here is much to praise in The Pickup Artist, before it falls asleep. And even the final pages of Terry Bisson's new novel--long final pages in the passage of which a half-dead ex-film star delivers a drably implausible explanation of everything that has happened to a character she has no reason to tell anything to--do dazzle with dread. Indeed, for most of its length, The Pickup Artist, like a hangover which fixes the eyes open to the true depressive and eternal awfulness of the day after, absolutely glows with the grimness and dread of our fallen world. It is also astonishingly funny.
The Pickup Artist is SF, technically. It's set in the latter years of this century; its pages deploy a bevy of usual-suspect SF-like advances, from self-driving cars to clones to drugs which prolong life by coagulating the flow of time into dazed Wal-Mart torpidity; and we are inhabiting a world that has been politically and culturally transformed, or so it seems.
Or so it seems.
The Pickup Artist is in fact not a natural-son SF novel at all. It is, instead, something very rare in modern SF, or anywhere else. It is a satire. It is a text whose import is to draw negative conclusions from a depiction of a fallen world, by comparing that fallen world, explicitly or (as in this case) by inference, to a prior world which may be defined as Somewhat Less Fallen. A satire which happens to wear's SF clothing does not, like normal SF, focus on or prophesy a world to come for the sake of that world, or for the sake of telling a story (as in much space opera); and as a consequence that future world may seem thinnish, indifferently realized, to the SF reader. But this is right. The future is of no interest at all in the SF satire--except as a mirror, as an image of the extent of decline of our own world. The portrait of America in 2065 in The Pickup Artist is crafted to inform us that our own world of 2001, looked at straight, tastes like this.
The Pickup Artist is about what we already are.
So it went, and so it still goes
Attempting to point the reader in the right direction, Tor's blurb copy, perhaps inevitably, mentions Kurt Vonnegut, who is of course one of the few genuine satirists to write SF. But Vonnegut, until very late in his career, was the kind of satirist who shrugs: his best-known SF novels seem to be told from the side of the mouth of an author who is also a Confidence Man, a creator who may give pleasure, and may satirically point out some home truths en route to doing so, but who always let us know that ("So it goes") the text he shuffles before our very eyes is a house of cards. The world, for Vonnegut, is too sad for him to trap himself inside a story with no exit. The world for Terry Bisson is also sad; but he never tells us that The Pickup Artist is "only" a game to be shrugged. The book is played--the game of satire is played--to the end. The satirist Bisson could be better likened to is the late John Sladek, whose games were to the death.
The plot of the thing is simple. Hank Shapiro is a Staten Island pickup artist from the Bureau of Arts and Entertainment, a government official whose job (Tor's blurb also evokes Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 [1953]) is picking up works of art from homes, libraries, etc., where they have been, perhaps accidentally, stored after "deletion," and delivering them to headquarters, where they will be properly destroyed. Deletion is a process whereby the art of the past, which has choked the arteries of the 21st-century human race, can be fairly and expeditiously expunged from the human record.
It is unnecessary for us to cavil at the impossibility of expunging images or digitizable texts from a world (like ours) in which nearly infinite amounts of data can be broadcast instantaneously everywhere. Bisson is not interested in that kind of "naturalism." His focus is on the language we use to justify intolerable actions; on a country whose citizens are far more interested in being paid for turning in deleted art than in retaining (for instance) a deeply loved CD; on a cast of characters, typical Americans all of them, so immobilized in the entrails and detritus of the disappointment-management culture we addict ourselves more deeply, now, in the year 2001, every time we enter a shopping mall, so entranced by a world designed to mask the unutterable disappointment of getting what we "want" that nobody has changed in half a century: every single character in the book is bound to the wheel of Hell, which is to say they are all caught in an America that can only repeat itself, like Wal-Marts.
Portrait of a satire as an SF novel
So the world of Staten Island in 2065, bits of SF gear aside, is Staten Island today. Which does not make The Pickup Artist sound like much of a read, hilarity-wise. But Bisson does have a story, a kind of sick-unto-death, demented replay of the cross-America trek that transfigured his great early novel, Talking Man (1986). Hank finds a Hank Williams LP, now deleted, whose cover he remembers. When he was a child, his father had held that album up. He becomes obsessed with the idea of listening to the album again, just once.
And the plot thickens, as it must. Hank's dog Homer is terminally ill--his attempts to get service through his HMO via voicemail may take place in Bisson's mirror 2065, but will inexorably remind any human living in 2001 of living in 2001--and a confusion of errors and disasters sends Hank, Homer, the corpse of a clone named Indian Bob and other characters westward across the Interstates towards the independent city-state of Las Vegas in a search for the now- missing Hank Williams LP, which is in the hands of the Alexandrians, a secret group devoted to the preservation of art works, or so it seems.
The hilarity is dense. Homer begins to talk, but only about smells. Hank's female companion gives birth to a fully formed midget, who also talks. A congeries of obsessed, repetitive, haunted voices begins to mount. The Pickup Artist gets crazier and crazier, and more like the way we live now, with every page--until the last few, where an indifferent Hank hears a monotone explanation of everything, and the flow of the book dries to dust, and the book closes, as depressed and inert as the world it has been mocking.
But the ride through Mirror Land is a gas.
