Debugging the software of life

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, May 3, 1998

Page: E2

Section: Books

Then, last year, the lawyer Dooling came rampaging out of chambers in ``Blue Streak,'' a tirade against the encroachment of sexual-harassment laws upon the right to free speech -- laws, he also asserts, that attack men as biological beings. In its wrath and agitation, this extended essay was a book to dismay even the reader who is generally sympathetic to his point of view. Now we have Dooling's third novel, ``Brain Storm,'' and I am bound to report that that lawyer fellow has not entirely retreated but has seized a portion of the novel to argue his case. That is too bad, but it is the only thing I can say against this otherwise very funny, astute, and rather sweet book.

``Brain Storm'' is set in St. Louis in 2002, a time different from our own only in certain inevitabilities; that is, in slight extrapolations from the present state of cybernetics and legislation. Joe Watson is a young lawyer in the prestigious firm of Stern, Pale. He was hired for his expertise in executing computer searches and is, in the argot of his peers, a ``silicon turbonerd,'' one of the ``spods'' to be found ``clustergeeking'' around new machines, putting them through their arcane, acronymic paces.

Although as a law student Watson had fantasized about a public-spirited career on the lines of Clarence Darrow's, he now is married to the beautiful, big-spending Sandra. She comes from what her father calls ``Real Money'' and has consonant views on his role as provider for her and their two small children. At the moment, the family is living well beyond its means, a fact Watson has not cared to share with his life's companion.

In the way of the geek, Watson can't help comparing life's contrariness with his computer's rationality. ``Home life,'' he reflects unhappily, is ``too fraught with emotional trauma, uncertainty, domestic peril, daily catastrophes -- all impossible to guard against via proper systems maintenance. Hard drive failure was easy to guard against. Just maintain meticulous and thorough backups. Keep mirror images of the logical drive on a separate removable device. But how to run an uninstall or debug utility on the wife? Defrag and reformat your kid's brain? PKZIP the two dog files and archive them in remote sectors of his hard drive, eliminate their presence on his personalized desktop, while allowing other family members access to them by way of multitasking, elsewhere, off in some other window, far from his?''

This assessment of life is a running joke -- or rather, a recurrent, deflating metaphor -- throughout the novel. The targets of Dooling's irony are two: the view of the world that limits reality to what can be explained and controlled, that rejects the mystery of freedom; and the related and ever-growing impulse to police thought itself. Watson comes up against the latter when he is directed by the courts to take on, pro bono, the defense of a man charged not only with murder but murder perpetrated as a hate crime. The accused white man, it seems, found his wife -- in flagrante -- with a black, deaf tutor of sign language and shot the man dead, an act that has raised ululations in the press and a consequent hue and cry from the public.

It is on the subject of hate crimes that the lawyer Dooling makes his arguments heard; we discover that by 2002 legislation in this matter has predictably expanded. Though this certainly seems a pernicious trend, the filing of this entire brief, as it were, weighs the book down and detracts from the irony, which is more devastating than any bald statement. In any case, Watson is now tarred with the same brush as his client, and becomes the recipient of hate mail -- and, just as gruesomely, of fan mail, too. Worse, his career is in trouble. Stern, Pale is, after all, a firm for which reality is synonymous with billable hours. His family and professional lives are shattered; ominously, his hard drive crashes. ``Suddenly, all of nature, all reality, seemed a seamless web of psychic and physical events.''

What follows throws him together with a beautiful brain scientist who hopes to assist him in getting his client off by proving that the accused has defective brain chemistry. In addition, she would like Watson to participate in certain research-oriented sexual acts, and is intent on converting him to the view that the soul and free will are fictions, and, further, that conscience is ``a vestigial, evolutionary device.'' Meanwhile, his client -- as unlovely a person as you could want -- seems to be involved with some shady characters: ``Buck,'' who sends bundles of money to Watson, and two galoots, ``Stocky two-hundred pounders, both straining at the seams to move up a size into new dark-blue-and-black suits.''

As the plot builds momentum, other wickedly depicted characters and unlikely heroes roam the terrain of this comic tale of good and evil. The author, we discern from the ``A.M.D.G.'' (ad majorem Dei gloriam: ``to the greater glory of God'') that appears as part of the dedication, is a student of Jesuits -- a training we understand to be ineradicable. And indeed, here is evidence. The order, famous for knocking the stuffing out of merely secular reasoning, has produced a rock-fisted pugilist in the novelist Dooling.