The End As I Know It: A Touching, Sweet Y2K Novel That Gets the '90s Right

Compared to the frequent horrors of the past decade, the comparatively tranquil 1990s are increasingly an object of nostalgia for Generations X and Y, the subject of fluff TV and movies like I Love the '90s! and The Wackness. It was born in victory and ended in absurdity -- when the end of the Cold and Gulf Wars anointed the United States the world's only superpower, during which an economic recovery compounded with the tech boom for almost uninterrupted economic growth. Some thought it would all come crashing down at the end of the decade, but even two separate millennial computer catastrophes -- 9/9/99 and Y2K -- failed to bring down the good times.

Kevin Shay, a internet humor writer and Movable Type programmer, set his first novel in late 1998, as the paranoia was spreading, and displays a remarkable eye for detail and winning pathos in a comic novel about a man who believes, contrary to the success and complacence all around him, that the world's about to end. His protagonist is Randall Knight, a 25-year old guitarist and children's puppeteer who's set off on a cross-country puppet tour to warn all his friends and family members about the coming disaster. Predictably, he doesn't succeed; equally predictably, the world doesn't end. Like Chuck Klosterman's portrayal of the 1980's Midwest in Fargo Rock City (rating: 85), Shay does a great job evoking a time that isn't so far in the past, whose minor details have vanished in the gap between our collective short-term and long-term memory.

It's also extremely funny. Comic novels sometimes get short shrift -- excepting for Anglophiles clutching firm to their Kingsley Amis and P.G. Wodehouse -- but the fact that this book reads quickly and goes down easy shouldn't be held against it. In the end, it's a hilarious book with a gently sweet love story, the sort of thing that Nick Hornby used to do well. Randall is an appealingly unreliable narrator, convinced of his own rightness and rationality, a paranoid conspiracy theorist in a quarter-life crisis.

This is the sort of book that many people might call a summer read. But there's no need to stereotype by season something so thoroughly pleasant. It might just be the funniest historical fiction I've ever read.

Rating: 88

Crossposted on Remingtonstein.

 

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