Paolo Bacigalupi's young adult novel, The Doubt Factory, was my author for B. It's not my first book by this author--I've read his adult audience novel, The Windup Girl, and another young adult book, Ship Breaker.
Bacigalupi writes really interesting worlds--dark, richly realized, full of fictional tech/society that needs that changed tech. I often am captivated by the way the plot interweaves through the worlds. I enjoy the characters in his young adult novels better--they seem more real, more fleshed-out.
The world of The Doubt Factory is a fictionalized glaze to modern America, making it very different from the dystopias of his other books. So my annoyance was higher with his Connecticut yuppie-town, boarding school, and factory in Hartford. The settings felt flatter, more caricatured as "stereotypical".
Bacigalupi sets the antagonist as a PR firm--specialists in creating the doubt that lets shaky science continue, such as the pseudo-science that props up the tobacco industry. My feeling that the book would have read better if I were 13-17 is partly that Bacigalupi seems like he is trying to awaken the careful skepticism of teens entering a cynical grown-up world of money and power. I already know that some of these corporations do terrible things in favor of their bottom line, like shoring up sales for drugs that are not as effective or more harmful than admitted to. Bacigalupi wants his readers to waken along with the main character, Alix, to the idea that a person can be someone you love on a personal level and yet still do things of which we are not proud. And as Alix must then make ethical decisions in order to go on as her own person, so too will we make choices of morality. (Yup. Maybe I'm too old for this book.) In her research into these companies, Alix never takes a moment to understand how products are developed and go to market. Bacigalupi calls out companies by name--Dow Chemical, Archer Daniels Midland, Johnson and Johnson--which puts them in this shady context of cover-up. But no character ever says that there are good products coming out of these companies, to the benefit of humanity. It seems to be taken as a given but in a work meant to foster reasoned distrust, it feels just as disingenuous as the work of the PR firm to never have a character at least say it. The companies are flat; they are two-dimensional firms that employ the bad guy. The bad guy-PR firm consorts with other bad guys--mercenaries for hire as "security firms". They too fill a flat characterization of modern evil in the world of the teens/young adults learning to fight for their voices and beliefs.
My other complaint of this book is that there is a sense of teenage wish fulfillment in the way the characters build family. Orphans are not necessarily better but tragedy lets you find your "REAL" family and you love them. The family you are born with is not necessarily good. Alix is drawn to the other main figures and they turn out to be her family of choice--the family she connects to, the family that protects her and drives her. While Alix is close to her biological brother, Jonah, Bacigalupi builds in their development as they see each other not as siblings as people, people who didn't notice things about each other because they were too close as family. The teenagers/young adults of this novel are extraordinarily talented and successful in their plans. The smoothness of their plan execution, aided by huge sums of money, exists only in a novel world.
In short (?!), this is not a novel that worked for me. I do think it has some interesting things to say about money and media if you are being introduced to thinking about these concepts critically; it was a good action-packed read. Bacigalupi certainly kept me going despite my feelings for the actors in the world.
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