Book Review: The Bug

After reading a review of The Bug on Salon I ordered a copy from Amazon UK for a bit of light summer reading. I hadn't read Ullman's non-fiction book, Close to the Machine, but I thought that someone with experience in the tech field might be able to write a passable novel about a bug and the programmers involved. I was disappointed and think I should have waited for the paperback on remainder sale. I'd give it 1 star out of 5 on amazon and, if you don't mind the spoilers, read the review below.

The physical book is actually very well done with an ASCII art bug motif throughout the book as well as a Conway-esque motif for the sections. Sadly, there is little artistic value in the text itself. The book opens with a jet-setting consultant who is given pause at customs to briefly recall Ethan Levin, a programmer in her distant past, whom even in the beginning has a pall of doom about him. The story then flashes back to 1984 when computers were still for nerds and the Macintosh had just been introduced. It's nice to see that someone still remembers the pre-internet age with some clarity, but the story dulls shortly thereafter.

Ethan Levin is a recognizeable sort of corporate programmer who was a CS Ph.D. candidate until his father died which forced him into the workplace and he never returned to academia. He continues to play with his Conway-esque 'simulated ecosystem' which is an underlying motif throughout the book. After Ethan is introduced to the reader he becomes a 'shit magnet' and you know very early on that this character has just beamed down to the surface wearing a red shirt.

The bug appears, discovered by the jet-setting consultant who was then just an ex-academic linguist hired by a friend to be a QA tester, and it takes on a life of its own. In fact, the bug has more personality and believeability than any other character in this book. Ethan is the receptacle for every programmer stereotype you can imagine; absent minded, oblivious, self-absorbed, obsessive, asocial and a bit odd. His girlfriend of 4 years goes on a trip to India with her girlfriends' husband since Ethan can't go due to his work schedule. She returns from India having slept with her travelling companion and he smothers his life by hunting the bug, now named 'the jester', even more fervently. Towards the end she leaves him after he catches them shagging in his bedroom and it is revealed that a year earlier she had an abortion without telling him and holds him responsible because he didn't behave like the guy in pregnancy test commericals when informed that she was pregnant.

The author can't quite decide whether to make him psychotic with an array of behaviour that even the most callous of co-workers couldn't passively ignore but somehow do in this story or to make him a raving alcoholic which the jet-setting consultant conveniently ignores, too. I have a really hard time imagining that an entire workplace of people would blithely turn a blind eye on a person who goes to such lengths to isolate himself from the world with earplugs and even a parachute tent around his desk who then later reeks of cheap bourbon. There is one brief moment where the stereotypical night Unix admin notices that he's not doing very well but instead of giving him a chance at redemption the admin simply takes him home, shags him, then leaves which smacks of page filler and more dumping on an already beleaguered character. Later he sees the night admin kissing another female co-worker in the parking lot and I have utterly no idea why in the hell that was thrown into the story. Perhaps the author needed a gay scene or something.

Ullman tries to insert what she thinks a clever 'lesson', but is just a really hackneyed manipulative device these days in a family obsessed society, when Ethan creates families in his 'simulated ecosystem' which makes it thrive just before hanging himself [ and isn't found dead at home for 17 days ]. Ironically, this same 'lesson' is not applied to the jet-setter consultant who is divorced, has no children and is living alone when telling the story. The QA tester, now fluent in C and moving up the corporate ladder, finds the code causing the bug which wasn't Ethan Levin's code afterall. If the guy was such an unloveable asshole, as he is made out to be throughout the book, it's unlikely he would have committed suicide. Why the author dumps on this character and then offs him in the end makes me wonder if the entire book isn't semi-autobiographical and if the vendetta against this character isn't personal.

Life is, indeed, in the details but Ullman doesn't waste many realistic details on her characters since those are saved for the bug itself. I'll give her bonus points for writing a somewhat more realistic than usual book about programming environments but the characters were uninteresting and flat, one of whom the author clearly despises and manipulates like a voodoo doll, which renders the novel a disappointing read. It does mention Perl on page 329 but unless you collect books that mention Perl I cannot find a reason to recommend anyone purchase, read or keep this book.