Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

I like Cory Doctorow's ideas. I also like the stories he spins from the raw material of his good ideas. It's his storytelling that I get a little hung up on.

In Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, there are a mountain's worth of great ideas wrapped up in a solid story. There's a washing machine mother, a brother who rises from the dead, a severed thumb that grows a body, a girl with wings, and free wifi... all wonderful things (none of which are elves and unicorns...). But the devil is in the details and a few of those details niggle at me here.

In Star Trek, Mr. Spock never turns to the camera to offer a 15-minute lecture on how transporters work and why they are good for free society. In this book, we spend too much time in geeked-out explanations of how to blanket a city with free wifi and why it's the Right Thing To Do. Even as a full-fledged nerd I was a little put off by the lectures coming from all over the place; a telecom employee, a reporter, etc.

And then there are the relationships. This is the same issue I found in the wonderful novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- the characters taken singly are interesting and multi-dimensional, but the relationships just aren't believeable. I don't feel an emotional connection between people. I read the words that say they care for each other, but I just ain't feelin' it.

As far as the nuts and bolts of the story, there are a few little gimmicks that could be more than just clever tricks if we only knew why they existed. For example, the names of the main character and his family morph constantly within a set of rules that help the reader follow the changes. The eldest son is always called a name starting with "A," the second son's name always begins with "B," and so on. The name changes are not too jarring, but we never know why. Is it a fit of authorial pique or something about the nature of the characters?

Again on the name front, early in the book Alan meets a neighbor whom he calls Mimi as a joke. Her roomie starts to correct Alan, but Mimi stops him and says,"Mimi is as good a name as any." But it's not hers, and we never get to know her real name. Is that important? It's hard to tell, since we never get into the nature of Mimi and why she's a winged creature like a bird, bat, or angel.

Then something happens to the writing about halfway through the book. I'm having trouble putting my finger on it, but the storytelling changes. I had to re-read a few pages to ensure I hadn't missed something. We're knee-deep into a critical part of the story, then we suddenly shift to another time and place. The rest of the book jumps around and we never quite settle back into one coherent story.

It feels as if this book is the first half of a longer novel. We're tantalized with an elaborate alterworld that lives alongside our own mundane existence. I was eager to explore that world and learn even a little bit more about it's nature, but we never quite get in the door. The final "journey to the mountain" near the end of the book had the feel of an elaborate resolution to come -- I was braced and ready for at least some sort of peek at an answer -- but none ever arrived.

It was as if my parents piled all four kids in the car, loaded up with luggage, smiled with a gleam in their eye and said, "We're going somewhere fun today!" then drove cross-country for nine hours and ended up at a ShopRite in a different town.

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