Feed is basically my nightmare come true! But it’s brilliant!
Book Summary
Feed, by M.T. Anderson, centers around a teenage boy, Titus, and his group of friends who live in an anti-utopian future of the Earth. An anti-utopian setting, according to Young Adult Literature: Exploration, Evaluation, and Appreciation, is a setting where the “communit[y] on the surface seem[s] to be utopian […] but turn[s] out to be dystopian or anti-utopian” (Bucher & Hinton, p. 192). In the case of feed, the setting is a version of life where there are so many technological advances that people haven’t really noticed or have slowly, subconsciously accepted how awful things truly are. For example, everyone in Feed has these lesions on their skin due to how toxic Earth’s environment has become. But, hey, you can now travel to the moon!
The moon is like a sadder Atlantic City. Despite the “lo-grav,” the entertainment is cheesy and everyone becomes instantly “null” (Feed-speak for boring) because, with technology at your finger tips and the instant gratification that comes with it, what is interesting anymore? Certainly not much, as Titus and his friends endlessly look for dumb ways to entertain themselves.
The group meets a strange girl named Violet on the moon who Titus ends up falling for. Turns out this girl did not have The Feed implanted at birth, like everyone else. The Feed is something like Google Glass only it’s implanted into your brain at birth. (And, by the way, conception occurs in laboratories now, probably due to the fact that everyone is infertile because everything is sick and dying on Earth). Not only is The Feed implanted into your brain, it becomes part of your biology as you grow.
The group’s Feeds get hacked by a protestor while they’re visiting the moon and they end up spending a long time in the hospital. Back when Violet was born her hippie-ish parents decided against giving giving her The Feed, but once she became a teenager they agreed to allow her to have it installed. Due to the fact that her Feed hasn’t been a part of her since birth, the hacking did more damage to her than others, potentially becoming fatal.
The narrative continues around Violet’s recovery and remission. Authorities work to figure out if they can fix her Feed or not. Titus’s feelings for Violet grow stronger, but he also becomes really annoyed by her intelligence and existential questioning. She’s often the Debbie Downer of the group, like me!
Eventually Violet and Titus detach somewhat from their group of friends and do things alone together, such as the time they went to a filet mignon farm and Titus ironically declared, “I like to see how things are made, and to understand where they come from.” The filet mignon farm is rows upon rows of “huge hedges of red […], with these beautiful marble patterns running through them. They had these tubes, they were bringing the tissue blood, and we would see all the blood running around, up and down” (Anderson, p. 116). Anderson writes like this throughout the entire book—eloquent descriptive language contrasted with the horror of what is actually going on. Occasionally a filet mignon “fruit” had a deformity, such as the one that grew a blinking eye ball. Hard to read when you’re a vegan!
You’ll have to read the book (or the long book review below…) to find out what ends up happening to Violet and so you can be prepared to face our inevitable future.
References
Anderson, M. T. (2002). Feed. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press.
Boucher, K., & Hinton, K. V. (2014). Young adult literature: Exploration, evolution, and appreciation (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.
APA Reference of Book
Anderson, M. T. (2002). Feed. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press.
Impressions
You can tell by reading my summary that I loved this book. It is very engaging like a good sci-fi should be! Like how I couldn’t put down The Hunger Games. Anderson is a brilliant author because his writing “shows,” it doesn’t merely “tell.” There is a lot of allusion and the reader puts together the pieces to figure something out. The slang he invented for the book is also really interesting and perfectly fitting for the culture of the characters of the book. Brilliant!
Professional Review
Feed
Despite the title, this isn't a sequel to the author's Thirsty (BCCB 4/97); it's a compelling, witty, and seductive dystopia about life in a technocorporate-ruled future. Titus is a basic teenager, annoyed by School(TM) and ready to enjoy a trip with his friends to that traditional break destination, the moon, "except the moon turned out to completely suck." Okay, not completely-he does meet Violet, a strange and beautiful girl, but she, Titus, and his friends all undergo a rather traumatic experience when a hacker hits their feeds, their brain-implanted connections that make information, marketing, entertainment, and private conversation availabe to them twenty-four hours a day.
After a few days in a moon hospital, Titus grows closer to Violet, and when the kids return to Earth, the two begin going out. He's drawn to her unusual viewpoint and intrigued by her atypical history: a child of impoverished academics, she didn't get her feed installed until much later in life, and she writes with her hand and thinks about what happens in other countries. The feed oddity proves to be particularly significant, because the hacking damages Violet's less-- integrated circuitry, leaving her increasingly prone not just to signal blockage but to serious neurological deficits, disorders that may well kill her. Highly skilled technical repair might save her, but her unpredictable consumer history makes her an unreliable investment in the eyes of the corporate sponsors; therefore no help will be forthcoming, and Violet will die.
The dystopic view here isn't limited to the world, however; the tragedy isn't Titus' raging against the system that kills his beloved but his resistance to such raging. Titus is a Winston Smith drawn to the possibility of life beyond the screens, but he's essentially a lover of Big Brother (or, more accurately, Big Brother's products) from the start, annoyed by the predictable criticisms of the naysayers: "Of course, everyone is like, da da da, evil corporations, oh they're so bad, we all say that, and we all know they control everything. I mean, it's not great, because who knows what evil shit they're up to. Everyone feels bad about that. But they're the only way to get all this stuff, and it's no good getting pissy about it, because they're still going to control everything whether you like it or not." As Violet deteriorates, Titus becomes increasingly annoyed with her Cassandra tendencies, eventually separating from her and the possibilities she offers and tellingly thinking at her death, "I had thought it would feel like a tragedy, but it didn't feel like anything at all." As with many classic dystopias, the message isn't subtle, but it's not meant to be; it's the lacerations close to the bone (sometimes literally, as with the fad for surgically created lesions to mimic the skin condition afflicting popular media stars) that give this book its bite.
What really puts the teeth in the bite, however, is Anderson's brilliant satiric vision in the seamless creation of this imagined but believable world. The writing is relentlessly funny, clever in its observations and characters and not just in its inventiveness, but it's also inventive indeed, with Titus' narration establishing a new yet familiar language in a manner reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. The familiar raised inflections have officially become questions with no actual queries, businesses issue edicts in phraseology straight out of Clueless ("We regret to inform you that our corporate investors were like, `What's doing with this?"'), and parents use the old-fashioned "Dude" rather than the up-to-date "Unit." The details of Titus' world are dead-on credible, just one step beyond the present while clearly built on it. Readers will snicker about the shirt sale at "Wetherbee & Crotch" ("except it only came in sand, persimmon, and vetch") and the hot feedcast drama (called Oh? Wow! Thing!, it "has all these kids like us who do stuff but get all pouty"), all the while recognizing the roots of the grimmer side of Titus' present in their own.
It's this vision that cunningly allows the book to be cool while questioning the consumer pursuit of coolness. When Titus finally hears a faint echo of the emptiness that Violet tried to warn him of, he muses, "It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it. I felt like I'd been running toward it for a long time." It's fitting for a dystopia-and a particularly cynical one at that-that the closest thing to hope is this breath of discontent. Pessimistic teens will find that darkness appealing; optimists will be startled to discover that a book about raging against the machine can be so much fun. (Imprint information appears on p. 98.)
Deborah Stevenson, Editor
Reference
Stevenson, D. (2002, November). Feed. [Review of the book Feed, by M. T. Anderson]. Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, 56(3), 95-96.
Library Uses
Adapted from the blog, Auntie Karen’s Teen Book Corner, by Karen Crow.
Curriculum Ties: advertising ploys and propaganda; environmental issues; world issues (victims of natural disasters; people starving to death in 3rd World countries, etc.); death; peer relations and peer pressure
Discussion Prompts:
What might it be like to have a computer hardwired into your brain?
What might you use it for?
Would you use it to help you learn difficult school lessons?
Would you use it to communicate with others telepathically?
Would you use it to access information in an instant (I'd love to be able to think of a melody or a piece of art and have the computer tell me the name of the piece and its artist)?
The people in Titus' world have managed to connect computers and RSS feeds directly to the human brain... but whether they have used it for good or for evil is for you to determine.
Challenges and Censorship Issues:
Language Issues: Anderson uses foul language throughout the piece. Perhaps he would explain it as many authors do, as simply trying to be realistic.
Sexuality: Titus and Violet have intimate moments, although they do not have actual intercourse. In the book sex is referred to as "doing it" and "prong.”
Consumerism: This book is meant to be a satire about the shallow consumerism of today. Characters are self-centered, always seeking pleasure for themselves, and seemingly oblivious to anyone's perspective but their own. Whether kids will see Feed as satire or as a glamorization of their own world will depend upon their own perspective and world view. Do you think there are more Tituses than Violets in our society today?
Drugs: There is drinking and The Feed allows kids to download computer programs that act like drugs.
From Common Sense Media:
Satire with a nice bite -- for mature teens.
Parents need to know that the author makes a sometimes heavy-handed statement about our tech-driven consumer culture and where it's leading us: There's lots to think about and discuss. He uses humor and satire to make his points and will certainly get kids thinking about where we might be headed.
http://www.commonsensemedia.org/book-reviews/feed
https://sites.google.com/site/265crowteenbookcorner/science-fiction/feed-by-m-t-anderson
Reference
Crow, K. (n.d.). Feed by M. T. Anderson [Web log]. Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/site/265crowteenbookcorner/
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