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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.
God I'm such an amazon whore. Flame away.
hooray! it's a sex wiki