Book Review: TWET--What It Gets Right

 The Wrong End of Time by John Brunner, page 28.

I am really impressed by this author's condemnation of materialism and keeping up with the Joneses. I just wish that in the process, he didn't seem to condemn the metaphorical Mr. and Mr. Jones just for being a couple.
Let's see what our Soviet agent thinks of this near-future society, and to a larger extent, what the author thought of our present-day society:

They would take pains to impress him with their loyalty, their right thinking; they would have the proper photographs and flags on display. Small matter if they were afraid of some impersonal, august, omniscient security force, rather than the cold consensus of their neighbors--the effect was essentially the same. 

 That last sentence tells us that the author is talking about more than a fictional near-future world. Indeed, his fictional America and world is merely an exaggeration of our own--from the garbage filling the ocean, to everyone being armed, to the televangelist being a creepy pervert who tries to grope girls at parties and touches himself while watching others making out, but is still revered by his flock. (Although, to be fair, that last one probably isn't an exaggeration at all.)
The cold consensus of our neighbors--is that what we are so afraid of? I've often wondered if people in subdivisions are more likely than country people, or even city people, to feel pressured into buying expensive cars and boats to impress their neighbors. Country people look out their windows and see nature or their own field animals; city people look out and see strangers coming and going. But the people in the suburbs look out their windows, and see people that they have to live with and put up with, possibly for the rest of their lives.
They see the neighbor next door who always seems like a smugly perfect mom, or the guy across the street who always has to top everyone else with his gadgets. (Or am I just thinking of sitcoms?)
Either way, I have noticed that, in my experience, people living and working in crowded environments--suburbs, large employers such as schools and government organizations, and churches--tend to spend more conspicuously. This is especially true of churches, where the pressure is to put up a "blessed" front so that you look like a good Christian.
My mom had a "good" job for a little while, with a local government agency. But she didn't like it, mostly because of the pettiness of the women working there. She mentioned to me that every one of them had designer purses and expensive cars. With how many people were working there, the Veterans' Administration had become its own materialistic subculture.
I'm sure there are some that resist the urge to buy nice new cars, furniture, boats, and vacations. But they don't talk about it. And living in the suburbs, especially more prosperous or middle-class suburbs, would not make it any easier.

They would strive to be dedicated pillars of their community, set on raising their children to follow in their footsteps, endlessly quarreling with them when they scoffed or asked unanswerable questions. 
But he had seen a man under a tree: thin, wearing only a loincloth, one eye filmed with a cataract, who spent the day in ecstatic enjoyment of the sun's heat on his skin, and at nightfall fumbled in the bowl before him and ate what he found. There was always something in the bowl.

After that he had to be Donald Holtzer again, and Holtzer was not troubled by such thoughts. 


The spy, "Holtzer," was thinking of a man he had seen in India, who owned nothing but a begging bowl. The man was content, even with so little. And "there was always something in the bowl." The universe, the world, provided for the man. And in a less general sense, his fellow human beings were willing to share. There was enough for everyone. How could Sheklov, even in his alter ego as Holtzer, not be changed after what he had seen? How could he ever be the same, when he had seen the alternative? Or when he knew there was an alternative?
I like how Brunner, the author, has a talent for making a seemingly insignificant sentence, in context, become dramatic and raise the conflict of the story and the inner conflict of the characters. That, at least, is something this obsessively homophobic--and thereby harmfully mistaken--man did right.