/newwave/ book review: Tower by Jack BC

corporate satire and emergent power of literary metastructure

I’ve had the pleasure of listening to the Book Club from Hell podcast for a number of months now, and they’re a perfect example of the kind of literary community that I think is cohering around the Schelling point of the New Wave.

The hosts,

Jack BC

& Levi, describe themselves as follows:

We’re two friends who read strange books together, then talk about them at length.

There’s a little more to it than that—a lot of the books they analyze are written by mad men, eccentrics, and various non-NPC-characters who are undoubtedly on a number of government watchlists.

What I love about this podcast isn’t just their irreverent Australian humor, but their general openness to considering all kinds of novels and ideas. This openness is anathema to the sort of purity culture that has developed around “high fiction”—the prestige literary fiction ecosystem and its complex system of associational purity tests.

In purity culture, ideas are like demons. They’re demonic in the sense that they contain the power of contaminating their recepient through agentic possession. Thus, the distinction between partaking in an intellectual exercise and the act of normalizing bad values is erased. We are all familiar with the calculated associational politicking that the modern literary figure must now engage in, a world where it feels like the list of unforgiveable authorly transgressions is long and ever-increasing.

While I’m not entirely unconvinced by the arguments around platforming and deplatforming when it comes to political figures, assuming that literary readers lack agency strikes me as a foundationally incorrect starting point. As I’ve written before, I am convinced that this creates a nominally decentralized consensus-forming mechanism that yields homogenization.¹

The BCFH guys seem to agree with this notion. For this reason, they can pick apart works like Nick Land’s Meltdown, The Female Dating Strategy Handbook, Mike Ma’s Harassment Architecture, J.G. Ballard’s Crash, and many others, and they can entertain these ideas without lapsing into the Manifesto Cinematic Universe (MCU) themselves.²

That is to say, they are interested in interesting books, and I’m still making my way through the back catalog months after discovering them.

What’s the implicit attitude of forming a Book Club from Hell?

Simply put, it’s something like “writers are supposed to be fucked up, crazy people, and oftentimes those are the ones who tend to write the most interesting books.”

This is not the same thing as claiming that good writers are good people.

It’s more like the opposite: to claim that these things are often anti-correlated.

Enter the tower

It’s much larger and more ominous in the novel.

I had a great time chatting with

Jack BC

during our interview on BCFH several months ago, and he asked me to review his book afterward.

Given Jack’s existing pedigree, I’d situate him in the emerging /newwave/ tradition based on his existing body of work.³ Consistent with what you’d expect, his novel doesn’t engage on a culture war axis at all, likely due to its affinity for strangeness.

What’s the book about?

Here’s how Jack summarizes the novel on Amazon:

We have chased meaning away; in its place grows The Tower, always expanding and leaving blissfully-fulfilled employees in its wake.

I am a doctor who specialises in souls; a potent advertising slogan leaves ripples in the world of the spirit.

Love is remembered; maybe S. was responsible for everything, but who else do I have?

Blending Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jacques Ellul and STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, Tower is a search for meaning in a world no longer organised for humans.

I’d carve out the premise even more succinctly: Tower is a surrealist corporate dystopian story with humorous characteristics.

While I’ve not read Kafka, I often find it hard to engage with surrealist worldbuilding in general. For that reason, I found it very difficult to review this novel, largely because (a) I haven’t read Kafka to have much of a reference point, and (b) because I have a dispositional aversion to surrealism. It was a fun intellectual exercise.

This interface between the reviewer and the novel being reviewed is, of course, obvious, but it’s also something that I’ve struggled with when reviewing works from genres that I typically avoid.

With books, I have certain aesthetic preferences. One of these is clarity in a novel’s underlying depictions of causality. I enjoy the processing of gaining a systematic understanding of the implicit logic of a narrative world because parsing the logic of causality is how I try to make sense of life in general.

That being said, Tower’s strength in setting still drew me in.

In the center of this universe, unsurprisingly, is a tower: a monstrous, towering object stippled with eyes that literally assimilates human beings into its structure by turning them into migratory objects that transform, gradually, into pieces of furniture and progressively fuse into its structure over time.

The Tower is both a physical structure but also implied to be a conscious, malevolent agent and synonymous with the corporation at the center of the city. Around the tower is everything else: skyscrapers that buckle and warp under its physical influence, eventually being subsumed by it, a city and its inhabitants whose sole purpose is to staff the corporation that is headquartered in the tower, and a cohort of nearly-identical “high performers” who are typecast as hilarious Clockwork-Orange-style corporate enthusiasts.

Like this, but much more menacing and eerily interchangeable.

The protagonist is a sort of surrealist-physician: a “radioalmologist” who specializes in imaging souls and treating their pathologies (i.e., a combination radiologist-psychiatrist, but for psychic ailments). The descriptions of soul-imaging and diseases of the soul are a very unique and a genuinely inventive way of integrating core ideas from the philosophy of mind into a narrative format.

As you would expect with this genre of work, the focal point of struggle is between the protagonist and the Tower’s unfeeling machinations.

The Tower feelss quasi-omnipotent. It teleports its employees in and out of existence and sends them on undefined, vague “business trips” at random intervals, adding even more precarity on top of the phenomenon of objectification (the transformation of a person into an object that eventually migrates to fuse with the Tower).

The company’s stock price is ever-increasing.

[ very mild spoiler alert ]

And, true to genre, none of this is ever really explained.

What, actually, is the Tower?

How did it get there?

How and when was the company formed?

What do the employees of the Tower substantively do?

Where do people go when the Tower teleports them away? What do they do in this other world?

Why does objectification happen? How does it happen?

I assume that the entire point of surrealism is epistemic ignorance: you, as the reader, are not supposed to understand the underlying logic of the narrative universe. It is meant to be dreamlike and opaque and to break your brain’s default assumptions of natural law. The randomness and disorientation are deliberate artistic choices, mirroring that of a dreamworld where narrative causality is an afterthought.

While I thought the imagery and the universe were interesting and evocative, I felt frustrated by the lack of expositional revelation toward the end (even though the ending was well-written and the climax felt appropriately propulsive!).

[ very mild spoiler ends ]

If I were to parallel Tower’s worldbuilding with a contemporary visual reference point, I could point to something like the Apple TV series Severance, but with more overtly horrorist elements.

At the end of the day, if you like this type of novel, you will like this book.

The most important thing, however, is to ask the question: what is Tower actually about?

Dreamcapitalist accelerationism

As the intern approached, things became clear: she was becoming a filing cabinet and her objectification was progressing rapidly, bones obviously bending uner her skin, skull growing angular and progressing to frankly cuboidal. Her efforts to inser the folders into her mouth had been unsuccessful so far, but her jaw was still expanding and it would be possible shortly.

Post GPT-3, there’s been a lot of circle-jerking over effective accelerationism and various Silicon Valley twitter personalities reappropriating Nick Land’s predictions about artificial intelligence from several decades ago.

Of course, in typical VC fashion, e/acc is largely decoupled from what Land actually said (and recently reiterated on

Theory Underground

): “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”

What Land is basically saying here is that humanity is an intermediate stage in the evolution of intelligence. It is constrained by the dimensions of the human skull and the computational throughput of pulsating meat. For this reason, we will be surpassed on an imminent timescale.

Compare this to Tower (and compare it, I must).

The obvious interpretation of Tower leans into a Mark-Fisher-style anxiety around the totalizing power of the modern corporation that predates more recent concerns around the dawn of AGI.

Largely everything in the text points toward this being its core thematic package, and it reminded me of the excellent 2000’s-era documentary The Corporation. This critique, while probably not written in a wholly conscious manner, is directionally correct and part of the Faustian bargain we’ve made with industrial capitalism. Ted K. would probably like the novel even though its implicit value system might well be characterized as leftist.

As a thematic configuration, I think this remains salient, but I think that we’ve passed a truly epochal rubicon and the advent of AGI really does pose much more radical problems for human social organization and the continuity of human meaning (notwithstanding the question of species survival). Thus, this theme feels less topical than it would’ve felt even in late 2022. I’m therefore more interested in the science fiction genre, insofar as it more directly engages with this transition in epochs.

In the case of Tower, that’s fine, of course—novels don’t have to be predictive!—but I think the horror of Algocracy is orders of magnitude worse than the neoliberal shitscape that we’re already neck-deep in.

A more contemporary critique of capitalism is definitionally a critique of technocapitalism, i.e., it must necessarily engage with worldbuilding that incorporates an account of artificial intelligence. This is turn requires an intrinsically systematized implicit narrative logic that is probably incompatible with the genre of dreamlike surrealism in general because of its machinic nature (notice how surrealist worldbuilding may have machines but generally lacks explanations of its foundational mysteries? You’re not meant to understand the core logic of the bureaucracy in Kafka! There aren’t going to be long paragraphs about the administrative equivalent of transistors and transformers!).

So here’s my meta-commentary here: very soon, we are going to look at the world that existed before.

Before mass technological unemployment; before omnipotent surveillance and humanoid police-bots entrenching the power of the technofeudalist class; before airborne swarms of quadrocopters massacring disabled civilians in Gaza.

And there is the world after, which we are all being born into at this very moment.

I guess what I’m saying is: it’s kind of hard to write about dystopias when you’re already living in one.

Coda: Pacing, Characterization, & Literary metastructure

There are two difficulties I encountered when reading Tower that I think are worth pointing out.

The first was pacing: I felt the novel took too long to accumulate narrative momentum (about 1/3rd of the way though) and that many scenes could been shortened or eliminated entirely. On the whole, the book could’ve likely been 1/3rd to 1/2 shorter and still retained the strength of its evocative imagery and literary worldbuilding.

Partly this was because I didn’t quite connect with the humorous subplot around some inanimate objects that become the protagonist’s friends and didn’t feel like these friendships with the character were particularly compelling.

A novel entails a substantial commitment in time from its reader, and I think indie authors do want to trend toward shorter works that are punchier on a page-to-page basis.

The second issue was characterization. I understand that the protagonist was a reflection of the oppressive environment: a burnt-out, PMC-type searching (and failing) for meaning under conditions of modernity. While I felt that this was an accurate portrait of the templated psyche of this type of person, the character often felt a bit flat to me, as did his relationship with his wife. While that sense of genericness probably purposely mirrors the conformist blandness of the setting (e.g. the “high performers” are even more identical personalities), I think more could’ve been done to distinguish the protagnoist and further entertain the reader.

(If I’m turning pages, I want to enjoy every single one of them).

Together, these two factors speak to the book’s literary meta-structure: the feeling that I got while reading it. I felt that the book picked up strongly around the midpoint, but even in literary fiction that may start with setting-based immersion that seems “plotless,” I didn’t feel quite “pulled forward” until the back half or back third of the book, when it picks up substantially.

The climax, however, was appropriately cinematic, and imagery very much resonated with me.

What’s next for Jack BC?

Writers are often people who are addicted to a single-player game: the flow-state of writing.

While that might sound masturbatory—you’re both the player-character and the console!—I think it’s a fun way of thinking about novelists.⁴

I’m confident that Jack BC will continue to produce more fiction and accrue more readers, and I think Book Club from Hell will similiarly grow as more and more as a larger pool of people connect with this fresh slice of the emerging commentariat.

The only suggestion I’d have for him is to add a little more chaos into his protagonists—a little more craziness so as to match the intensity of the books that he’s already spent so much time engaging with.

Unlikely machines, we hominids live and die by the flow of blood, not electricity.

Turbulence is the essence of art, vitality, and the new wave.

1. The prestige author of literary fiction often straddles both the non-fiction world and the fiction world, which is where things get muddled. These people tend to write narrative essays in The New Yorker, not just novels.

2. I strongly recommend that you never enter the MCU with yourself as the title character.

3. The idea of bracketing “New Wave” into “/newwave/” originated from a comment by

Postliberal Book Reviews

(I like it because it looks cool).

4. I stole it from Justin Murphy