A regular guy Book

Two and a half stars. Maybe two and a quarter.

This was a book club selection, a fictional retelling of the rise and fall (before the return and higher rise) of Steve Jobs. Only in this book Steve Jobs is named Tom Owens, and instead of running a computer company, he runs a company that does something even the omniscient narrator isn't sure about.

And that is one of the fatal flaws of this book. Tom Owens appears to have all his success because he literally is bathed in luck, yet despite the many times we're deep in his inner thoughts, we don't know what the hell either of his companies does to make money. There's some product called N12, but whether it's a polymer, an antibiotic, or a vaccine, I couldn't tell you, and neither could Tom. And I find that completely unbelievable. Nobody could start two firms so important that mysterious Bohemian Club backers are discussing Owens running for California Governor, and not be aware of what the places are doing.

And that's not Owens' fault. That's Simpson's failure to convince me that Owens was who she said he was, or that Alta actually existed in one particular place. Not only does Owens not know how he made his millions, but his town can't figure out if it's in Silicon Valley or the Sierra foothills. I suspect Simpson hasn't been to either place, because she shows Owens voting (for the first time) and literally pulling a lever of an old-fashioned voting machine.

Had Simpson actually visited California, she would discover those machines weren't used out here. Similarly, she can't place the town where the novel occurs, because she describes it as being both in Santa Clara County (e.g. Silicon Valley) and next to a town called Auburn (a real city of that name is a suburb of Sacramento in the foothills, 150 miles away). There's a mention of Grass Valley Community College; Grass Valley is another Sierra Foothills locale. We don't know where Alta is because Simpson doesn't know, so she can't make it real enough. Her Tom Owens character lived in a copper magnate's decaying mansion (as did Jobs, in Woodside, 10 miles from Palo Alto) and then bought a house in "Alta" (Jobs bought a house in Palo Alto). But he grew up in "Auburn." Is Auburn really Los Altos, where Jobs grew up? Is it Mountain View, where he also lived? Both these towns are right next to Palo Alto. Or is this part of the 30% of Tom Owens that doesn't track with Steve Jobs? For example, Tom Owens' mother died at his birth and he was given up for adoption. Steve Jobs' mother gave him up at birth but stayed very much alive... to later give birth to Mona Simpson. So in this novel Simpson literally killed off her own mother as a plot device.

It isn't just the instability of place and business that's the problem; there's also a tendency to shift Point of View more often than the reader turns pages. If I came across this novel in one of my writing classes I would red-ink "POV shift" every three paragraphs. Now, I recognize that a good writer can break the rules if it's done well. But the POV shifts are NOT done well. They're just DONE. And they're annoying. We're deep in Tom Owens' thoughts, no, now we're in his daughter's thoughts, no, now where in her mother's thought, oops, over to Owens' girlfriend, and now over to his friend Noah. This isn't just omniscient narrator. This is adrift narrator.

The Owens/Jobs character is interesting, but he's not the only character we get to know in the book, and many of the others really weren't worth the time to delve into. Mary, the mother of Owens' daughter Jane, is annoying in a way that doesn't enlighten or even entertain. She doesn't grow as a character, and her daughter doesn't even seem to learn anything from her as a negative example. I really had difficulty understanding what Owens ever saw in Mary in the first place, given how often we see how intensely drawn he is to perfect simplicity. (And there's another failing of the book, that drive, which was signature Jobs in his insistence on elegant style in Apple products, makes no sense whatsoever when remaking him as some sort of biotech mogul.)

It's always more fun to write a scathing review than a glowing one. I can't say what compelled me to finish this book after showing up at book club with it 2/3 done. Everyone else had similar frustrations with the book and the characters. I guess I was hoping, even if it didn't get any better, that there would be some cathartic realization for someone, somewhere. There's a happy ending for one of them, and a happy beginning for another, but I can't say I learned anything taking those two hours to finish the last 120 pages.

Not recommended as a literary novel, and not recommended for Steve Jobs fans either.