* the bug...coder creates bug creates coder. I wonder if, to defeat the bug, he becomes the bug, which he does by realizing that he already is the bug, because, uh, that stuff I already said. And in doing so, he destroys himself, but becomes the instrument of his own rebirth because the bug is replaced with new code. It's all very existential-y and Zen-y with a nice cyber-y Matrix-y angle to keep it current.
Anyway, I'm not sure what I just said, but I'm confident that there's an M.A. thesis in there somewhere if this book ever becomes recognized as literature by academia.
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