Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Oh how I wanted to like this book but I couldn’t get into it. I will come back to it in the future once I get over my fear of books that get under my skin.

Dopamine City is the story of Lonny Cush, sanitation worker and single parent, kind-hearted and red-blooded, who is trying his best to protect his kids from the hysterical hyper-reality of 21st century life.

A satire on modern life and our dependency on technology and social media, Dopamine City is structurally interesting with Pierre including columns at the side of the text to mirror the diversion via screens, bombarding us with different viewpoints and texts imitating web content of differing quality. To some extent this works but as the novel goes on it proves literally exhausting to read and takes away from the depth of the central narrative.

I really did not like this one. The style is weird and I could not really concentrate on the story. I DNF:ed it. Just niot for me,.

Dense though lyrical prose, I got the impression that DBC Pierre is a writer who is more about the technicalities of writing than the storytelling aspects because I had no idea what was going on most of the time. Characters nattering at one another, I think I got a vague idea that the main character was a single dad who was struggling for some reason, and there was something going on in their neighbourhood, but mostly I was lost. It's like Pierre focuses so much on the words that he forgets to GET ON WITH IT! Good title though.

D. B. C. Pierre's Vernon God Little is one of the most controversial Booker winners ever, but I really loved this edgy novel about gun violence at schools, a book that is also, in a larger sense, a commentary on the state of the world (keyword: disaffection). And this new feat deals with alienation as well, this time brought about by the shift from the real to the digital world. Lon, an unemployed single father, struggles to provide for his kids, and when he finally gives in to his daughter's wish to own a cell phone, their lives and the narrative explode in parallel existences: Pierre uses columns at the side of the text to mirror the diversion via screens, bombarding us with different viewpoints and texts imitating web content of differing quality.

At first, this makes for an interesting experiment, a little like BBC's "Sherlock" tried to incorporate screened content in the moving image. But the book has 400 pages, and this is basically the one interesting thing about it. The stuff that is exhausting about the web is also exhausting on the page, and while this is exactly the effect that Pierre is going for, it doesn't exactly make for an interesting read. The narrative itself becomes less and less involving, also because the immersion is lost because of the inserted text blocks that may or may not be relevant or worth your time (again: Just like articles on the web).

And while there is certainly some truth about the dangers of the digital rabbit hole and the effects of the attention economy, a wholly negative outlook on the web is not exactly a nuanced approach. This prose is flashy (and I'm all for flashy prose), but not deep enough. Still, I will follow what this author does next: Pierre has quite some tricks up his sleeve, but this novel fell short for me.

Meanwhile in Dopamine City is the fifth novel by Man-Booker Prize-winning Australian-born author, DBC Pierre (Peter Findlay). Having successfully managed to thus far resist Shelby-Anne’s persistent pleading for a smart-phone, one impulsive act by Lonregan Cush makes the purchase an essential part of keeping his little girl close. And if his nine-year-old has a smart-phone, he’ll need to enter the digital age too, swimming through the cyberspace miasma himself, to keep her safe.

If the closest it has ever been to sublime was before his wife, Diane died nine years earlier, Lonnie’s life, over the course of the novel, steadily progresses to the ridiculous, then to the tragic, and ultimately to the sad and pathetic, until the final, hopeful, pages. Along the way, he is swamped by more useless information than he could ever want or need. He loses his job, some of his friends, custody, his freedom and sometimes, hope.

More than half of the novel is presented in a rather annoying format of the main narrative (in which, as a further irritant, there are no quote marks for speech) together with a continuous sidebar that takes up a third of the page. This side bar is a newsfeed that relates to the main narrative (a bit like those annoying ads that pop up in your browser pages) consisting of (often bizarre) research and studies, equally bizarre apps, weird litigation, support campaigns for wacky causes (such as the rights of the virtually pregnant).

If, initially, the reader has to get past the blue-collar-worker patois without a phrase book, the story does later demonstrate the phenomenon of language being unrecognisably altered at viral speed through trendsetters dictating use. With occasionally convoluted, but always rich descriptive prose, Pierre also explores the awful potential of trust scores. This is a funny, clever and insightful commentary on the world we now inhabit, and the Often scary) direction it is taking.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Faber & Faber

Definitely a dystopian dream-like novel, this is not my usual fare for reading...basically a father trying to protect his children from the on-line world, dominated by the Company (Google?? Facebook?). Part satire, part speculative fiction.

I had wondered where DBC Pierre had got to - as I really enjoyed his debut Vernon God Little all those years ago. Maybe I've changed or maybe life has made his writing less accessible and funny, but this book disappointed me and I struggled to finish it. I found it a little too pleased with itself I'm afraid. Sorry

Vernon God Little was my first introduction to DBC Pierre and I loved it so I was very keen to read this one, This feels a lot darker and certainly scarier. The way we control our on-line presence or have it manipulated by others makes this dystopian read very disturbing. I'm still not sure how I felt about things overall. I will probably read again with a clearer eye.

Single parent Lonny lives in the worst end of the worst street in the worst part of the city. When he is retrenched from his dead-end job as a sewerage worker, he seems to have hit rock bottom. But then the social security people come and accuse him of assaulting one of his children, and threaten to give them to his mother-in-law if he does not submit to anger management, and to the endless surveillance reach of the state.

In this dystopian state, one's online influence is all that matters, and young people are the real economic power, because they are more adept with the technology. Stories, photos and memes shared online can make or ruin a reputation instantly, whether they are true or not. The only thing that matters is how it looks to online viewers, who are capable of instant turnarounds in their judgments as soon as a conflicting meme arises. Lonny is bewildered by this new online world, and all his efforts to get to grips with it only sink him deeper into the role of social outcast.

Pierre has captured something significant here about where social media is taking us, particularly the role of huge corporations in capturing more and more data about us in order to line their own pockets. In Dopamine City, an algorithm designed for measuring popularity online is swiftly adopted by banks, government and employers as a standard for who deserves trust and who doesn't, running out of control and way beyond its original intent. Much as Facebook is now much, much more than the platform for keeping up with friends that it started as.

One way that Pierre has captured this online life is to chop up the narrative with incessant posts from news feeds and influencers. The news feeds provide a rolling account of what is going on in the world around Lonny, the way that various influencers and social movements emerge and interact, and how that spills out into real life.

This reflects the way that our social media life interrupts our real life and drives our attention away from what is really important and that, ultimately, is what this book is all about. I would say, though, that this writing style can be quite disconcerting, and I could see people who like a clear narrative flow disliking it intensely.

DBC Pierre is an extraordinary writer - I've followed his work since he won the Booker Prize and his latest absolutely lives up to his best. A welcome return.

A sincere thank you to the publisher, author and Netgalley for providing me with an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest reviewl.

This is not my usual genre, I’m more into crime books and psychological ones too however I wanted to take the opportunity to read something from outside my norm. And I am glad I did!! Thank you for  opening up my mind to something totally different.

A fascinating, hilarious and terrifying speculative fiction that kept me hooked till the last page. It's one of those book you can love or hate and I loved it.
It's full of ideas, voices, descriptions and sometimes the abundance of ideas and voices made me dizzy but it was also a reflection of the current information overload.
Shelby and Lonny are great characters. Each of them represents an approach to the net culture, one will win and the other will lose.
The story is set in an unnamed city dominated by tech giant, it could be anywhere because there's no place on the Earth where tech giant cannot reach.
It was a fascinating, entertaining and thought provoking read, highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

The book is set in an unspecified country – much (if not most) of it reads like America but (as a hurricane reference makes obvious it clearly is not America) – may be this itself is a satirical comment on how the internet firms are remaking the world in their image.

The book starts with a just made unemployed sewerage worker Lon(nie) – he lives in a town dominated in all aspects by a Big Tech firm (the Octagon), and increasingly home to refugees fleeing an increasingly nuclearised war in the Middle East. He is the widowed (his wife having died of lupus) father of two children – most noticeably (see below) a young daughter Shelby-Ann (whose age serves as effectively the punchline to the book’s opening and introduced a key theme of the book – the widening generation divide and the clear winners of that divide).

Having previously lost custody of Shelby to his mother-in-law and regained it, his slap of her in the first chapter threatens to lose custody again – although it becomes quickly clear to him and us that he has largely already lost her to an online world (“the grid”) that he has tried to prevent either she or he joining. In an attempt to stave off authority intervention, he buys her a phone and then realises that if he is to maintain any form of connection with her he will need to join her in that world.

And at the point when Lon finally decides that he needs to engage with the future, get a smartphone and join the grid, we are told

"He opened both eyes.
Looked at the bedroom window.
Then at the screen.
One was real life.
The other was the future.
Or something.
One was here and now.
The other was – something else.
Information.
A binary life had started."

And from then on (apart from a couple of occasions when Lon decides to turn off his screen) our reading experience mirrors this.

The page is divided in half

On the left we have a series of first party accounts (of varying lengths) many (and the longest) by Lon, but many by other characters (including: his mother-in-law, a childhood flame turned social worker, Shelby and her rival turned friend, some of Lon’s ex-colleagues: one a victim of an online pile-on, the other an overnight sensation, a key worker for the Octagon at the heart of their most advanced projects and an ageing academic reluctantly employed by them to stave off governmental intervention) - which advance the narrative at least partly conventionally.

On the right a series of grid articles – one per page – which largely match, and in many cases, neatly complement the narrative.

This effect works brilliantly – as a reader our eyes flicker from one side to the other – just as, of course, our real life experience is now divided with that of our phones. Perhaps even more cleverly, the right hand trail is easier on the concentration, more easily fulfilling, a quicker hit of reading pleasure – whereas the left hand side can feel convoluted and overly complicated.

The list of areas and ideas explored in the book - most of them simply satirical extrapolations (and not very far from the present day) of current trends, and some of which are more like running jokes, includes such things as: pregnancies induced from a discarded hotel tissues in a hotel room occupied by a single man; the abuse of menopausal halting drugs; a back lash against adults imposition of the artificial concept of childhood and a general advance of children’s rights and denigration of anyone over thirty; the use of vacuum cleaners to deal with infantile cellulite; Honeybeetox for pouty lips; a huge backlash against the insidious effects of beers; a social trust score taken to extremes; a backlash against medical expertise; confiscation of children’s phones ruled equivalent to isolation torture in POW camps; terrorist grooming of young girls; deliberately contracted gum disease to make teeth appear whiter by contrast; tigers as birthday party accessories; animal ear transplants for humans; overnight meme sensations; the replacement of conventional linear time with user-defined Quantum “Curlytime”; fennec fox fever; the rep(lication) of people from their selfies..

Whereas some of these ideas are used and discarded like the tissue (Pierre I think follows the “fail fast, fail often” Silicon valley mantra), some (a little like the used tissue) are pregnant with possibility and give birth to a whole series of other ideas. In the tissues case for example: Serviette roulette played by teens risking pregnancy, lawsuits about the ownership of DNA left by people in public establishments, identification of the tissue as a live weapon, men refusing to stay in hotels etc.

The book is a very long way from perfect. Too many story lines are simply left dangling – unexplored, unexplained or a little of both - weakest perhaps a rather bizarre late revelation about Lon’s neglected (both by Lon and the author) son Egan. And the book’s ending is decidedly bizarre. But as said above I think some of these flaws are very deliberate.

I can see many people really hating this book and many others using it to bemoan the falling standard of literary fiction over time – but as the book would say, that’s haners and declinists for you.

Consider me a DBCBae

Meanwhile in Dopamine City is a satirical, technological novel about a single father trying to protect his children from the online world. Lonnie Cush has been laid off from his sanitation job—well, is waiting to hear about retraining—in a city dominated by the Company, a big tech company. He's trying to stop his mother-in-law getting custody of his two children, Egan and Shelby-Ann, whilst also dealing with the fact that nine-year-old Shelby is desperate for a smartphone. When he eventually gives in, she's opened up to a world of trolls and a range of new digital products and ideas, and Lon has to dive deeper online too to try and keep up.

The novel has two elements, the Cush family's struggles and the wider context of the digital and non-digital world, and much of the novel has parallel news reports showing how ideas and events progress and get twisted in different ways. Reading both together opens up elements of the plot and provides clever commentary, but makes for a difficult reading experience at times, constantly cutting off in the midst of a sentence to read the rest of the page. This also means there's a number of parallel narratives which it can be hard to keep track of, but they add different layers to the satire and widen the story, set in a non-specific city with non-specific countries involved.

This is a book with an interesting concept that takes elements of modern technology and pushes them to extremes, whilst also looking at a failing father, and the conceit of having the news feed down the side is an interesting way of giving wider context in the narrative. However, this makes it difficult to read, and quite a few of the narrative points felt very familiar from other recent stories like Black Mirror, which made it less engaging for me.

Wow this is an exhausting read of a book, but well worth the effort. It's like being punched repeatedly in the face after drinking five strong cups of coffee or maybe taking something stronger.

DBC Pierre takes one long deep breath then jumps in fast, pushing the novel form to do something new and freakish. He succeeds in creating a dystopian dissonance and bitter satire that makes you wonder if anyone will ever find a way out.

Lonnie is the main character, a newly-redundant sewer worker in an anonymous city, single father of two children who struggles to make sense of the new online possibilities from his distinctly analogue viewpoint. When he gives his nine-year old daughter a smartphone for her birthday to make up for a misunderstanding, all hell breaks loose.

The main narrative is insistently and repeatedly interrupted by secondary social media stories that break in on your concentration, mimicking the way Lonnie gradually loses the plot and is gradually taken over by the increasingly threatening robotics and AI technology at play.

A host of secondary characters follow seemingly inevitable trajectories and the background builds in tension as most people are taken in and taken over by the digital world:

“Every second an arm like a blade combs the surface of the earth for dopamine, yours and mine, our whims and arguments, our relationships with others, our attempts at love, our anger, our caring, to embezzle it as revenue for a dozen male college dropouts.”

There are some very finely drawn and poignant moments in the book, as one character falls into dementia and as Lonnie becomes increasingly obsessed with his dead wife, but the effect is rather in the general despair that falls to all the characters as they try to live up to digital perfection in a stubbornly analogue world.

Tensions accelerate and build to a conclusion that is either a resolution of a kind, or a fall into deeper despair.

With a worryingly short leap from our current isolated present to an escalating and terrifying future, the book acts as a warning or an incitement to follow our obsessions with the virtual word to a logical conclusion - is it too late to dig our way out?

As a wickedly smart near-future speculative fiction, Meanwhile in Dopamine City feels like what every modern novel warning of the upcoming singularity wants to be; and with a satirical snarky vibe (that works well to entertainingly expose the dangerous path we're all sleepwalking along), I was put in mind of the great works of David Foster Wallace and John Kennedy Toole. I have read D.B.C. Pierre before and I reckon this is his best work yet.

As a recently laid-off sewer worker, Lonnie understands the necessity of separating the pure from the polluting, and as a single father with a dead wife and a mother-in-law longing for custody of his two kids, he works hard to protect his family from the societal forces (and particularly those online) that would seek to foul them. Soon after the book begins, Lonnie gives in to the pressure to buy his nine-year-old daughter her first smart phone, and as Shelby is nearly immediately put in the crosshairs of trolls, bodyshamers, and men with questionable intentions (she's nine!!), Lonnie finds himself ramping up his own online presence in order to understand this new world. In a format that sees the main narrative constantly interrupted by developing online stories – viral newsbites that demonstrate how petty groupthink becomes enforceable policy – D. B. C. Pierre doesn't make too big a leap from our present day to show how fast the world can change and how little control we as individuals might have over these changes. And especially when the nearby Octagon is populated with technocrat billionaires striving to control and profit from the neurochemistry of our monkeybrains through the devices we hold in our hands.