Scarlett Thomas’s latest novel, PopCo, is certainly ambitious, for it’s the rare book that can encompass mathematics, secret codes, hidden treasures, disappearing parents, crossword puzzles, homeopathic medicine, hot-selling toys, love, corporate culture, pirates, the secret lives of teenage girls and the two coolest grandparents ever, while also including a recipe for “Let Them Eat Cake” cake, a table with the “Frequency of Occurrence of Letters in English” and a chart listing the first thousand prime numbers. Other than a total bore, who wouldn’t be intrigued? Scarlett Thomas’s latest novel, PopCo, is certainly ambitious, for it’s the rare book that can encompass mathematics, secret codes, hidden treasures, disappearing parents, crossword puzzles, homeopathic medicine, hot-selling toys, love, corporate culture, pirates, the secret lives of teenage girls and the two coolest grandparents ever, while also including a recipe for “Let Them Eat Cake” cake, a table with the “Frequency of Occurrence of Letters in English” and a chart listing the first thousand prime numbers. Other than a total bore, who wouldn’t be intrigued? Thomas’ protagonist, 29-year-old Alice Butler, works in “creatives” at PopCo, a multinational toy company that is inherently greedy and sinister in its advertising campaigns. When Alice and several of her co-workers are brought to a “secluded Thought Camp” in the English countryside, they are given the task of discovering and designing the next “killer, addictive product” for teenage girls. Exploitation is not merely a given, but an expectation. In the confines of the corporate world, though, such work is called marketing, the process that “gives value to things that do not have any actual intrinsic value.” Though she’s never been particularly close to her colleagues at PopCo, Alice finds there are others with whom she shares a lot more than a knack for creative ideas. There’s Esther, a young woman who isn’t exactly forthcoming about her role in the company, and Ben, a video game programmer and possible love interest. During the course of their days together, enduring endless ice-breakers and seminars, Alice not only opens up to her new friends, but discovers there are a lot more secrets going on at PopCo than she’d ever imagined. And secrets are something that Alice understands well. As a child, her mother died and her father mysteriously disappeared. Orphaned, she went to live with her grandparents—a mathematician and cryptanalyst—who years later leave Alice a treasure map and, hopefully she thinks, a possible key as well. While on retreat at PopCo, though, Alice begins to receive a series of encoded messages, the first asking simply, “Are you happy?” It’s the search for an answer—to her past, to her future—that opens Alice’s eyes to everything from the perils of consumerism to veganism to sweatshop labor. If there’s a liberal cause to support, Alice gets right on it. Thomas is the author of five earlier books, among them Bright Young Things (Flame, 2001) and Going Out (Anchor, 2004). She lives and teaches in Canterbury, England, and says she “never wanted this to be a depressing book,” nor “a didactic, one-dimensional” one. At times, Thomas’ social commentary is a bit obvious—yes, corporations do manipulate, and pop culture is sometimes all about advertising—but the story itself is so broad, so quirky and dead-on with its frighteningly perceptive cultural insight, that the reader can forgive Thomas for any small lapses into sermonizing. The issues Alice comes up against are important, for sure. We might all do well to ask ourselves, as she does, “Since I have devoted a lot of my life to not doing what everyone else does, why is it that I accept so much that is obviously wrong? Why is it that even I assume that some things are OK simply because everyone accepts that they are?” But however much of a commentary PopCo may be on today’s state of affairs, the novel truly is, in the standard cliché of the book-reviewing world, “hard to put down.” Thomas has an uncanny ability to connect seemingly random and disparate things, seeing a point of intersection between treasure maps and Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, between the horrors of junior high and the series of life choices that could transform a young farmhand into a renegade ship captain. In her hands, the world is at once wide and frightening, magical in its intellectual possibility, unsettling in its frailty. Like the codes she attempts to break, there is always something—a story, an answer, a carefully done product placement—hidden offstage, behind the obvious and the everyday. It’s apparent that when Thomas sits down to write, she also sets out to challenge her reader, in the realms of both politics and story-telling. For Thomas, the status quo—whether the latest fashion or the latest narrative arc—should be held up, examined and ultimately broadened to include a lot more creativity. Alice realizes that in today’s world, “We own the means of production—our minds—and we can use our brains to produce whatever we want.” This is a hopeful sentiment. And, simple as it may be, it’s this, along with a few pirates and code-breakers, that in the end prophesies PopCo’s status as a cult-fave.
