The Word Exchange: A Novel by Alena Graedon
Release Date: April 8, 2014
Official Summary:
In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted “death of print” has become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are things of the past, and we spend our time glued to handheld devices called Memes that not only keep us in constant communication but also have become so intuitive that they hail us cabs before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growl of a hungry stomach, and even create and sell language itself in a marketplace called the Word Exchange.
Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL), where Doug is hard at work on the last edition that will ever be printed. Doug is a staunchly anti-Meme, anti-tech intellectual who fondly remembers the days when people used email (everything now is text or videoconference) to communicate—or even actually spoke to one another, for that matter. One evening, Doug disappears from the NADEL offices, leaving a single written clue: ALICE. It’s a code word he devised to signal if he ever fell into harm’s way. And thus begins Anana’s journey down the proverbial rabbit hole . . .
Joined by Bart, her bookish NADEL colleague, Anana’s search for Doug will take her into dark basements and subterranean passageways; the stacks and reading rooms of the Mercantile Library; and secret meetings of the underground resistance, the Diachronic Society. As Anana penetrates the mystery of her father’s disappearance and a pandemic of decaying language called “word flu” spreads, The Word Exchange becomes a cautionary tale that is at once a technological thriller and a meditation on the high cultural costs of digital technology.
This review is not spoiler-free.
I really wanted to love this book. I had this on my to-read shelf before it hit netgalley. The main idea is that the technology we're dependent on makes us even more dependent because it changes the English language and then it makes us sick. Clever idea but terrible execution.
The book is supposed to be the combination of Bart's journal and Ana's memories. Bart is a big fan of words no one actually uses. Early in his first chapter he describes Ana as a "variegated seraph". He also describes her as "Ana qua Ana is, basically flawlessness qua flawlessness, sui generis". Thank god my e-reader has a dictionary. But then he develops aphasia so it takes awhile to figure out if what you're reading is gibberish or just an overcomplicated word.
Ana really likes footnotes. While footnotes are useful in scholarly text, they're annoying in novels. It breaks up the flow of reading to go read the notes and you risk spoilers to learn nothing of use.
Ana is also an idiot. She is repeatedly told to not use the Meme, but she always has it on her. While her naivety is realistic (her Meme is her phone, ID, credit card and everything else at once. How would you cope?) you would think she'd get the message eventually. There's also the scene in the basement. She stumbles across strangers in the basement of her (and her father's) office building, sitting at tables in a deep trance with metal discs on their foreheads and they're reading nonsense symbols. It's creepy by itself but with everything else going on the scene before her is scary. Most people would get the heck out of there. But not our Ana. She sticks one of the discs on her forehead! And then once she does leave, she goes back into the creepy people in a trance room. If she didn't have major help, she wouldn't have lived to the end of the book.
The pacing is a huge issue. There's no world building. We're looking into a world 20+ years into the future but other than the Memes and driverless cars, little else in technology has changed. The book takes place over about 8 weeks, but most of it is about the first 2 or 3 weeks. The plot is a slow, slow burn and then there's an info dump at the end.
It took me 3 weeks to read this book (which is unusually slow for a book of this length). With most books I'm left sad it ended but with this I was relieved to finally be done with it.