2030 The Real Story of What Happens to America By Albert Brooks (St. Martin's Griffin, Paperback, ISBN 9780312591298, 384pp.)
Who or what do you think of when you think of Albert Brooks?
Do you think of the Joe Schmo who finds himself scrutinized in Purgatory in Defending Your Life? Perhaps you've recently seen his turn as a very tough and very serious bad guy in Drive.
Thanks to YouTube, his iconoclastic 'National Anthem Auditions' on The Flip Wilson Show or his bar setting short films on SNL may be your strongest impression. Maybe it's... look, let's just stop there. Albert Brooks, be he sung or unsung, has been running through our heads in a myriad of getups for decades.
Like many of his contemporaries, Brooks is a brilliant man. Like many of his contemporaries who know what to do with their super charged brains, Brooks is very prolific and varied in his creativity.
It's been said that every comedian wants to play Hamlet. Why? Because, at the end of the day, comedians are very serious people. Is 2030 Brooks' Hamlet?
No.
Comedians want to play Hamlet, not write Hamlet.
What Brooks does here is take on the genre of speculative fiction. Like most baby boomers, he's seen more amazing events, both good and bad, in his lifetime than any previous generation. That fertile mind can't help but to ponder the shape of things to come.
In 2030, he's taken a half dozen issues from our present day concerns, including corporations, health care, out of control debt, international relations and natural disasters, and extrapolated them into a possible future scenario.
Prediction: bleak.
Brooks has put a lot of work into crafting his future America. A great deal of the nation's problems start after we discover the cure for cancer. Our relationship with China has anything but gone away. Just for good measure, Mother Nature decides to have one of her tantrums.
These events are humanized through the lives of a dozen characters, ranging from captains of industry to disenfranchised twenty-somethings to the Oval Office. One could say that this is the first time Brooks has had to breathe life into a dramatis personae without the aid of an ensemble of amazing costars. Like a good writer, he likes them all and doesn't play favorites with the blood, sweat, tears, warts and scent of each of his co-protagonists.
2030 is a long read, but it is a steady read. Like I said, don't expect any futuristic surprises to fall out of the sky. With the exception of the aforementioned cancer cure and the prediction of remote control surgery, this 2030 is pretty cut and dry.
Brooks does throw in a clever gadget here and there, but some things get lost in the shuffle. It seems some characters have wristwatch communication devices, while others have to wait until they get home to get a voice-mail from their boyfriend. There doesn't seem to be anything in between. Cell phones seem to have disappeared. I really don't think a picture phone heads-up display in your windshield while you're driving would be a good idea.
I looked over a couple of other reviews after I finished reading 2030, just to avoid accidental plagiarism, and I noticed several other reviewers touting this book as hilarious. I'm wondering if we read the same book. I'm wondering if they really read 2030 or just assumed anything by Albert Brooks would be funny.
Sure, many of his characters have a sense of humor. Sure, Brooks throws a little whimsy into his futuristic narrative. Maybe it's me, but I did I didn't find these people's lives 'hilarious'.
Considering the long arc of the story, the inevitable conclusion seems rushed. One central character, although already a philanthropist, suddenly becomes the love child of JFK and Michio Kaku the moment he takes the oath of POTUS.
It would take for a lot of xenophobia in America to get cured, along with cancer, for such a rapid turn of events to take place.
Maybe there's something in the water, be it contrived psychotropic drugs or toxic waste, that effects these rapid changes.
I see a sequel, Albert.
