Feed Feedback

M.T. Anderson clearly was trying to create the book of a generation when he wrote Feed. The success of his aspirations, however, do not quite equal his effort. Feed seems to lack real character development and portrays his extremely pessimistic views of the future. There comes a point where a person becomes too negative that people generally ignore him/her. M.T. Anderson comes dangerously close to that point. That doesn’t, however, mean that there wasn’t any success in his novel. It was well constructed (characters aside) and the setting of the novel was imaginatively realistic – a hard feat to accomplish in a science-fiction novel.
The character that bothered me the most was Titus. I realize he was shallow by design, but I couldn’t figure out who he was. Sometimes he was portrayed differently from his friends – he didn’t go into mal (the futuristic equivalent of drugs), he was caring towards Violet, he had a sense about him that he wasn’t just his feed. Then other times I was led to believe that he was just another bland personality without any real care for the world, such as when he breaks up with Violet, or when he deletes her memories. Overall, Titus is a frustratingly shallow character that is difficult to understand or relate to. In fact, the same can be said about almost every character in the book, save Violet and her father. They were all hard to relate to because they seemed so unreal, so careless, and so human-less. A lot of it had to do with the nature of the novel, but for such a fantastic book, M.T. Anderson’s characters seemed unreal.
What I liked most about Feed was the world that M.T. Anderson created in the novel. Without removing any feasibility, he used his powerful imagination to create a world on the verge of self-destruction that is run by advanced technology and overrun by crimes existent since the beginning of time. Political corruption and the advent of computers has replaced many of the troubles that humans face on an emotional side (which explains why Titus had so much trouble dealing with the emotions that Violet brought with her) but as M.T. Anderson asks, is that substitute really the direction we want society to be headed? The novel clearly answers itself in that regard. I think that M.T. Anderson’s view of the future are extreme (although I’m not ruling it out) but I do think that he brings up important topics anyway. Computers do enhance our lives (heck, I’m writing this on one), and are an important part of our everyday lives – something that cannot and will not be replaced. I do fear the day that computer replace out ability to think and feel emotions, and hopefully that day will never happen. Life is nothing without our ability to think and feel emotions. One of the wisest and most memorable passages I’ve ever read came from a book about basketball. On the topic of pre-game nervousness it said to be thankful that you are able to feel these emotions, that there are so many people in this world working 9 to 5 in cubicles who go through the motions never to feel the ups and downs of life. Regardless of what book it came from or the subject at which it was written in, I think that this is an important reminder for all of us. Feelings are not replaceable, and when they are, everything gets, for lack of a better word, screwed up.