The Word Exchange
Alena Graedon
Toronto: Bond Street Books, 2014.
This is the perfect bibliophile’s beach read! It has all the thrills and spills of a blockbuster summer read, but what the characters are fighting for is the fate of The Word, or words, in the shape of protecting the most recent and most comprehensive edition of the North American Dictionary of the English Language.
The novel has 26 chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet, and each chapter begins with the definition of a word, but none of these is quite right. Take A:
Alice n: a girl transformed by reflection
Alice, it turns out, is the code name for one of our narrators, Anana Johnson, whose father has vanished:
On a very cold and lonely Friday last November, my father disappeared from the Dictionary. And not only from the big glass building on Broadway where its offices were housed. On that night, my father, Douglas Samuel Johnson (!), Chief Editor of the North American Dictionary of the English Language, slipped from the actual artifact he’d helped compose.
That was before the Dictionary died, letters expiring on the page. Before the virus. Before our language dissolved like so much melting snow. … Before my father vanished, before the first signs of S0111 arrived, I’d reflected very little on our way of life. The changing world I’d come of age in–slowly bereft of books and love letters, photographs and maps, takeout menus, timetables, liner notes, and diaries–was a world I’d come to accept. If I was missing out on things, they were things I didn’t think to miss. How could we miss words? We were drowning in a sea of text. A new one arrived, chiming, every minute. (3)
In this near future, we drown in words but they all lack meaning, and much of that absence of content can be blamed on our increasing dependence on our devices. Instead of phones, the ubiquitous device is a Meme, and it serves not only as a means of communication, but also as an extension of self and a substitute consciousness. When the narrator enters a restaurant at the beginning of the novel, her Meme brings up the menu, but it then overrides her drink order, replacing a tea with a hot toddy, because it knows that she needs a stiff drink.
Memes can also, crucially, give their owners the words or definitions they need if they have difficulty remembering a word or its meaning. Five cents a word. Touch of a button. This exchange is where the novel plays out: in the space between our use of language and its digital and corporate control.
Definitions and their ownership are the territory over which the characters battle, and the book is a fun and rollicking ride through an alarmingly corrupt future. I was reminded often of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, and especially of Oryx and Crake in which Atwood does the heavy lifting of her world building. They share the same kind of hysterical exaggeration of nefarious corporate interests that frightens, nevertheless, because, yes, people can be that stupid and that greedy.
At first, the struggle seems to be over the ownership of words and their definitions, but when a virus that corrupts spoken as well as digital communication begins to spread, the stakes get suddenly and critically higher.
This is a first novel for Graedon, a graduate of Brown and of Columbia’s MFA programme, and while the novel reveals its author to be whip smart and savvy about what makes a page-turner, I felt that her editor could have been more firm about eliminating some redundancies and tightening up some of the plot. There are double and triple agents, but I never quite felt that the revelation had had the proper build up. There was a bit too much slack in the reins, but not enough to spoil the ride.
Add this to your beach read haul for summer, though, and you’ll be reading well past sunset.
Nathalie Foy 