The Word Exchange is largely composed of the journal entries of two employees of
the NADEL, the North American Dictionary of the English Language: Anana
"Ana" Johnson and Horace "Bart" Tate. Ana's father, Doug
Johnson, is the NADEL's general editor, and he has gone missing, leaving behind
one clue: the word “Alice.” As Ana and Bart try to get to the bottom of Doug's
disappearance, they uncover an even more sinister truth: something, or someone,
is destroying language, starting by wiping out the NADEL's corpus and ending
with a pandemic virus that attacks human language centers, rendering people
incapable of speaking or processing language as they used to.
The world Graedon writes about in The
Word Exchange is not too far removed from our world, perhaps only a few
years in the future. In this world, Memes—devices something like our
smart-phones, but with a lot more features, such as the ability to predict the
user's needs—are ubiquitous. People hail cabs, pay bills, text, chat, and play
games on them. They also use them to look up words on the titular The Word
Exchange, a sort of online dictionary. So far, so familiar, right?
Doug's disappearance coincides with
the release of a new version of the Meme—the Nautilus. This device attaches
directly to the user's skin, merges with their bio-matter, and does not require
a screen. Instead, it projects images, smells, sounds, and other sensations
directly into the brain. Oh, and it gives the user an overwhelming sense of
calm and well-being. Not creepy at all . . .
Doug, an inveterate lover of print
and books, has always warned Ana against using her Meme. His worries are proven
correct when Ana discovers that use of the Meme (and, to a greater extent, the
Nautilus) is strongly correlated with the Word Flu, a disease that is spreading
through English language speakers. Before it kills you, the Word Flu manifests
as mild to severe aphasia, which Graedon has cunningly inserted into the
first-person narrative of her characters. The effect is incredibly eerie. Ana
and Bart both begin to use words that aren't words: "zhaman,"
"eezow," and "lavo." While the reader can still make out
the meaning from the context, the casual, off-hand delivery of these words
lends The Word Exchange a deep sense of foreboding.
Ultimately, the Big Bad ends up being
a corporation. The academics, banded together in a secret group called the
Diachronic Society, help save the day and civilization by coming up with a cure
for the Word Flu. Spoiler: it involves reading books. Hooray for the
Humanities!
Graedon's writing is strong, lyrical,
and descriptive; I was especially impressed with the verbs she chose, as in
this sentence: "My neck petalled with heat." The writing was also
emotionally resonant. I caught myself choking up several times as Ana described
her frustration, panic, and sadness. At the same time, it was emotionally
restrained. Take this example, Ana's description of two ex-lovers having
coffee: "Doug said it was 'nice," Vera that it was 'pleasant,"
which I think means it was sad for both of them." That understatement
completely captures the sense of resignation and loss I associate with
meetings-with-exes.
But, after a while, the detail The
Word Exchange lavishes on us became too much for me. There are so many
consciously creative descriptions of people ("a laconic brunette with
luminescent eyes who speaks as if she has marbles in her mouth") and of
physical sensations* ("my stomach fluttered like a wind-torn plastic
bag") that, at some point, it just felt like showing off. Worse, it got in
the way of the story moving forward.
The main character, as quirky and
lovable as she was at first, also began to grate on me. Several reviews have
pointed out how TSTL Ana is and it's true; she puts herself in danger several
times against the warning of her friends, her past experience, and her better
judgment. But even dumber, I feel, is her attraction to either of the men in
her life. Both Max, the rich cheating ex-boyfriend with a gold toilet, and
Bart, the overlooked sweet-and-sensitive work-friend, are pretty arrogant and
proprietary of Ana. Max's attitude towards her is more obvious, and more
egregious, but I was also put off by Bart's assumption that he's the only guy
in the world capable of really "getting" Ana. He seems to think that,
because he loves her for her brain and
her body, he automatically deserves her. (Also, Bart name-drops European
philosophers and cool bands and calls his thoughts his "pensées," so,
no.)
Listening to The Word Exchange on
audio also had its strengths and weaknesses. I really enjoyed both readers.
Gilbert especially read with an emotional range that contributed to my
verklempt-ness. And hearing the book rather than seeing it compounded the eerie
feeling I got when Graedon began dropping the verbal “slips” into her
character’s speech. Instead of being able to scan back over a word visually and
confirm that it was a “slip,” I was perpetually in the position of the
characters themselves, wondering “Did I just hear what I think I heard?” At the
same time, though, hearing it occluded some of Graedon’s creativity. Some of
the “slip” words, for instance, were spelled with Cyrillic letters, a
difference that didn’t come across strongly in audio. And one of the book’s
best examples of word play, the Creatorium (rather than the cretorium), didn’t
come across at all; I had no idea until I looked at a paper copy that the word
was intentionally spelled differently.
In the end, however, the biggest
problem I had with The Word Exchange was that, without exception, it privileges
the written word over the digital text. While I will be the first to admit that
the relentless digitization of our world has its problems, I am not a
doomsayer. The history of language is full of sea-changes and each one has come
with its attendant crisis. Language always changing slowly, imperceptibly; that
process just speeds up when a new technology appears. From stone to manuscript,
to hand-press print, to industrialized automated printing, to digital text—each
of these textual revolutions came with major shifts in the methods of (and
purposes for) disseminating human language. And each one inspired fear and
concern. When the print revolution happened, people associated printed texts
with low-class, with trash, with easily disseminated heresy, evil, and
wickedness. They worried about the rise of literacy hurting our eyes and
causing diseases like brain fever and hysteria. They worried about not being
able to remember things any longer because they'd be written down. Language and
access to language has always been policed (who gets to write? who is taught to
read? what kind of texts can they access, and how?) and the current furor
surrounding the digital revolution is not fundamentally different from the
worries that happened when print was invented and began to be widely used, nor
is it different from worries that attended the rise of radio, TV, the
telephone, etc.
Despite this, people still resist language
change. While it does not seem like Graedon is one of those people herself (she
admits to using a smart-phone), her book memorializes written and printed text
and puts it on a pedestal. Graedon's book speaks to our nostalgia for print, a
nostalgia I certainly take part in, but it doesn’t really offer much else as a
compelling alternative to the digital world we already live in.
*An interesting experiment would be
to count how many different ways Graedon describes Ana's sensation of
nervousness.
(This blog post originally appeared at FantasyLiterature.com, where I gave it 3 out of 5 stars.)
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