Resumo de The Futurist - James P. Othmer

Many of the chapters openwith telling highlights from his career: "He once spoke before thegraduates of a Bible college in Virginia about the future of God and one weeklater delivered the keynote address to the Adult Video Distributors Conferencein Vegas about the future of porn, and received standing ovations atboth." The secret to Yates's success -- surprise -- isn't divining thefuture but divining what people want to hear about the future and thendelivering it with sufficient bravado. He admits that he doesn't know anythingabout the present or the future. He notes that he and his colleagues are neverheld to any standard of accuracy. Finally, in an act of professional suicide,he repudiates his career and announces, "I am the founding father of theCoalition of the Clueless.""The first to speak the heretoforeunspoken universal truth that none of us knows anything. Even as he tries toretire, two goons named Johnson and Johnson make him an offer he can't refuse:travel around the world, all expenses paid, and describe what the citizens ofthe world think of America. The first 25 pages of The Futurist appeared in theVirginia Quarterly Review and went on to receive a National Magazine Award nominationin 2005. Fleshing out that story into a novel, Othmer has mingled the conceitsof the corporate-spy thriller with those of domestic fiction, over-the-toplampoon with moving passages of suburban angst. What follows is an erratic butmostly entertaining story of Yates's travels to some of the remotest spots inthe world. That the Futurist should face death while shilling our war in thecradle of civilization is just one of the many irresistible ironies here.Despite all the sins in hispast, he's retained the capacity for moral outrage -- even toward himself. What is left with whe youunstrap the bomb from the stomach of the suicide bomber? This addictive storyattempts to answer that question by peeking into the life of "The Futurist,"a technology salesman who lives extravagantly by selling people the futuresthey want to buy, in the brief and ultimate moment of his life when he fullyrealizes what he is selling. Looking back, the events leading to the futurist'stragic demise seem rather predictable given the theme, yet the Futurist'sgraceful fall from the heavens is very memorable. The Publisher's Weekly review(above) does a great job summarizing the plot of the first part of the book. It'sas if the author felt he had a lot to say in the first third of the book, andthen had another two-thirds of the book to fill but wasn't really sure what hewanted to say. Much of it worked for me, though I had some difficulty buying into theconspiratorial framework of the story, especially the plausibility of theJohnsons' recruitment of Yates to serve their amorphous geopolitical agenda. Whileadding an element of danger and intrigue to the story, it compromised thebelievability factor.

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