Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Globetrotting, do-gooding activist Leila Majnoun is “director, in-country” for a “bush-league NGO” trying to develop a public health campaign in Myanmar, “which sounded like a name cats would give their country.” David Shafer, in quick witty flashes, opens this debut novel with a rich, jaundiced portrait of both the good intentions and the corrupt, flawed global realities affecting development work. At its best — and WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT is often very good indeed — Shafer delivers a generous, comic, politically-incisive absurdist thriller.

Myanmar is an often dangerous place, where an omnipresent “menace” limns every social engagement, “like walking by a man holding a stick, the man silent, the stick raised above his head.” But the diffuse danger of the place is given more urgency when Leila in her country-wide travels happens to see a strange vehicle and some out-of-place contractors.

The men give her the hairy eyeball, and she entreats her driver to make a quick departure. But Leila’s not one to shy away from injustice, and she sends a blast email to a group of friends who might be able to help her figure out what’s going on. She includes the GPS coordinates of the site.

And she triggers an outsized reaction from dark global forces, who scanning her email put her on a target list and immediately frame her father for a despicable crime. But Leila also comes under the scrutiny of others out there on the margins, and WTF begins throwing various balls into the air, juggling a host of subplots (portending some central significant uber-Plot), a complicated Pynchonian conspiracy-satire fueled by the 1%, the war on terror, the reach of global digital media, self-help fiddle-faddle, Occupy and fringe leftist revolutionary movements. Big, beefy topics.

Yet the book is grounded in careful, incisive portraits of its three main characters. Leila, trust-fund paranoid (but maybe on to something) manchild Leo, and slick poseur Mark (who’s busy exploiting a tossed-off bit of fluff as deep insight to daytime television and to major corporate players). At its best, WTF reads like a wicked splicing of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. The Majnoun family’s internal politics are dissected with the same casual expertise Shafer displayed in his portraits of various global sites (or situations). His humor bruises and bites, but–like Greene–there’s a rich, compassionate attention to even the most minor of characters. Leila’s initial driver appears only briefly, but his fate is keenly felt; even as Shafer raspberries around subjects of deep concern, from rendition to global surveillance, he maintains a firm grounding in the particular, concrete experiences of his particularized, fully-imagined cast. And like the best of Greene’s thrillers, the book hums and races, creating a compulsive energy complemented by Shafer’s attention to the characters facing the consequences.

Where the book stumbles, a bit, is in the expository clutter that comes with conspiracy thrillers. Shafer ends up filling in a lot of details, having to step back (or speak through some character in big thick blocks of explanation) to spell out what’s going on. In some hands (Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William Gibson) every stray detail seems to suggest a deeper connectivity–everything is tied into the big, sinister Plot, and anything might be salient — the reader’s paranoia is amped up, hyper-realized, turning the everyday into a foggy carnival of half-sensed wonder and dread. Alas, Shafer more often feels bogged down by details, more attuned to the central plot than to the grander themes suggested by his satirical targets.

Still, WTF is a general delight, particularly when Shafer uses the Plot as mere mcguffin, focusing his energies instead on the aside, the character at sea and unsure what’s going on. WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT is a rich, funny first novel.

A darkly comic and truly interesting novel that stands astride genres. Plenty here to recommend.

Three main characters in their mid-thirties, seemingly unconnected, become unwitting players in a control for online information. This edgy, dark but also comedic novel describes a potential dystopian state of affairs in which the personal becomes the property of large corporations, who want to use it as they wish, and sell it back to you for a price.

Leila Majnoun is an attractive American woman trying to make a difference in health care in Myanmar, who inadvertently stumbles upon the U.S. Government involved in something she shouldn’t have seen. Leo Crane, a good-hearted but misguided and substance-abusing neer-do-well, has just lost his job as a preschool teacher in Portland, Oregon. And Mark Deveraux is a drug-addled, alcohol-addicted self-help guru in New York who has come to the attention of wealthy and powerful James Straw, the “squillionaire” of SineCo, a digital search-and-storage conglomerate.

SineCo is supported by a clandestine U.S. military organization called the Central Security Service, or CSS, the mission of which, since 9/11, has been “to build and maintain the world’s supreme electronic intelligence-gathering apparatus and cyberdefense infrastructure.” The CSS uses a few private-sector endeavors for intellectual capital and leading-edge technology. In return, the CSS provides cover for the companies’ R& D “that, in order to be valuable and effective, must take place in zones unattached to a particular jurisdiction.”

With the help of the CSS, SineCo has formed “The Committee,” dedicated to privatizing any and all information found anywhere online, and putting it to their own uses. A secret counter-movement, called “Dear Diary” has also arisen to try and stop The Committee.

What Leila found in Myanmar was an operation run by The Committee. Even though she had no idea what she saw, she was curious about it, and emailed a few reporter friends with questions. This was enough for the CSS to arrange for her eviction from Myanmar.

Before leaving however, she receives a cryptic warning from Ned Swain. Ned is a CSS operative who has been a little shocked and disaffected by the increasingly nefarious direction CSS has been taking. He advises Leila to contact Dear Diary. With their help, soon Leila is connects with both Leo and Mark, and the three of them get involved in a scheme to help take down The Committee. Dear Diary is afraid that The Committee wants to do more than just influence the thought and language and culture and social order. They have seen documents indicating that The Committee is considering a “targeted genocide" program. In ten years or so, they will have collected enough biological and genetic material to have computers determine which five percent of the population should live so they can begin the world again with “Enhanced Humanity.”

But Leila, Leo and Mark have to grapple with a critically important question: how do they know that Dear Diary won’t also turn into The Committee? As Mark points out, revolutionaries usually end up eating their children, or as he phrases it, “distributors always become the assholes.”

Dear Diary has a way to help figure out the truth, called “The Test.” All three of them take it, and it gives them a new perspective on reality, and on each other. But is it enough to save the world?

Discussion: This is one of the growing number of books in a genre that looks at the (invariably deleterious) repercussions of the proliferation of online information and diminution of privacy. It is similar in a way to Dave Eggers’ book "The Circle", but this one is less allegorical. I like to wonder if it is more or less over the top than Eggers, but that’s because I like to pretend that these cautionary tales are *all* over the top.

There are some very funny satirical moments in this book, both subtle and overt - I especially loved the insider Proust joke. But I thought there was a bit too much rehashing of the main characters’ inner angst, and not enough development of some of the side characters, like Ned and James Straw, neither of whom I felt I really understood.

Evaluation: While this book just brushes the edges of being a thriller, I would categorize it more as political fiction, with a dark, satirical edge. Recommended for those who like to think about the possibilities for abuses of information collection and privacy.

Rating: 3.5/5

Published by Mulholland Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, 2014

I would like to thank NetGalley & Mulholland Books for granting me a copy of this e-ARC to read in exchange for an honest review. Though I received this e-book for free that in no way impacts my review.

Goodreads Blurb:
William Gibson meets Chuck Palahniuk in an ambitious novel of international techno conspiracy and dark comedy.

The Committee, an international cabal of techno-industrialists and media barons, is on the verge of privatizing all information. Dear Diary, an idealistic online Underground, stands in the way of that takeover, using radical politics, classic spycraft, and technology that makes Big Data look like dial-up. Into this pitched and secret battle tumbles an unlikely trio: Leila Majnoun, a disenchanted non-profiteer; Leo Crane, a bipolar trustafarian; and Mark Devreaux, a wracked and fraudulent self-betterment guru.

David Shafer's WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT is both a suspenseful global thriller and an emotionally realistic novel about the struggle to change the world in and outside of your head. In the spirit of Chuck Palahniuk, it is a remarkable debut that announces a captivating new voice in literary suspense.

This book was a slow starter for me. A very slow starter. By the time I was 30% into the book I was ready to call it quits, but decided I'd give it just a bit more time as I hate to leave books unfinished once I've begun reading them. Thankfully things did get substantially better as I got deeper into the story, but it was an uphill battle.

Though I didn't find the book to be great I could give it 'good,' and that's because the third quarter of the book did a miraculous job of turning things up, but it simply wasn't enough for me to feel that I'd enjoyed the book. It took too long for me to feel involved with the characters, or the characters with the plot. I felt that the author was trying a bit too hard to keep the plans of this international cabal under wraps, not just from the unsuspecting characters but also from the reader. And that was problematic for me.

Not being able to get a grasp on this terrible 'thing' being planned made it very challenging for me to remain invested. It didn't help that the three main characters are kept in their own chapters for quite some time, with limited, if any, interaction. Having to bounce between each character's individual story without a cohesive plot to hang things on just tired me out. Granted that changed, but for me it was too little, too late. But I do think that this author has potential, and fully expect to enjoy future works better.

The main characters were interesting, and Schafer did an excellent job of getting into their heads, and showing us what they were going through in their very different lives. The frustration of running up against red-tape and corrupt governments and organizations every day while trying to improve the lives of others; the fear and self-doubt of someone who has always had an elevated opinion of themselves but never had it reconcile with how they felt the world viewed them; and the depth of depression book-ending manic highs of such euphoria that you are willing to endure the lows just to touch the highs one more time. Each of these personalities has such authenticity that it almost makes me wonder just how much experience Shafer has had with these personality traits and personas.

I must admit this book description is what caught my attention, citing two of my favorite authors and likening this new author's voice to their seminal works. I figured it must be quality if both these author's were mentioned, heck even if one had been mentioned I'd have tried the book! I just need to remember that reviews are subjective, and not to be swayed when reviewers draw correlations between a new author and a favorite established author(s). Frankly I saw less William Gibson in this than Neal Stephenson, but then that is just my own subjective opinion, and even then I'm referring to Stephenson's early works, before he really found his stride, but his potential still shone through. I anticipate that this will someday be Shafer's version of The Big U.

I did not expect to like this so much.

I'm not sure what I expected...perhaps something military, because of the title. That most certainly was not what it turned out to be.

The wacky but likable characters and exotic locations make an intricately detailed canvas for this darkly comic thriller. The conspiracy that is at the heart of the plot is altogether too believable to be comfortable. Makes you want to get rid of your computers, your phones, anything that could be taken over, and you wouldn't feel safe even then!

David Shafer has mixed mystery, psychological thriller, conspiracy theory, travelogue, computer science... the result is an amazingly unified and exciting read.

There’s a lot to say about David Shafer’s WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT.

First and most simple is that it is a novel that makes the reader think. It requires the reader to pay attention and to work at following the story. Any reader that does this will be rewarded, I promise.

Second is that the story is about three people; Leila Majnoun – a Persian-American humanitarian aid worker with a NGO in Burma, Leo Crane – the slightly off-kilter son of a board game fortune who likes pot and alcohol more than he should, and Mark Devreaux – the accidentally famous author of a self-help book who really could read a few more of those books himself.

There are tiny hiccups with the characters.

The first part of the novel is dedicated to Leila and she is the ideal character on which to base a story. She’s strong and sassy and determined. She’s doing charitable work when her parents wanted her to go to medical or law school, marry a rich man, and give them grandchildren.

Leo is the lovable goof of the story. At the start, he works in a day care center where he invents a game called Rolling Death. Is there anything more adorable than a guy working with kids too young for kindergarten and playing Rolling Death with them? No. Leo’s paranoia, only partially enhanced by copious amounts of pot, gets him in trouble and then in rehab. By a stroke of luck, some of his paranoia proves absolutely true. The way he deals with that revelation proves that the lovable goof can also be the dependable rock in life.

Mark got high and/or drunk and wrote a blog somebody liked. So they gave him a book deal (which every would-be writer is jealous of) to write a self-help book. This proves that fools get all the luck and he gets a fancy patron in one of the richest men in the world.

The hiccup is that I’d read a whole book about Leila, Leo was good enough, and I could’ve done without Mark entirely. But I think that’s how it was meant to be.

The main plot of the story is intriguing and alarming.

It’s sort of like the popular dystopian novels – it’s fiction but it’s so close to a possible reality that it’s a little unnerving. For example, after reading Shafer’s book, I can assure you that I am now wholeheartedly against Google Glasses. And I’m looking at things I post online (like this review) with an even healthier sense of skepticism and the feeling that someone – not necessarily the government but a cabal of filthy rich people on fancy yachts – is spying on me for nefarious purposes that they rationalize as entirely legitimate and helpful to little old me.

I love dystopian novels, though, and I love WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT too.

WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT is available for purchase in print, ebook, and audio form now.

(I received a copy of WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT through NetGalley in return for an honest and original review. All thoughts are my own. This review will be posted on NetGalley, Goodreads, and my blog.)

A book like David Shafer's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot isn't for everyone, but damn if it doesn't seem like this book was aimed directly at me.

Seriously, this book spoke to me:

Well, hi, there, Erin! Say, I know you like an accessible post-modern novel. I'm, like, one part Don DeLillo social satire and two parts Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49. Except, you know, super contemporary. Plus I kick off with a bad-ass female protagonist and my shifting point of view really highlights the nuances of the three different main characters. Oh, and I have a major scene set in Dublin. Oh, and one of my characters is struggling with his sense of what's real. And the whole thing is wrapped around this information conspiracy. (I even have a touching little love story!)

So, yeah, I adored this book.

I don't make comparisons to Pynchon and DeLillo lightly. I teach DeLillo's White Noise in my AP Literature and Composition class. I ask my students to write a sequel of sorts after we discuss it - What would today's version of White Noise look like? They're meant to mimic DeLillo's style and advance the themes of consumerism and technology, family and identity. This year I'll be excerpting Whiskey Tango Foxtrot as a model for the assignment, because that is precisely what Shafer does. First, he shares DeLillo's love-mock relationship with his characters. Clearly they are held up for ridicule, especially in their addictions to substances (including consumer goods), but paired with that is a strong affection. That affection grows as the novel goes on, and by the end, I was absolutely enamored with each of the main protagonists. Likewise, Shafer uses lists of stuff at various points in an echo of DeLillo. Atop all of this is a specificity of diction that borders on the poetic.

The driving conspiracy is pure Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon's 1966 novel is about the uncovering of a conflict between two mail distribution companies which began before America became independent. Oedipa Maas, the protagonist, is our fish-out-of-water detective, a housewife cum executor of her ex's estate, landing her in the midst of this mail conspiracy.

Perhaps no longer centered around mail delivery, today the bulk of our worries, when not about financial solvency, remain about the control of information. Our internet privacy rights, passwords, and levels of encryption mean the difference between social media and internet shopping savvy and identity theft. But then who owns the data that we stream through our cable company or cell phone carrier? Who owns the files I store in the Cloud? Does AT&T own the Scype conversation I had with my husband while out of town? They certainly control the actual data, but where's the boundary between data transfer and personal conversation? What about backdoor access to my laptop webcam or the recording elements of my cell phone?

This is the line of questioning that allowed the book to sink its meat hooks into me. While I was midway through the novel, Facebook's new Messenger app rolled out, garnering alarm over the many permissions it requires for use. Take a look-see:

Change the state of network connectivity Call phone numbers and send SMS messages Record audio, and take pictures and videos, at any time (emphasis mine)
Read your phone’s call log, including info about incoming and outgoing calls Read your contact data, including who you call and email and how often Read personal profile information stored on your device Get a list of accounts known by the phone, or other apps you use Now, many have argued that these are reasonable permissions for a messaging app, and it's no different for WhatsApp or other alternatives to the on-board phone messenger. However, there is an implied trust by consumer of the app to Facebook to not misuse the access they have to the phone and the information therein. Should we trust Facebook? Well, I don't mind getting my ads tailored to me, to be honest. It's what led me to the book Girl With All the Gifts, which I totally enjoyed reading. However, Facebook was recently revealed to have experimented on their users' emotions through control of their news feeds. I have no interest in being emotionally manipulated by my social media.

Capitalism does not have ethics other than the "rightness" of the dollar. This is the very notion that Whiskey Tango Foxtrot exploits for its paranoid conspiratorial drama. I was absolutely pulled in by it. I uninstalled that Facebook Messenger app and went back to the clunkier but less invasive messaging through the Facebook mobile site. Then I dove back into the novel.

What the novel offers as an alternative to corporate-controlled information is simply fascinating, and it gave an otherwise cold-conspiracy a warm, beating heart.

The end of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is also very much like The Crying of Lot 49, though I will leave that to the reader's discovery. There's even a direct homage to the mail systems of old in there.

I keep wishing I had more Whiskey Tango Foxtrot to read and finding that other books aren't meeting the expectations it set. This is David Shafer's debut novel - I can only hope his follow-up books are as brilliant.

Perfect for fans of Mr. Penumbra's 24 Bookstore or The Circle. An intriguing take on modern society and social networking.

I rate within genre, so I don't expect a dark-comic thriller to have the same features as a literary novel or biography or self-help book. However, I expect to engage with interesting characters who aren't simply stereotypes. I expect plot twists that are at least unusual, if not unexpected. I expect "original" bad guys with a bit of story to be backfilled. And, yes, there should be a struggle between good and evil and even some question about exactly what evil is and whether the good guys are purely good. And, I really shouldn't notice what page I'm on if it's a true page turner!

And Whiskey Foxtrot Tango does all this very well for a debut novel. I had a great time while waiting to find out how the three quirky main characters would finally meet up. I enjoyed the slow unveiling of the real problem. Great chase scenes. Collateral damage that has people thinking hard about what to do. Cooperation, anarchy, oligarchy, all kinds of good stuff. Enjoy! Thanks, NetGalley, for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” (from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22)

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the debut novel from David Shafer pits three thirty-somethings against ‘The Committee,’ a powerful, sinister organization that appears to infiltrate every layer of society. While Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a techno-dystopian thriller, it’s a dark-mirrored reflection of the world as we know it–a world in which technology advances have eroded privacy–those aspects of our lives that we have not chosen to share with governments and/or the world in general. Novels in this genre take risks and often don’t work, but Shafer carries the day with spiky humour, salient, identifiable issues and realistic characters, normal people who find themselves fighting against the sinister committee. The novel begins very strongly indeed, and when plausibility is stretched a little as the plot deepens, I was happy to go along for the ride.

This is the kind of novel where discussing too much of the plot will spoil the experience for other readers, so instead I’ll stay on safer ground by focusing on characterization and the author’s tone and style. Readers should note there is a sequel in the pipeline, so don’t read this with the expectation that all will be resolved. It isn’t. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (and you can’t miss what that stands for) should appeal to fans of Duane Swierczynski’s Charlie Hardie novels: Fun and Games, Hell and Gone, and Point and Shoot. Swierczynski’s trilogy begins with an overweight housesitter inadvertently stumbling across Hollywood Star Whackers. Each subsequent novel takes our hero deeper into a global conspiracy, and once you accept the initial premise, the impossible, the conspiracy theories, the shadowy power-brokers, our deepest fears and paranoias becomes strangely, and terrifyingly, possible, and that’s also the scenario with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

The novel begins by grounding us in the lives of three excellently drawn main characters: Leila, Mark and Leo–all in their 30s and all just a little bit lost when it comes to their place in the world. Persian-American Leila works in Myanmar with Helping Hands a “bush-league NGO.” Intense and directed, she’s trying to establish a public health program but is making little headway when she stumbles across something she isn’t supposed to see. Bad things begin to happen to Leila and, more importantly, to her family back in America. She’d chalk it all up to a horrible misunderstanding, some sort of error to be fixed with litigation, but then she receives the tip that the actions against her family have been deliberately manufactured to divert her from asking questions.

Leo Crane, trust fund kid, failed bookshop owner (“he’d emptied his trust fund like a kid shaking a ceramic piggy bank,”) and fired daycare centre worker ends up in a strange rehab facility after his sisters jointly conduct an intervention. To Leo’s sisters, he’s good-hearted but going off the rails:

He drove a wine delivery truck, he drove a taxi; he was a mediocre waiter, a drunken bartender. The periods of hope and courage came less frequently. And as his twenties became his thirties, the landscape came to feature swamps of gloom doted with marshy hummocks of anxiety. He worked on getting better. He tried jogging; he limited his drinking; he sprinkled seeds in his yogurt. A girlfriend got him into yoga. He practiced having a good attitude. But it was trench warfare. He lost his yoga mat and had to buy another one. Then he lost that one and couldn’t see buying a third. He watched other people claim to enjoy drinking; they baffled him. The same people spoke of hangovers almost fondly, as evidence of their propensity to dissipation. His own hangovers were whole days mined with grim, churning thoughts, He saw therapists and psychiatrists; he tried Wellbutrin, Klonopin, Effexor, Celexa, Paxil, Xanax, Zoloft, and Lexapro. Also meditation, core work, and juice fasts. He cut out meat. Kept a garden. Clawed through months of clean living, then fell back into blurred days like and acrobat into a net.

“Tell me about the people who you say were watching you,” said the doctor.

Oh that. “You mean the paranoia, right?”

“If you call it paranoia, you will think I don’t believe you.”

After being fired from the daycare centre, a job Leo genuinely valued, he started a blog: I have Shared a Document with You–a venue for his conspiracy theory that a shadowy organization engineered a “massive plot to control all the information in the world.” Certain he’s being followed and monitored, dropped supposedly due to ‘concerns’ by his pot dealer, Leo sinks into paranoia and isolation until his sisters intervene and toy with sending him to a mental health lock-up but finally agree to rehab. But in the rehab unit, Leo begins to wonder just how the doctor there knows all the little details of his life. Is the doctor even a real doctor? There are brief moments of illumination in Leo’s life when “truth holes [..] flare” in his “field of vision” and appear to connect information. Is Leo paranoid or via his blog was he on to something big?

The third main character is Mark, the author of an immensely popular hip self-help book Bringing the Inside Out. Mark, Leo’s former best friend from college, a vain, weak, self-centered dickhead catapulted to fame largely thanks to “craven SineCo squillionaire James Straw” whose “devotion” and patronage comes with a price. There’s a complex financial arrangement between James Straw and Mark, Straw’s “life coach” which includes Mark’s promotion of the Node, “SineCo’s newest gizmobauble,” a “biometric and surveillance device.” Mark sees two diverging paths for his future, and Straw’s powerful friends make it clear that if he doesn’t sign on for the full programme as a SineCo executive, then his brief meteoric career as a celebrity is about to go down the toilet.

Opposing The Committee is an underground network known as Dear Diary which can be accessed in the Darknet through various portals, including one that appears to be a “house-swapping” site. Leila, unaware that she’s already picked a side, and unaware that “she could be extraordinarily renditioned from, like, a women’s toilet,” contacts Dear Diary for help, and then it’s down the rabbit hole…

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a great romp and yet still manages to be surprisingly prescient by maintaining just the right note of quirky, sharp-edged humour and serious, imminent threat. The author presents the 21st century of socialverses, and electronic gadgetry where technology is in every aspect of our lives and runs headlong into surveillance–a world in which “85 present of electronic correspondence (worldwide) and 100 percent of electronic correspondence (English-language) was run through a threat-sieve network commission by the U.S. government but increasingly outsourced to a consortium of private companies.” This is a world in which special contact lenses exist that implement “visual-channel-collection technology,” and private security firms possess extraordinary power to reach into and ruin people’s lives. Finally, the book isn’t about left or right politics (a few passages make that clear); the focus is on power.

Why didn’t she know more about computers? That knowledge suddenly seemed more important that feminist theory or eighties’ song lyrics, both of which she was well acquainted with. Computers had risen around her all her life, like a lake sneakily subsuming more and more arable land, but she’d never learned to write code or poke behind the icons or anything like that. She was like a medieval peasant confounded by books and easily impressed by stained glass.

Review copy