cover image Out of Wonderland: A Saga

Out of Wonderland: A Saga

David Cates, . . Steerforth, $19.95 (141pp) ISBN 978-1-58642-095-6

Set adrift by sudden unemployment, the Candide-like protagonist of this biting satire of modern capitalism encounters other denizens of a dystopian Wonderland, including a con woman who mails bogus consulting bills to random businesses, some of whom pay up; a boy obsessed with sex; and a woman in pink lamé with a "background in medieval history and retail sales." Sustained by faith in the "Global Free Market," they endure sweatshops, war and the incessant search for employment amid nonstop economic upheaval. Their calamities are soothed by a culture of inane uplift: workplace fatalities are papered over with grief counseling, management celebrates the diversity of its viciously exploited labor force and the Panglossian Dr. Fingerdoo urges mourners at a funeral to "visualize success." It's a funny caricature, but Cates (Hunger in America ) gets at something subtler. In a society that extols nomadism and gnawing insecurity as "Mobility and Choice," his characters surrender individual autonomy—and responsibility—to the mysterious workings of the market, concluding that the world is a "big wind" that "lifts and flaps us like sheets on the line, and our one true choice is to hang on or not." Cates delivers a caustic but never cynical take on what he sees as the demoralizing fatalism implicit in today's market-mad ideology. Agent, Emilie Stewart. (Sept.)