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Remember the Y2K bug?
Back when we were partying like it was 1999, some feared that the millennium rollover would cause a crippling computer crisis. Wired networks might think the date was 1900 and shut down. Power outages! Looting! Economic collapse!
The apocalyptic scenarios, of course, didn't come true, and now they seem almost quaint. But that hasn't stopped Kevin Shay from setting his first novel, The End as I Know It, in 1998, starring a 25-year-old with a case of Y2K fever that's almost Lyndon LaRouche-ish.
Terrified of what will happen on New Year's 2000, Randall Knight embarks on a coast-to-coast Cassandra tour, urging his family, friends and ex-girlfriends to take the looming crisis seriously and prepare for Doomsday. The children's puppeteer throws R.K. Raccoon, Salmon Ella and a pile of paranoid, pessimistic studies he downloaded from this new thing called the Internet into his Oldsmobile. His goal is to rouse a nation that would rather distract itself with a soap opera about the president and an intern.
His first approach is to calmly present people with the facts as he sees them. But after his own family stages an intervention to stop him from being the real Y2K casualty -- and Randall responds in a very funny scene by crashing a party thrown by his sister and brother-in-law, a Lewinsky-obsessed reporter for CNN -- he finds himself celebrating Thanksgiving at a survivalist's camp in Texas and wondering what went wrong.
That Randall is charming and appealing even as he alienates everyone he loves is a testament to Shay's light and witty touch with his nutty hero. Even when the story becomes repetitive and episodic midway, you root for him to get it together, knowing he's just the right girlfriend and a decent haircut away from being himself again.
And though you would think a novel about Y2K would seem dated -- grist more for an episode of VH1's "We Are the Late '90s" than a debut novel from a McSweeney's editor -- it's impossible to read The End as I Know It without thinking that the world really did change shortly after 2000.
It just happened on Sept. 11, 2001, rather than Dec. 31, and those who were sounding alarms about terrorism and Osama bin Laden's intention to strike within the USA weren't listened to, either. Likewise, Shay is a first novelist not to be dismissed.
The End as I Know It
By Kevin Shay
Doubleday, 371 pp., $23.95
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