Boom Lit

THE 1987 WALL STREET CRASH triggered a literary tsunami. Books like The Bonfire of the Vanities and Liars Poker provided an eye-popping glimpse behind the rotten satin curtain of the greed-is-good decade, plus a schadenfreude particularly delicious to those of us for whom 80s greed did no good whatsoever. Tom Wolfe, Michael Lewis, and company skewered the hubristic losers and made a killing for themselves.

So its no surprisein fact, its overduethat authors here in the shady land of cyberscam should finally capture that fleeting zeitgeist of skyrocket options, 99 Kompressors, and Medina mansions for all. Last year, ex-Amazonian Mike Daisey was first out the gate with 21 Dog Years, a cheerfully unreliable memoir in which the Jayson Blairlike kid boasts of defrauding his generous employerwhich, full disclosure, was also once my employer. He cashed in with a stage show that was such a hit he parlayed it into a book contract. Hes a better writer than Blair, but minor, a clown.

Well, here come the heavy hitters, four current or upcoming boom-inspired books by real writers with a prayer of putting our experience on the literary map. This summer, Michael Byers gave us Long for This World (Houghton Mifflin, $24), a novel wherein Seattleites make insta-fortunes from biotech, Microsoft, and Amazon. Next week, Fred Moody, a longtime Seattle Weekly staffer who left the paper in 1999, publishes his boom-and-bust memoir, Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: A Love Story (St. Martins Press, $24.95). October brings Jonathan Rabans Waxwings (Pantheon, $24), a boom novel already long-listed for the Booker Prize. And next year comes Amazonia, the just-completed memoir by James Marcus, one of Amazons earliest staffersand formerly my officematewho for years was responsible for the home page.

As a 1980s Seattle Weekly writer (now back for my second tour), I know many people both in and behind these four books. When Moody describes SW founder David Brewster as Warner Brothers Tasmanian Devil in a narcolepsy ward, I may harrumph but have to smile. Moody ruefully tells how he dodged seven-figure Microsoft gigs in the 80s, then tipped off Katherine Koberg, Brewsters longtime lieutenant editor, to a posh Amazon job instead of applying himself in 96. Koberg hired me as her lieutenant. She and I are characters in Amazonia, as is Jeff Bezos, manning the dunk tank at the company picnic.

The four horsemen of the tech apocalypse get plenty right: the Nasdaq braggadocio; the Belltown restaurants in Rabans Waxwings that opened and closed so quickly that by the time you got a reservation, the place had changed from French to Afghan; the stunning collision of three culturesnot just C.P. Snows mutually clueless humanists and science types, but juggernaut MBAs, too. In Waxwings, techies talk literally in code, their speech sprinkled with impenetrable acronyms. Impenetrability was invulnerability. While researching his 1995 Microsoft book, I Sing the Body Electronic, Moody watched an executive torment a baffled Ph.D job applicant by ordering him to find the flaw in what was actually an infinite loop of computer code, while, by chance, Kurt Cobain threateningly reiterated Dont know what it MEANS on the radio.

Not knowing code meant that the throngs of English majors in the boom milieu werent invulnerable at all. In Waxwings, a journalist turned dot-commerwho reminds me of Rabans ex-wife, an SW alum who shared Kobergs Amazon officefinds that editorial types had no arcane science of their own with which to defend themselves, and so the programmers and the number crunchers, incapable of making sense to each other, usually settled their differences by laying into the dopes on the ninth floor . . . because everyone could read.

A chill wind of melancholy blows through these books, and a frosty moralism about tech wealth defiling the pristine Northwest lifestyle. When the Kingdome falls in Byers Long for This World, its a symbol of a larger fall. During the boom, muses its preIPO protagonist, Seattle was a softer, richer, larger, less backward sort of place now, a place where immense fortunes were being made . . . it was a strange, slightly dirty, uncomfortable feeling, as though he were negotiating to sell a memory, or a limb. Spotting a nouveau riche neighbors gaudy car, a character asks herself, If the SUV gave Jackie pleasure, was it really a bad thing? Yes.

But mild guy Byers is afflicted with Seattles original sin of niceness: He never goes ballistic, just belletristic. Hes too tolerant and sensitive to really throw the book at boom miscreants. Raban, the haughty possessor of the citys most impeccable prose style, is less shy about carving up the parvenus. He has the wife of one ex-Microsoft-VP-turned-digital-smell-entrepreneur spend the couples exponential wealth flying a very special gardener in from Bucharest to plant their lakeside backyard. (Raban actually met a Seattle dame who did this.) Gleefully razzing a manse like a partially-solved woodblock puzzle and a vast Chihuly representing either a tropical marine-life form or the biggest vulva in the world, Rabans writer protagonist, Tom Janeway, an analog person in a digital world, likens the smell magnates to arrivistes out of Dickens: Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new.

Raban only has the veneer of Swift, thoughinside hes got a heart as big as Dickens. He paints unbelievably skillful verbal portraits of Seattle scenes and types, from MFAs to MBAs to (his finest creation) an upwardly mobile Chinese stowaway who rises from Harbor Island to I-5s tent camp to Queen Anne Hill. But when Rabans satire occasionally wounds, its only a flesh wound. Like Byers, his pen isnt pointed enough.