A comedy of loyalty, betrayal, sex, madness, and music-swapping

Art can be an up-and-coming user interface designer working on the administration of data circulation along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He’s carrying out the best work of his career and can assurance that the system will be, without a question, one of the most counterintuitive, user-hostile software application ever forced forth onto the globe.

Why? Because Artwork is an industrial saboteur. He might live in London and function for an EU telecommunications megacorp, but Art’s about Eastern Standard Tribe real home may be the Eastern Regular Tribe.

Instant wifi communication puts everyone in touch with everybody else, twenty-four hours each day. But a very important factor hasn’t changed: the necessity for sleep. The world is gradually splintering into tribes held together by a common time zone. Art can be working to humiliate the Greenwich Mean Tribe to the benefit of his own people. But in a world without boundaries, nothing at all can be used for granted-not pleasure, not money, & most certainly not appreciate … which might explain why Art finds himself stranded on the top of an crazy asylum outside of Boston.

“Doctorow lives up to the guarantee of his first book…This short novel’s occasionally bitter, sometimes hilarious, and generally wackily appealing protagonist consistently skewers those evils of contemporary culture he keeps most pernicious.”-Publishers Weekly