Zeitgeist
by Todd Wiggins
Zeitgeist by Todd Wiggins is literature as rant, ferociously taking on topics including self-help gurus, cable tv, gun control and every stripes of sexuality. The book's slight, archetypal plot of twentysomething turks on the cross-country lam is really just provided as a pegboard on which the 28-year-old author can hang bright strands of zingers and socio-political criticism.
The novel's central posse of turn-of-the-milennium characters seems deliberately crafted to start pushing cultural hot-buttons from page one. There's a would-be buppie turned militant black separatist; a perpetually horny schizophrenic Jew, once converted to Catholicism, now packing nonsecular heat; a fame-obsessesed bisexual Welsh expat; a lesbian martial artist with and incestuous Wiccun mom; and the narrator, a high-priced Manhattan prostitute, ultimately forced to reconsider her anything-for-a-price view of the human marketplace.
Kicking off with characters like these, Wiggins would have been wise to let them hang out and marinate in their collective juices. Instead he sends them scrambling through a sequence of set-pieces, riddled with Tarantinoesque violence and one-liners, preventing their relationships from ever becoming fully-fleshed and emotionally resonant. Still, these are not exactly cookie-cut types Wiggins is working with—there is much to be admired in his skewed imagination.
With the hip ambition of this pop-milennial debut, Todd Wiggins arrives as a literary little brother to David Foster Wallace. Sure, Zeitgeist lacks some of the sophistication and underlying warmth of its doorstopping counterpart; it also lacks about 500-pages of its length. This is one fine Finite Jest.
