TURN OF THE CENTURY; By Kurt Anderson; Random House; 659 pages; $24.95.In "Turn of the Century," Kurt Andersen jacks you into the nerve center of the media society and pins your eyelids open until you go nearly blind with overload. He achieves this with just old-fashioned black lettering on consecutive white pages -- no shocking glossy photographs, no soundtrack, no hand-held video clips and no Web site. He wins back terrain for the novel that has been ceded to new media, demonstrating that the novel is as alive and as nimble as its high-tech competitors.
This big, sprawling book targets the great infotainment economy, principally Manhattan -- in midtown and Silicon Alley -- Hollywood and Las Vegas. The novel is set one year into a slightly satirical future, when clothing catalogs are headed by prestigious magazine editors, BarbieWorld has opened in Vegas and there's a 24-hour cable channel devoted entirely to raw footage of celebrity parties. Prostitutes not only have to pretend to enjoy sex, they have to pretend to be impressed by beer connoisseurship. Somewhere in the background, Al Gore is running against George W. Bush, and the Chiapas rebellion has evolved into a war.
The Manhattan power couple George Mactier and Elizabeth Zimbalist are the book's central characters. George is a television producer for the emerging network MBC, the Mose Broadcasting Corporation. His specialty is blurring fact and fiction, weaving live video of drug busts into his serial episodes of a narcotics squad -- but the show's ratings are dwindling. Elizabeth is a Silicon Alley C.E.O. with a secret sense that work is a "big make-believe game, dress-up Monopoly."
The satire is sharpest when Andersen takes us onto the soundstage of George's show, right into story-editing meetings and negotiations between stars over their lines. Similarly, the portrait of Lizzie managing her company at the point it must choose between an I.P.O. or acquisition exit strategies is dead-on. Option traders and computer hackers alike are drawn in vivid, accurate detail. Andersen, a columnist at The New Yorker and former editor of Spy and New York magazines, layers his writing as if he's on the record, off the record and on deep background all at the same time. And into this realistic scenario he throws outrageous gags -- the first pig-to-human liver transplant, live broadcasts of Charles Manson parole hearings, cat-telepathy experimentation, cemetery tombstones with built-in video screens. All of it is played straight, with the laughs swallowed.
"Convergence" is the driving force behind the future Andersen portrays. While other writers might see our world as splintering, to him it's a melting pot in which even the pot is melted. Fact is converged with fiction, people behind the scenes are part of the scene, the Net is like television and today is a lot like the future.
And in this future, careers become the new ethnicities. Andersen gets a kick out of tuning in to the different languages spoken by programmers, executive assistants, arbitragers, M.B.A.'s and Hollywood producers. These languages overshadow differences due to race or religion.
The limitation of a Zeitgeist novel is that an accurate portrait of today can quickly feel dated and lose all its kick by the time it's out in paperback. Andersen has managed to hoodwink this trade-off. He's got a book chock-full of references to today that stick out like neon Post-It tags -- "Dharma Minus Greg" on television, Morcheeba on the CD player, George Stephanopoulos at parties -- yet he's infused it with so much inventive imagination that it transcends all that.
The other problem with the novel's length is that people may buy the book but then only pretend to have read it. That would be too bad, because in the last 100 pages, a suspenseful plot breaks out. Computer hackers who work for Lizzie hatch an elaborate prank on Bill Gates, and the pages fly.