Whiskey Tango Foxtrot=Damn Near Perfect

            Reliable sources—Laura Miller, Garner the Great—have already heaped tremendous and due praise on David Shafer’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, so hopefully you’ve noted it and paid attention and done yourself the service of buying/reading the thing. If you haven’t, I can just say this: I read Shotgun Lovesongs in a sort of blissed fugue, unable to believe I’d read anything better this year, and certainly not a better debut novel, and yet here’s WTF, as dynamite a debut as one could hope for and as engaging and enjoyable a read as one could possibly demand, from anyone, anywhere, any time period.

            Some context: I’ve spent a good chunk of this year trying to understand what it is I want from books(/TV shows/movies), not because I’m unclear, but because, at 35, I’m now trying to have maybe a more adult understanding of the work and ingredients and gears at play in the cultural/artistic stuff I draw nourishment from. It may also be because I’m a dad, meaning I’m now keenly aware of the fact that I’m entering a phase during which there’s a slim but real chance I’ll be asked to explain or retaionalize my take on stuff, why something is thus and so and why I give any damns regarding such (I know: chances are maybe more than slim that questions like that’ll arise, but whatever). The obvious stuff—great characters, good conflict, insights offered into general Humanity stuff—is fair, sure, but I’ve been trying to get at more what it is I like. What are the ingredients in art that knock me to my knees? Why does Wallace floor me but not Vollmann? Jorie Graham but, less, Saskia Hamilton? The Replacements but not Husker Du? How come the Walkmen’s stuff is so amazing but Leithauser’s solo’s a groaner? None of this is rhetorical: it may just be the circumstances of my current existence, but it does seem like, at some point, one’s sort of wise to spend some time articulating as clearly as one can just what it is about the things that floor them floors them.

            Which is a roundabout way of saying: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot lights my head up like fucking pinballs, enjoyment-wise. The Good Ingredients are out in full force: The three central characters are clear as hell, real and believable as a stubbed toe. There’s Leila Majnoun, a burning-out nonprofit worker on whom the book opens, in Myanmar, as she’s trying to get a flat of medical supplies through the red tape of a militarized dictatorship; Leo Crane, a sort of flailing and failing trust-funder who happens to be an addict of various indulgences and a paranoid-ish conspiracist; and Mark Deveraux, an earnest Harvard-on-scholarship kid (at which school he met and became great friends with Leo, though they’ve since fallen out) who, through strange kismet, has ended up in a life-coach/advisory role for the CEO of a company that’s basically Amazon+Google+Facebook, and ps Mark’s taken quite fondly to indulgences Leo’s trying to flee. The conflict—basically, the CEO’s company is trying to secure *all* experiences, digitize everything, then charge for access—is astonishing for the nooks+crannies it offers, and for how it—mercifully, wonderfully—doesn’t ever play dumb (an open request to people making any narrative art: trust the person reading/viewing to make the leaps with you. Regarding the stuff above, from paragraph 2, about trying to figure out what makes something [to me] enjoyable or good, nothing’s more astonishing than recognizing that there’s an almost inversely parabolic relationship between the work asked of the reader and the enjoyment offered—if no work’s demanded, the enjoyment’s so limited as to be overlookable). WTF also—again mercifully—pulls off one of the hardest tricks in the sci-fi-ish bag, which is it proposes something that’s a few steps removed from/ahead of current reality but feels so oh, right, sure that you’ll likely have a hard time reading any tech news in the weeks after finishing the book without going wait a second, wait just a second here…

            But the Big Deal about Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is, to me, the insights. That’s not the right word. That feeling of reading, say, Wallace (or some Kelly Link, or some other folks I can’t think of off the top of my mid-week head [Jim Shepard for sure]), where this sort of to-the-side (~plot-insignificant) detail hits so true you’re spellbound? In Jest, that long thing early about the guy trying to quit smoking pot, and the page after page of how he throws everything away and starts all over again, and how if you’ve ever had an imbalanced relationship to any intoxicant you’re just going fuuuuuuuck? That’s what I mean. Here’s how neatly Shafer deploys it: Leo, at some point reminiscing about Mark, makes some mention (I didn’t mark the page, stupidly) about how overly puppy his old friend always was, and how he (Leo) wanted him to realize that the best girls like to work a little, too, they don’t just want to be fawned over? I’m mangling the fuck out of the whole notion and scene (which is, literally, a sentence), but there’s this just tremendously insightful grace Shafer offers, again and again, that’ll knock you sideways. I’ll have an interview with him up soon-ish, elsewhere, and in it I mentioned the first place this sort of thing transpires in the book (this sort of thing: perfect writing capturing an exact sensation in such an intuitive way you’ll likely start thinking in the author’s words), which is on page seven, and which goes: “The menace was present in everything here; it was like walking by a man holding a stick, the man silent, the stick raised above his head.” (describing Myanmar) There’s writing like that in heaps throughout WTF, a bounty of details nailed and sensations given damn near perfect articulation.

            I don’t know. I don’t know how to hype this enough. Garner’s got it right: it’s easily the book of the summer, and it’s smart and funny and hilarious and I read it in two days and would’ve chomped it in one were I not a father and husband. If you’ve read reviews on here before, you know that, often, the books I like most are the ones that almost evade or trump any good review or criticism: they’re wholly themselves, same as any love’s wholly itself, and nitpicking seems as silly as a happy person coming up with something he’d like to go back and change about his life—change nothing. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a glorious read and deserves heaps of attention and praise, plenty of which has already come its way but plenty more of which is due. Do your part, pass it along: this is less a book that needs readers than a book that readers need.