In Eric Barnes’ novel 'Shimmer,' science fiction meets ponzi scheme

Given science fiction’s recent resurgence in the publishing industry, it’s no surprise that “Shimmer,” the new novel written by Eric Barnes, SoA‘ 95, is out in hardback. What is surprising is the novel’s fluency, conventionality, and clean style.

“Shimmer” comes with all the impediments of contemporary fiction: it is smartly bound in blue and saddled with the subtitle “a tale of corporate greed, intrigue, and deceit.” This obnoxious cover is completely at odds with Barnes’s low-key, easygoing demeanor. He laughed when he was told how quickly the book could be finished. “People always tell me how fast it moves,” he said in an interview. “It takes them four hours to read, but I wrote it for two and a half years over a 10-year period.”

The novel’s painstaking but swift journey begins in our protagonist’s head. “I’d started having dreams where I could fly,” the opening reads. This is Robbie Case, the well-named CEO of Core Communications. Note the pluperfect tense­­—all of “Shimmer” is narrated retrospectively, another hoary sci-fi conceit that Barnes uses to digress and analyze. “I couldn’t write it in third-person,” he said. “I liked the first-person.”

It is certainly easier to write from this retrospective vantage point, but the danger is that the author becomes the sole personality in the book. However, “Shimmer” does not suffer from this potential pitfall. The author’s voice is not the narrator’s, and the narrator periodically effaces himself to make way for his co-workers—”Shimmer” even has multiple characters. In a welcome change from typical sci-fi, these characters are the novel’s primary concern, and, unlike in hysterical realism, florid welters of adjectives are not needed to bring them to life.

Like other novels of its kind, “Shimmer” is pervaded by a sense of solitude, but this, too, is more effective for being understated: “I have had a lot of friends in my life, but at this point, Perry was my only close friend,” Robbie narrates.

Barnes must have been very concerned that his narrator’s solitude not devolve into solipsism, for the end of each chapter features a little third-person narration in order to, as Barnes said, “get out of Robbie’s head.” Regrettably, the third-person voice alternates with interior monologues like, “I hate this city. I hate it, every day.” The characters seem flatter as more details pile up.

Techniques like this are a little heavy-handed, even MFA-like. This is no surprise, as Barnes has an MFA from Columbia. He is well-read and will talk volubly about everything from “Ulysses” to “Breakfast of Champions,” and he cites DeLillo as a formative influence, stating, “I realized, reading him, that everything didn’t have to be like Hemingway.”

Most of “Shimmer” is drawn from personal experience, though subtly transformed and artfully enlarged by the imagination. “I had a day job as a managing editor, and then the Internet came along and things just went crazy,” he said. “I was an arts major in charge of all the financial stuff, and when I told people I had an MFA they always heard MBA. People heard what they wanted to hear.”

People heard what they wanted to hear—a sci-fi epitaph for the ages. Fiction that deals with technology should be predictive, not reactive—otherwise the future will feel dated—and the plot of “Shimmer” deals with a Ponzi scheme vaguely akin to Bernie Madoff’s. Barnes described it as “creepily topical,” but this is to his credit — it’s his novel’s crowning virtue. The descriptions of computers, networks, and information are kept clean. They don’t bog down the plot, and they manage the difficult trick of being comprehensible to the layman and sufficient for the otaku. It is more like Murakami than Gibson.

“Shimmer” is not perfect. The sex scenes lose force with repetition and read like a pallid parody of “American Psycho,” which must have been another influence.
The prose also occasionally veers into convolution. Barnes tries to fuse the two possible endings of apocalypse or stasis into one—he clearly wishes to have it both ways­—and this feels a little artificial. But at least readers will be motivated to keep turning pages until the end.