I’m a big fan of “dark” children’s books, and my interest in Feed , by M.T. Anderson, was sparked after I read a good review of the book in the States. The story takes place in a future America in which everyone has an Internet connection - a “Feed” - implanted directly in their brain. The book centers on Titus, an average, big-spending, semi-illiterate, Feed-addicted teenager who has his life turned upside down when he meets a girl who doesn’t conform with the norms of his decaying society. It’s an interesting and timely premise, and Anderson offers intriguing glimpses of an even darker world just beyond the edges of the story - but ultimately, the book just didn’t really work for me.

First of all, there’s the matter of the slang that Anderson invents for his teenage characters. It is very, very difficult to invent a patois and make it seem plausible, and I’m not convinced that Feed pulls it off. I think I understand the author’s reasons for inventing slang rather than using current teen-speak. If nothing else, it prevents the book from being immediately (out)dated. But the language seems forced to me. A Clockwork Orange is a prime example of a book that invents a credible dialect and handles it absolutely brilliantly; by the end of the book, you don’t even notice that you’re reading “Nadsat” rather than standard English. By the end of Feed, however, I was still stumbling over the fake slang, and still not really believing in it.

Apart from the slang, I’m not sure that even the normal teen-speak in the book - the whole “like” and “you know” thing - was entirely believable. It’s been a while since I was a teenager, but I’m not so out of touch that I don’t know what teenagers today sound like, and as I read Feed (which is narrated in the first person by the main teen character), I just didn’t “hear” a teenager. I could be entirely wrong here - only a teenager could tell me for sure - but I just felt that Anderson didn’t really get the niveau of his writing right. The language seemed to veer between being aimed at children and being aimed at adults, without ever gelling somewhere in the middle to satisfy the expectations of teens, the target audience.

And finally, there was the book’s Message. Feed is a satire, an indictment of consumer culture and modern society. This is not a bad thing; in fact, this is a very good thing. I’m all for satire and criticism. The problem is that Feed doesn’t just show you how things are and let you make the deeper connections yourself. Instead, it hits you over the head repeatedly, in a million different ways, so that by the end of the book, you find yourself cowering in the corner and saying, “Okay, okay, I get it already!”

In this respect, Feed actually reminded me a lot of White Noise , by Don DeLillo. Both books make what I think are valid points - blind consumerism is bad, materialism is bad, superficiality is bad - but the authors don’t seem to trust their readers enough to reach the right conclusions on their own. Maybe I’m simply already too cynical for my own good, and maybe a teenager really wouldn’t “get it” right away, but the message behind Feed (and White Noise, for that matter) just seemed so blindingly obvious to me from the outset that I was a bit bored by it by the time I reached the end of the book.

To be fair, Feed does have some clever ideas (pop-up ads in your brain?), it’s unusually dark for a “young adult novel”, it kept me reading right to the end, and it would perhaps offer a startling revelation to someone younger and less critical of the world around them. But I - being old and jaded as I am, I guess - was ultimately left feeling disappointed. If a book is going to tell me something I already know, then I want it to do so in a way that makes me feel as if I’m just finding it out for the first time. With Feed, I really felt as though I had heard it all before.

Further reading…