Reading the news draws you deep into yourself, as you try to control things that can't be controlled and spread yourself too thinly over a world that's indifferent to your continued existence. You become a tiny black dot of almost infinite energy but no real value; you get to be less real even as you become more aware. On the other hand, reading a good book expands you, as it distills all those unconnected facts that constitute reality down into neat little abstract models. A solid novel is a fabric woven from arguments, a textile text. It applies the social glues of morality and ideology to a world that is more or less arbitrary, particular chunks of unmoored meaning. Part of growing up is realizing that life is messy; part of the role of art is finding the rough-hewn beauty that lurks within the mess.

I suspect Bruce Sterling would recognize the preceding argument; in fact, I suspect that he would probably make it. I'm coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that Bruce Sterling and I are in some way doppelgängers, which is really only uncomfortable because Sterling came first and I've put so much time and effort into creating my particular form of cranky idiosyncracy. It's a bit discomfiting to realize that from a certain point of view I'm just another lefty libertarian camp follower. I choose not to interpret things that way, of course: I'm going to keep working on my schtick until I come up with something of my own, and Sterling's novels always leave me laughing and gasping in admiration, even as they serve as a mirror.

To say that the plot of Zeitgeist is inconsequential is to do it entirely too much credit. Instead of Sterling's usual rambling rehash of Candide, that protean and infinitely malleable Ur-plot, this story pretty much pitches the plot out the window and settles instead for what ends up feeling like one extended set of Pynchonesque riffs on what the twentieth century really meant and how we might constitute morality in the post-everything world. Like most good High Modernists, Pynchon anticipated the postmodern through his slippery appropriation of just about everything and the way he ruptured his texts with stream of consciousness rambling, abrupt shifts of scene, and occasional violations of the illusion of narrative coherence. Sterling's more interested in following a set of thoughts (on pop culture, on globalization, on the strange mixed form of high-intensity small-scale warfare peculiar to the last ten years, on the lasting importance of Haruki Murakami) to their ultimate conclusions than rewriting the map of literature. So Zeitgeist feels like a good-natured, satirical coda to Gravity's Rainbow rather than any kind of defiant statement of purpose, even as it's far more violent to narrative norms than Rainbow ever was. Any book that casually drops the names of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Jorge Luis Borges while taking the piss out of the Spice Girls is up to something.

As always, Sterling's observations of modern life are unerring, deft, and often devastatingly funny. Also as is typical in Sterling's writing, he manages to make the absurd seem both eminently sensible and offhand; his protagonist, the shambolic Leggy Starlitz, goes from sleazy, amoral international fixer to devoted father in about two pages, and Starlitz is such a walking conundrum that he's able to bridge the gap with little difficulty. Unlike most of Sterling's novels, Zeitgeist is set in the present day circa 2000, and if events have already rendered much of the narrative hooks of the novel obsolete (most notably the blindsiding of 9/11), the world he paints could handle the events of our own with no modification. In an act of astonishing perceptiveness, much of the plot revolves around Turkey and Turkish Cyprus, and while the big events have been a bit further east, Turkey is going to have a defining role in the region, and thus the world, for the foreseeable future. The book can serve as a good, if jaded, primer of the region's politics.

There's also a great bit with Starlitz hanging out with his zillionaire pop producer friend from Japan who's taken up residence on Kauai; not only does Sterling's grasp on the Japanese psyche seem more or less unerring (based on my admittedly limited experience), but Kauai was where I first read Sterling's Islands In The Net. That was the first of his Candide-esque wanderjahr novels, and was the first of his novels that I really enjoyed. There's some kind of symmetry between fiction and reality there that I find deeply appealing. I will say, though (in response to a comment in the novel), that I may be over-Japanophilic, but Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle hit me like a sack of bricks, and for reasons that seem more Japanese than the reasons it grabbed most American critics. It's also worth saying that it would be hard to think of an author more different from Murakami than Sterling. Murakami is all about hidden depths and left-field connections and intuition; Sterling is all about bustling energy, the exchange of surface and depths, and a peculiar form of magical realism where everything is perfectly obvious if you just look at it right.

It's a pleasure to bask in Sterling's warm bath of details. I don't think he does research so much as uses his novels as a way to disgorge the informational... stuff he's picked up over the years. Eastern European politics, Russian fiction, Turkish history, obscure genres of dance music, signals intelligence, passive-aggressive hippie power politics, viral kid fashions — they all have a place in Sterling's writing. He's like one of those guys who will corner you at a party for hours and hours, yammering on about random shit, and you'd like to punch him except for the fact that it's all pretty interesting and he knows how to relate all of it to everything else. When I grow up, that's the kind of person I want to be. In my secret heart of hearts, I think that's who I am, at least on my good days.