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They Is Us
Oryx & Crake meets Douglas Coupland. An unforgettable vision of the future of America. Years from now America finds itself split between the rich and the poor. The haves live in luxury within the small regions that remain unpolluted while the have-nots inhabit a toxic suburbia full of terrorism, crime and genetic mutations. Perhaps not all that different from today then? They Is Us tells the story of one family from the poor side as they go about their daily lives. Julie has a job as a summer intern at an animal laboratory. She can't resist taking home the discarded mutants and her house is filled with genetic cast offs. Her mother, Murielle, has kicked out her stepfather and now, seemingly from nowhere, finds herself subject to the attentions of multi-millionaire businessman A.J.M. Bishrop. Bishrop is only dating Murielle because he wants to get Julie's underage sister Tahnee into bed. Just your typical American family story. Set against a backdrop of increasingly invasive technology, growing pollution and the President of the USA's impending gay marriage (to be broadcast live across the nation) They Is Us features a cast of unforgettable characters that will stick in your mind long after you finish the book. Tama Janowitz has written a prophetic novel which is funny, and frequently hilarious, but is so uncannily believable that it is chilling to read. This really could be the future.
304 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2008
10 people are currently reading
173 people want to read
About the author
Tama Janowitz
29 books266 followersTama Janowitz is an American novelist and a short story writer. The 2005 September/October issue of Pages magazine listed her as one of the four "brat pack" authors, along with Bret Easton Ellis, Mark Lindquist and Jay McInerney.
Born in San Francisco, California to a psychiatrist father and literature professor mother who divorced when she was ten, Janowitz moved to the East Coast of the United States to attend Barnard College and the Columbia University School of the Arts and started writing about life in New York City, where she had settled down.
She socialized with Andy Warhol and became well-known in New York's literary and social circles. Her 1986 collection of short stories, Slaves of New York brought her wider fame. Slaves of New York was adapted into a 1989 film directed by James Ivory and starring Bernadette Peters. Janowitz wrote the screenplay and also appeared, playing Peters' friend.
Janowitz has published seven novels, one collection of stories and one work of non-fiction. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tim Hunt, and their adopted daughter.
Born in San Francisco, California to a psychiatrist father and literature professor mother who divorced when she was ten, Janowitz moved to the East Coast of the United States to attend Barnard College and the Columbia University School of the Arts and started writing about life in New York City, where she had settled down.
She socialized with Andy Warhol and became well-known in New York's literary and social circles. Her 1986 collection of short stories, Slaves of New York brought her wider fame. Slaves of New York was adapted into a 1989 film directed by James Ivory and starring Bernadette Peters. Janowitz wrote the screenplay and also appeared, playing Peters' friend.
Janowitz has published seven novels, one collection of stories and one work of non-fiction. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tim Hunt, and their adopted daughter.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
May 18, 2014
They is needing a good editor.
They is forgetting quirkiness can not redeem or excuse a lack of plot.
They is not 'Oryx and Crake.'
They is Us, quite simply, sucks.
They is forgetting quirkiness can not redeem or excuse a lack of plot.
They is not 'Oryx and Crake.'
They is Us, quite simply, sucks.
November 13, 2009
I have been a fan of Ms. Janowitz's since she made a splash in the literary world with Slaves of New York. I was elated to receive a new title from this unusual and talented author, but found this book to be a drastic change from her previous works.
They Is Us is a futuristic novel, written in a Kurt Vonngeut tongue-in-cheek style. Miraelle and her two daughters Tahnee and Julie live in a badly polluted New Jersey, surrounded by landfills, giant bugs, and nuclear waste. Disease, cockroaches, and mold form a visual motif around their everyday experience.
Trapped within bleak, empty lives the three try to find lives for themselves but ultimately fall victim to a profit driven government and hungry, lecherous patriarchal men. The work is humorous, albeit so bleak and repulsive it is sometimes hard to read. Janowitz makes plenty of pop culture references to induce laughter throughout the work. However, in the end, Janowitz accomplishes little with the work, other than point out the corrupt,hyper capitalist, and overly engineered world we inhabit.
They Is Us is a futuristic novel, written in a Kurt Vonngeut tongue-in-cheek style. Miraelle and her two daughters Tahnee and Julie live in a badly polluted New Jersey, surrounded by landfills, giant bugs, and nuclear waste. Disease, cockroaches, and mold form a visual motif around their everyday experience.
Trapped within bleak, empty lives the three try to find lives for themselves but ultimately fall victim to a profit driven government and hungry, lecherous patriarchal men. The work is humorous, albeit so bleak and repulsive it is sometimes hard to read. Janowitz makes plenty of pop culture references to induce laughter throughout the work. However, in the end, Janowitz accomplishes little with the work, other than point out the corrupt,hyper capitalist, and overly engineered world we inhabit.
Read
March 15, 2010I stopped reading this. Meh.
August 12, 2010
This book scared the shit out of me!
July 7, 2013
Depressing
October 26, 2019
I picked this up from a library bookshelf while I was checking out the 2nd book in N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. The first few pages I opened to described a harried mom telling her pre-teen child to go to a strip mall stripper establishment to find work for the summer. The back of the book described the setting as somewhere in suburban New Jersey, kids growing up next to a superfund site, in an America that's lost a war to Syria and Palestine. I was INTO it.
This book was published in 2008 and yet, as most dystopian sci-fi type writing of just a decade ago, it struck me as so real and banal, so excruciatingly, fantastically grotesque. Dialogue exchanges come few and far between, and we spend the majority of our time inside the different characters heads (teen girls, single moms, immigrant dads, teen terrorists, billionaire bio-tech CEOs, etc), experiencing the ghastly circumstances of their mundane suffering through descriptions of their anxieties, desires, and other bodily perceptions. We watch them tune in to television programming that ONLY broadcasts a gay president's celebrity wedding and donation-based war policy pleas. We watch them rationalize and ignore their own physical injury and sickness, genetically engineered vermin infestations, extreme weather and climate disaster, food substitutes, predatory capitalist schemes against people who think of themselves as regular degular Americans making ends meet, and so on. The longer the book goes on, the more you realize just how severe the state of their existence is. It's fucking incredible to me and the grim absurdity of the narrative had me captivated.
Then there is
SPOILER/CONTENT WARNING
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...
...
...
...
...
a rape scene. Much like in Patrick Califia's Doc and Fluff, you suddenly find yourself in the middle of an assault unfolding in real time, and it is not fun to read. Survivors beware. With Califia's Doc and Fluff, an edition of the book was eventually released with a direct response to people's criticism of the scene. With They Is Us, I do think this scene is a definitive turning point for the remainder of the book, its narrative, and the trajectory of its characters. I think it suits the story, to be frank. The scene was harrowing to read, it reminded me of many of my own experiences, and I think it actually sharpens the grotesque circus of events into the disturbing horrorshow it is. Most of the book reads in an amusing and exasperated style, but after this scene you find your perception changed, where what formerly amused and shock-value appalled has turned into definitive grim horror. I mean, the cover itself advertises the book as a cautionary horror story.
So. I liked this book a lot, but damn I fucking hate rape scenes, that shit sent me out for a day after.
Also worth noting is this current throughout the book where I thought characters of color were described in low key fetishistic/exagerrated otherizing ways... and I ~want~ to say that's because we're seeing them through these hapless and deeply ignorant white characters... but i'm also not here trying to make excuses for anybody cause I don't know this author in the least. It's just like, real ignorant white American, extreme capitalist horror shit. Belligerent white working class horror shit and then some. It's fascinating to me that most of the Goodreads reviews here give this 1 or 2 stars asking where is the plot and/or how disgusted and disappointed they were about it.
This book was published in 2008 and yet, as most dystopian sci-fi type writing of just a decade ago, it struck me as so real and banal, so excruciatingly, fantastically grotesque. Dialogue exchanges come few and far between, and we spend the majority of our time inside the different characters heads (teen girls, single moms, immigrant dads, teen terrorists, billionaire bio-tech CEOs, etc), experiencing the ghastly circumstances of their mundane suffering through descriptions of their anxieties, desires, and other bodily perceptions. We watch them tune in to television programming that ONLY broadcasts a gay president's celebrity wedding and donation-based war policy pleas. We watch them rationalize and ignore their own physical injury and sickness, genetically engineered vermin infestations, extreme weather and climate disaster, food substitutes, predatory capitalist schemes against people who think of themselves as regular degular Americans making ends meet, and so on. The longer the book goes on, the more you realize just how severe the state of their existence is. It's fucking incredible to me and the grim absurdity of the narrative had me captivated.
Then there is
SPOILER/CONTENT WARNING
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
a rape scene. Much like in Patrick Califia's Doc and Fluff, you suddenly find yourself in the middle of an assault unfolding in real time, and it is not fun to read. Survivors beware. With Califia's Doc and Fluff, an edition of the book was eventually released with a direct response to people's criticism of the scene. With They Is Us, I do think this scene is a definitive turning point for the remainder of the book, its narrative, and the trajectory of its characters. I think it suits the story, to be frank. The scene was harrowing to read, it reminded me of many of my own experiences, and I think it actually sharpens the grotesque circus of events into the disturbing horrorshow it is. Most of the book reads in an amusing and exasperated style, but after this scene you find your perception changed, where what formerly amused and shock-value appalled has turned into definitive grim horror. I mean, the cover itself advertises the book as a cautionary horror story.
So. I liked this book a lot, but damn I fucking hate rape scenes, that shit sent me out for a day after.
Also worth noting is this current throughout the book where I thought characters of color were described in low key fetishistic/exagerrated otherizing ways... and I ~want~ to say that's because we're seeing them through these hapless and deeply ignorant white characters... but i'm also not here trying to make excuses for anybody cause I don't know this author in the least. It's just like, real ignorant white American, extreme capitalist horror shit. Belligerent white working class horror shit and then some. It's fascinating to me that most of the Goodreads reviews here give this 1 or 2 stars asking where is the plot and/or how disgusted and disappointed they were about it.
October 1, 2018
Margaret Atwood did it better in her Oryx and Crake trilogy. Tama Janowitz imagines a dystopian future full of trash, toxins, and waste. Endless depression as the central family named Antrobus (referencing The Skin of Our Teeth, get it?) endures humiliation after humiliation. Lolita, The Grapes of Wrath are also referenced. Not particularly funny or moving. The characters are flat and uninvolving. The one image I liked was the short scene with the overwhelmed mother sitting in her living room surrounded by a hologram image of a snowy forrest. The quiet moment of stillness in the midst of a chaotic world was moving. The rest of the novel was forced and ridiculous.
July 30, 2018
Quite possibly one of the worst books I have ever read. Poorly written, in need of a good editor and a lack of any kind of discernible plot made this nearly impossible to get through. The author tried to be ‘funny’ with references to current popular culture but just made the whole thing sound laboured and trite. Would not recommend.
July 12, 2018
Waste of time
December 16, 2021
Fantastic and terrifying book, utterly ridiculous and yet utterly believe.
March 10, 2017
This is the most strangest book I have ever read but that doesn't make it great. In fact I didn't enjoy it. The characters were very annoying but that could be from the author giving them a futuristic views and opinions.
The author did have good ideas about the future in the book but I felt like I was constantly being left out as the author mentioned lots of future things but didn't explain them.
The author did have good ideas about the future in the book but I felt like I was constantly being left out as the author mentioned lots of future things but didn't explain them.
February 4, 2025
What a brilliant loopy wild ride. I had the best time reading this book, there had been a lot of Oryx and Crake comparisons in the reviews but I think they're cousins rather than siblings. They is Us had me legitimately cackling and very very grossed out in parts rather Oryx and Crake felt a lot more cold and clinical of an irony. There's a lot to recognise in one another but ones from lab Canada and the other is from a dumpster fire in Hicksville/Elon-Musks-future-backyard.
March 27, 2015
I found this book so enigmatic and intriguing. I loved the ideas behind it and I loved the bare bones of the story.
What I didn't like was the writing. It was so hard to read and felt more like running in water than floating. I also think that Janowitz over complicated the events and didn't define the difference between her flashbacks and the here now well enough. The extra little parts of the storyline where also too complex, the mention of diseases and bacteria are a confusing addition to what would have been a fine plot without them.
But the major problem for me was the speed at which the plot travelled. I felt like I was being left behind half the time, not enough explanation had been given to certain parts and there no reason for the plot change.
However, at heart, I loved it. I think it's a necessary read purely for the warning of the future, Janowitz outlines it in a way that petrifies you but hooks you. And while the circumstances of the future she suggests may be extreme, it does provide a reasoned, prophetic, outlook.
What I didn't like was the writing. It was so hard to read and felt more like running in water than floating. I also think that Janowitz over complicated the events and didn't define the difference between her flashbacks and the here now well enough. The extra little parts of the storyline where also too complex, the mention of diseases and bacteria are a confusing addition to what would have been a fine plot without them.
But the major problem for me was the speed at which the plot travelled. I felt like I was being left behind half the time, not enough explanation had been given to certain parts and there no reason for the plot change.
However, at heart, I loved it. I think it's a necessary read purely for the warning of the future, Janowitz outlines it in a way that petrifies you but hooks you. And while the circumstances of the future she suggests may be extreme, it does provide a reasoned, prophetic, outlook.
July 3, 2013
Clearly this is a work that polarises people. I liked it and I find the snap-judgement negative comments baffling and disappointing. Remember: authors don't write things to annoy you personally, so why respond like bitchy teenagers? It's not like Janowitz came round your house and poked dog shit through your letterbox.
Any way, They Is Us, isn't perfect. And it isn't a comic novel, as suggested. But it is grimly humorous. The supernatural and time travel side-elements jar a little and the ending could be stronger, but the level of invention in this book is truly astonishing.
As a vision of the future, it's worryingly possible. If you want to know how far the world will sink once Mega Corporations like Monsanto and Nestle have genetically-modifed the crap out of it, then look no further.
Any way, They Is Us, isn't perfect. And it isn't a comic novel, as suggested. But it is grimly humorous. The supernatural and time travel side-elements jar a little and the ending could be stronger, but the level of invention in this book is truly astonishing.
As a vision of the future, it's worryingly possible. If you want to know how far the world will sink once Mega Corporations like Monsanto and Nestle have genetically-modifed the crap out of it, then look no further.
September 23, 2016
Yes, this book is weird. But not good weird. I brings visions of a filthy, depressed, hopeless future in which the divide between poor and rich has become vast - in which food only looks like food, and everything is false, processed and chemical. That is the good bit.
But I am at a loss as to the plot. In certain parts, a story or event seems to unfold, and then just when I am getting into it, the focus flits elsewhere, leaving the gaps between the events unclear and disjointed. I closed this book feeling like I awoke from one of those suffocating, confusing nightmares in which nothing really ended, but just flitted from event to event. I feel like I read someone who is trying to be the great Chuck Palahniuk, but completely and utterly failed.
This book could have been great, if only there were more connections between each event, and some form of a vague plot.
But I am at a loss as to the plot. In certain parts, a story or event seems to unfold, and then just when I am getting into it, the focus flits elsewhere, leaving the gaps between the events unclear and disjointed. I closed this book feeling like I awoke from one of those suffocating, confusing nightmares in which nothing really ended, but just flitted from event to event. I feel like I read someone who is trying to be the great Chuck Palahniuk, but completely and utterly failed.
This book could have been great, if only there were more connections between each event, and some form of a vague plot.
Read
March 7, 2010Not my usual thing, but I liked it. It takes place in a near future New Jersey where the weather is crazy and people don't read and there's a talking dog named Breakfast. I found it possible to relate to the characters in a way that i normally don't in dystopian novels, and the writing was very assured.
August 5, 2012
Full of interesting, scary and funny ideas, but lacking any semblance of plot. They Is Us was indeed 'A Cautionary Horror Story' as the subtitle claims, although there was too much Cautionary Horror, not enough Story.
May 29, 2013
Wow! Mind blown! There is not a happy ending in sight in this book - and the lack of one star is because I still have a lot of questions about it! A real quirky, dystopian read of epic proportions. It truly is the world at its worst.
Read
August 6, 2015Just not in the mood for this much strangeness, and the flies really grossed me out.
June 11, 2011
You will never forget this book. You will be haunted by it. The writing is incredible.
August 17, 2012
Tama rocks. I love her voice. Sci-fi is not my thing, however. So... this was almost really really good. Parts of it made me cringe. I hope it won't come true.
Read
September 18, 2012Jag har en av de 1000 signerade böckerna. Och jag har dessutom två fina bilder på dockor från Tama....
October 21, 2012
One of the worst things I've ever read
November 15, 2012
Creepy, odd, and slightly terrifying.
September 6, 2015
Rereading due to awesomeness
May 7, 2014
Very, very strange.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews