“Mathralon” is a somewhat unusual story. I’ve been tinkering with it for a year or two, off and on, and the idea’s been in my head for much longer. But though I was convinced I had a fabulous idea, I couldn’t quite figure out the way I wanted to get it across. The characters of my early drafts were all plasticy, the action was formulaic, and the dialog trite.

So I decided: hey, if the plot, the characters, and the dialog are giving me such fits, why don’t I just take them out?

Sounds like “Mathralon” is something of a one-trick story, but there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s something of an epistemological think-piece, a meditation on the nature of work and why we do it. It’s a spotlight shone on the dark places of an otherwise well-oiled economic machine. It’s a protest against subjugating one’s self to one’s job. And it got a really kick-ass reaction from the crowd at the KGB Bar when I read it there last year.

If you want to hear me read it, come to Dining Room A in the James Madison Building at the Library of Congress this Thursday, February 21 at 12:10 pm. The building’s located at 101 Independence Ave, SE in downtown Washington, DC. The title of the reading is “Capitalists at Warp Speed,” a title that I’m really sorry to say I came up with.

I’m unclear how long the reading’s supposed to go for, but I’m also planning on bringing along the first two chapters of my upcoming novel MultiReal to read as well. And after the reading’s done, there will be autographed copies of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two and my first novel Infoquake for sale.

For those of you not blessed enough to live in the Washington, DC area, go to Amazon and order the book. Or you can wait a few days until after I post “Mathralon” onto my website, read it, and then go order the book. Either way, you know you’re going to buy it. There are original stories there by Peter Watts, Michael Moorcock, Karl Schroeder, Mary Robinette Kowal, Chris Roberson, Eric Brown, Kay Kenyon, Neal Asher, Paul Di Filippo, and more. It’s cheap. It’s fabulous. How much more convincing do you need?

Those of you in DC, hope to see you at the Library of Congress!

Disregard that old phrase about how you can’t judge a book by its cover when you read Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs. The 33-year-old Canadian’s novels are so accurately conveyed by their packaging that sometimes I wonder whether Coupland’s just hacking out text under the whip of a nefarious cabal of publishing art directors. This would, of course, involve a cross-corporation conspiracy between St. Martin’s Press, Simon & Schuster and publishing magnate Judith Regan (who has brought us, among others, Beavis & Butt-Head’s Ensucklopedia and Robin Quivers’ bio). But that doesn’t hurt my theory a bit.

Take 1991′s Generation X, for example. In order to appeal to a new generation that’s a notoriously bad market for books, the publishers printed Coupland’s debut novel in a large, unconventional size that juts a few inches beyond just about every trade hardback in existence. The story, too, is loud and filled with large pronouncements about the status of a generation and padded with flip pop culture references.

Then there’s last year’s Life After God, small and unassuming in size with a swimming baby adorning the front cover. True to form, the eight modest stories inside are brief and consciously childlike in their directness. Life After God is a vacation from Coupland-as-usual — less sarcasm, less name-dropping, less stylish than either Gen X or its 1992 follow-up, Shampoo Planet.

So where does that leave us with Coupland’s new novel Microserfs? Well, it’s flashy and glaring and bright like its tinfoilish cover. It’s populated with too-quirky-for-their-own-good characters like the hip twentysomething Lego businessman in the bottom right corner of the book jacket. And, with a few exceptions, it’s as thin as the compressed bible paper it’s printed on.

The narrator of Microserfs, one Daniel Underwood, is a software bug checker at Microsoft who types out his story in the form of journal entries on his Apple Powerbook. He works long nights for little pay or prestige, chats incessantly with his buddies via e-mail, and plays parent to his aging Boomer parents. (Dad has recently been laid off after a score of productive working years at Big Blue.)

Then Daniel and half-a-dozen or so of his fellow Microserfs strike out on their own for new territory. They form a company called Interiority and begin designing its flagship product: a virtual Lego block tool they call “Oop!” Steering through the obstacle course of venture capitalists and Las Vegas trade shows and programming glitches, the Oop!ers spend the remainder of the novel discussing television, coming out of the closet, starting and ending romances, and behaving in those stereotypical ways you see Generation Xers behaving on MTV and Zima commercials.

Coupland goes a long way toward redeeming Microserfs in his last chapter, when his characters finally stop talking so much about the computer revolution and start showing us what it’s all about. The book’s last few pages in particular reveal a surprisingly touching vision of cyber reality where the boundaries between human and machine have become suddenly nonexistent. It feels like a larger metaphor has just snapped into place for the plodding 250 pages that preceded.

Well, maybe Coupland doesn’t deserve so much cynicism. You can open just about any page at random and find a nice, pithy slogan for our culture as it heads to the next millennium. Like this one, which I’ve picked at random: “The modern economy isn’t about the redistribution of wealth — it’s about the redistribution of time.” Or this one: “What if machines do have a subconscious of their own? What if machines right now are like human babies, which have brains but no way of expressing themselves except screaming (crashing)?”

But a novel is not a 365-Days-a-Year desk calendar, and you can’t help but wonder after a while if Coupland had a master plan or scheme for his book, or if he just wrote the thing in one protracted burst of energy. Or if he’s in cahoots with the art department to come up with marketing profiles for Generation X to be sold to MTV, Zima, and the Rollerblade Company.

Sounds plausible to me: a TV show for Microserfs is already on the way.

World War II bombardier John Yossarian wants to know if he can be exempt from flying any more missions because he’s insane. Of course, comes the reply, but in order to be declared insane you have to consult a doctor, and only someone of compos mentis would consult a doctor.

Catch-22.

Here’s another one: an aging novelist wants to end his career with a novel as brilliant and innovative as his first. But the only way he can be truly original is by pirating from the first book, which makes him just another has-been stuck in a slump.

Sadly enough, that’s the predicament novelist Joseph Heller has written himself into with his new novel, Closing Time, which publisher Simon & Schuster is billing as the sequel to his groundbreaking 1961 work Catch-22. A sprawling domestic satire that tracks down Catch protagonist John Yossarian fifty years later, Closing Time pales not only in comparison to the rest of the Heller oeuvre, but to many of his imitators’ works as well.

The Yossarian we meet in Closing Time has decided, after a lifetime of lifeless copy writing and advertising jobs, to throw ethics to the wind and help old World War II cohort Milo Minderbinder sell his M & M E & A Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive Second-Strike Offensive Attack Bomber to the government. Yossarian quells his ethical dilemmas by reasoning that a) Milo won’t actually build the bomber once he’s got the money for it, b) Yossarian will probably be dead before the first plane makes it off the assembly line, and c) Milo’s paying him good money.

Yossarian only moonlights as a war profiteer, however. He’s also in charge of planning the most expensive, wasteful wedding ever to grace the Big Apple, and he’s decided to stage it at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. With an exorbitant million-dollar wedding cake and a cast of actors playing the various prostitutes, thugs, and drug pushers that normally inhabit the terminal, the wedding gives Heller ample opportunity to display his trademark venom at the absurdities of twentieth-century life.

Unfortunately, Heller chose to mix the narratives of two additional protagonists with the further adventures of John Yossarian. These chapters devoted to fellow septuagenarians Sammy Singer and Lew Rabinowitz move by at a snail’s pace, filled mostly with tedious reminiscences about the heyday of Coney Island and whining Andy Rooneyesque diatribes about the state of today’s youth.

Heller’s main problem in concocting a sequel to Catch-22, however, is that its predecessor was too successful. Back in the early ’60s before civil disobedience became fashionable, the idea of, say, Yossarian sitting naked in a tree during a fellow pilot’s funeral was unbelievably caustic and biting. In the ’90s, that type of wit has become the mainstream in humor. Today you can get something equally raw from your garden-variety cable comedian, or even a mediocre episode of “The Simpsons.”

There’s also a strange sense of ironic self-awareness running through Closing Time that gives the book an aura of recycled goods. Winking references are made to Catch-22s and a writer named “Joey Heller”; Rabinowitz rubs elbows with the author’s old buddy, Kurt Vonnegut, in the maple syrup factories of Dresden, Germany; even Yossarian’s courtship of his nurse bears striking resemblance to the real-life courtship of Heller and his nurse related in the autobiographical No Laughing Matter.

So what’s left? Plenty of jokes directed at the video game junky Vice-President with the Secret Service code name “Little Prick,” who’s obviously supposed to be Dan Quayle. (Haven’t we all heard enough of those jokes?) There’s also a smattering of the old vaudevillian Heller dialogues, such as this one in which Milo Minderbinder and pals go to bat for his stealth bomber before a government commission:

“And what does a flying wing look like?”

“Other flying wings,” Wintergreen interposed adroitly, with Milo struck dumb by a query he had not anticipated.

“And what do other flying wings look like?”

“Our flying wing,” answered Milo, his composure restored.

“Will it look,” asked a major, “like the old Stealth?”

“No. Only in appearance.”

Scenes like the previous one show that Heller can still be lots of fun when he wants to. But most of the rest of Closing Time is neither fun nor particularly insightful, and the book’s apocalyptic ending — curiously swiped from the Stanley Kubrick/Terry Southern film Dr. Strangelove — is an exercise in depression without purpose.

Joseph Heller was right in the introductory note to his first novel: there’s only one catch, and that’s Catch-22.

Paul Auster’s oeuvre stacks up to that of just about any living writer in his generation for pure imaginative hubris. Through the course of eight novels, three works of non-fiction and four collections of poetry, the reclusive Auster has proven himself a first-rate postmodern commentator on the Western logocentric mentality in the mold of Borges, Calvino, and Kafka.

And yet I can’t help thinking that the novel is simply not Auster’s genre. For every sentence of his that sizzles energetically on the page, there are another two or three artless clunkers lagging behind. Despite all his attention to language and the ways in which our speech both reveals and conceals our innermost selves, books like Moon Palace and The Music of Chance are only hampered by Auster’s lack of descriptive power.

So how wonderfully overdue is Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s graphic novel adaptation of Auster’s 1985 first work of fiction, City of Glass. The premiere release of Avon’s Neon Lit line of graphic mysteries, City of Glass captures perfectly the analytical despair and moody Kafkan atmosphere that characterizes Auster’s masterful story without stumbling over the author’s narrative shortcomings.

In City of Glass (the opening entry in Auster’s highly regarded New York Trilogy), gumshoe novelist Daniel Quinn is hired by a man named Peter Stillman to tail his father, a former linguistic scholar just being released from prison. The elder Stillman kept Peter locked in a dark room for nine years of his childhood, hoping that in the absence of communication the boy would forget his English and reconstruct “God’s language.”

During the course of the novel, as Quinn becomes absorbed in deciphering the true meaning of an indecipherable set of clues about Stillman’s motives, he himself comes to understand Peter’s horrible predicament.

Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s adaptation (under the direction of series designer Art Spiegelman of Maus fame) hammers the intricacy and paranoia of Quinn’s situation home in a way that Auster frequently cannot. The reader zigzags closely in on seemingly inconsequential objects like a snooping detective with magnifying glass in hand, or Quinn delving into the deeper meanings of things. When Quinn begins to lose his shaky grip on sanity, the rigidly boxed panels of early pages give way to chaotic, skewed shapes that mirror his condition.

Given the brilliance of City of Glass, perhaps Auster should have considered offering his latest novel, Mr. Vertigo, to Spiegelman and Company as well. It certainly doesn’t work in prose.

Mr. Vertigo describes the coming-of-age of a street rat in the Great Depression who is taken in by an aging sorcerer and taught to fly. Imagine a cross between Billy Bathgate and Disney’s Aladdin, but without the political consciousness of the former or the adolescent glee of the latter.

I get the sense that Mr. Vertigo is supposed to be a grand metaphor for the American Dream — Walt as Everyman climbing the ladder of success, Walt as symbol of American perseverance in the face of adversity, even Walt as innocent Forrest Gump in the land of crooks and schemers. But if so, then Auster has come to puzzlingly few conclusions about this country. In Mr. Vertigo, Walt learns to fly, he practices flying, he flies for large crowds, he flies for millions of dollars, he stops flying, he wanders around until the book ends. Walt’s conclusion? The hopelessly clichéd statement “You can’t get something for nothing.”

Auster fans will be frustrated at the sloppiness and lack of poetry to Mr. Vertigo. All the more reason to grab a copy of Avon’s City of Glass instead and savor good Auster writing to keep the faith.