The Mere Future

Author-activist Schulman (The Child) painstakingly crafts this meditation on the trajectory of society in the 21st century, but it may serve better as a warning than a novel. When New York's new mayor slowly transforms the city into a utopia through social reforms, the effects spiral out over a poor copywriter, the copywriter's new boss, his girlfriends, their lovers, their lovers' children, etc., in a narrative M?bius strip worthy of an art house film. Despite clever word craft, poetic political satire and biting humor on every page, vague characterization and a meandering plot push this polemic too far toward the abstract and oblique. Even the most adventurous and prose-focused readers will struggle to engage with Schulman's discontinuous style at this length; the only hope is to treat it as poetry, or perhaps modern art.