I love minimalism, but I also like being oriented

I love the idea of a futuristic plutocracy where commercialism is so pervasive that kids can only express their feelings in terms of the advertisements they’ve seen. I also love the idea that crass cross-promotion and corporate celebrity-breeding have become so bad that corporations have started raising kids from birth and insulating them completely to make them perfect celebrities and to test their products in-depth. I loved it so much that I required more.

Just how disparate is this world from our own? The author gives clues that these focus-group homes exist all over the country (the kids win in the “Midwest” category of “white teens”) but doesn’t tell us exactly how big a role they play in society. He seems to suggest that in this future world, there is an extreme polarization of wealth, and that these celebrity-like kids are the only ones who can rise above the muck – the narrator mentions that had he not been accepted into the focus group, his only other option would have been “the lumber yard.” On the next page, Slippen notes that his kids’ only other option is to become “merely another ophthalmologist among millions of ophthalmologists.” So the government regulate people’s careers and destiny? Is there a limited amount of opportunity because corporations have swelled to complete oligopoly and near ubiquity? The author never says.

In an effort to be coy and perhaps move the story along quickly, Saunders leaves me disoriented and confused. Why were they blindfolded “for their own protection” on the way to the Lerner Center? I knew they were celebrities, but does the corporation have to keep them oblivious to the world? Or are the leaders concealing where the Lerner Center is? Why? Is this business more malevolent then it lets on?

Also, if this is a highly advanced market research and pretty-boy farming corporation who micromanages the lives of their case studies, how did they manage to overlook a dying infant?

Telling me important details, such as why these kids are there, and what those “holes” in their neck are for, would have helped a lot had they come near the beginning. Obviously, not telling me why the narrator has two given names was smart, and paid off at the end when you find out why, but there is no reason why I shouldn’t know what the holes were for up front. There’s no pay-off for that.

It seems like Saunders felt the need to limit this story to a certain number of words to assure readability, and instead of taking out unneeded expository dialogue such as Dove telling the narrator “That’s your mom,” (which we deduced any), he took out entire ideas that would have helped me understand his surreal world better.

These details are relevant to the plot and to the story’s implications, because this story is an indictment of culture. It is suggesting that our world is similar to, and might eventually become like the one in the story. It would help me to know more about the process. In a story about kids who are tragically products of their environment, I would have liked to know more about the environment.