(1.5 stars, and that's being generous.)

Loved it!

"This is not a very good book" Yep. I liked it, then i didn't like it. The repetition ultimately got to me.

I love a good takedown of Silicon Valley--I subscribe to The Baffler, for crying out loud.

But this book was just okay, and even then only until it gets tiresome. The author writes that this is a bad novel, contrasted with a good novel (his italicization), or literary fiction, which is about "the upper class and their sexual affairs" and is boring. So he's writing a bad novel, which "[mimics] the computer network in its irrelevant and jagged presentation of content."

Which it does--the book is written like a hyperlinked article or a Wikipedia page, so every new topic that is mentioned gets snarkily defined in the next paragraph, and then that leads to another snarky aside, and on and on until we go back to what started the digression. It's funny a few times. But that little cleverness ("I told you this was a bad novel!") doesn't get you out of writing something that's worth my time. About halfway through I realized I was just so bored with this writing style and with these characters, but it's such a short book (less than 300 pages) that I felt like I'd see if it went anywhere. Spoiler alert: it doesn't. After the first few chapters you've read the extent of the author's joke catalog, but don't worry, he'll keep using them. Early in the book, talking about racism, he defines Colored skin as "the visual byproduct of eumelanin's presence in the stratum basale layer of the epidermis." And then he talks about a few new characters, or mentions people like Mark Zuckerberg or whoever, and every time he'll say something like "[Person], who didn't have any eumelanin in the basale layer of his epidermis, blah blah blah." Again, it's funny a couple of times. I get the joke. But then it carries on through the entire novel, and you have to read that clunky phrase over and over and over. It's the most memorable thing about the entire novel--that and the phrase "intolerable bullshit." The author likes to describe things as "intolerable bullshit." He'll write a little snarky description of something, like sexism or whatever, and it goes like this:

Fact about topic.
Fact about topic.
Snarky interpretation.
It was intolerable bullshit.

Again, and I feel like this is the theme here, it's funny a couple of times, and then it's just unnecessary. I feel like that "this is a bad novel written like the internet" bit was just thrown in as an ex post facto justification--I meant it to be annoying to read all along, just like that well-meaning but embarrassing friend of yours on Facebook! And even if that's not the case and he's perfectly nailing a style and a voice that he meant to all along, it doesn't amount to something that's particularly enjoyable to read. The characters are boring, there's no story to speak of, and the majority of the book is just space for the author to snark about the internet and social networks. It's occasionally interesting but mostly banal. The author just doesn't have the wit that he thinks he does. YEP, that's right, Facebook and Google do exist to serve advertising. You are certainly speaking the truth!

Go read back-issues of The Baffler instead.

Occasionally very funny, if, like myself, you have lived in San Francisco from the mid-nineties through the early 2000s.

However, "I Hate the Internet" is ultimately unsatisfying as a novel. It is more of a summary/list of topics and incidents which could be developed into a novel, than an actual novel.

But, perhaps that is Kobek's intent, as the author repeatedly self describes "I Hate the Internet" as a "bad novel" in the text of the book.

Look, I could have given it four, but I enjoyed the righteous anger so much I am steering towards five.

The closest that I've read to Vonnegut in a while, which is no small praise! Like Vonnegut, some of the stylistic conceits can get a bit repetitive. That said, Kobek is correct in smashing the reader over the head with most of the obscenities that pass for the state of modern society. Given that the novel ends at the dawn of 2014, I can only imagine what he'd make of the current state of affairs.

This is a relentless attack on the mindlessness that has accompanied the digital age, and not the book to turn to looking for hope. Yes, a lot of it consists of little more than exasperated and muddled ranting, but you know, he has a point!

This novel, though a thought-provoking book possessing arguments too simplistic to be taken very seriously, proved an enjoyable distraction from other, more predictable fare.