The Word Exchange is a very odd book, but ultimately that works in its favor. It is an amazingly complex, difficult book that serves as both a warning and a sour vision of where we could be headed. A summary teaser would go something like this: What if there was a global health crisis, but unlike the usual heart, lungs, etc. what if it targets words?
That sounds like a thriller, and there are certainly aspects of thriller. If it also sounds a little literary fiction, it can support some of that as well with a non-traditional narrative style, or rather a mix of stream-of-consciousness, active narrator, and journaling styles told both as it is happening and through the lens of after everything happened depending on where you are in the story. It uses ten dollar words, but with intent; has actual footnotes; and has the emotional complexities of many books classified as women’s fiction.
While the above might make it sound like a crazy muddle, and it’s not an easy book to read in some ways, that would be to do The Word Exchange wrong.
The straightforward classification is most likely science fiction thriller, or maybe highbrow science fiction thriller, though it does not rub that fact in your face. It has to do with most of the main characters being involved in linguistics of some form or another, with many working at one of the few surviving paper dictionaries in a world where everything has gone online.
Our main character is Anana who is also called Alice in a neat little mystery word puzzle laced throughout the book for Anana to decipher if she’s to figure out what’s going on and where she needs to be. She’s the innocent in this. Though she works at the dictionary, her job is as her father’s assistant and has little to do with the research and recording of words. However, she is directly tied to many of the main players, her father obviously, but her ex-boyfriend Max is mixed up in it as well as her friend (and would be boyfriend) Bart. She’s at the heart of the emotional story as she deals with the grief of her breakup with Max, her fear for her father who goes missing in the beginning, and her struggle to figure out what’s going on.
The big story involves corporate greed, espionage, and biology, which always finds a way. We see things unfold through Anana and her connections though, so the big story has a personal touch.
I had some difficulty with the beginning just because it was so dense with meaning and complexity in a time when I was busy with other tasks. However, I kept going because the story was compelling. It drew me back even when I had to take a break to read something else or I wouldn’t have a review to post for last week. Here’s my comment when I was only about a tenth of the way into the book:
This book is a highly literate stream-of-consciousness with a plot almost buried under the wash of information lush with name, word, and fact dropping. It should be horrible, but though a slow read, it’s compelling in an odd sort of way like you can see inside these people and really comprehend how all this came to be.
The book is well-written, rather amazing when I’m the type to find the typos and errors in every book I read while this one has deliberate word issues as we see through the eyes of those with the word flu. It doesn’t start out that way, but I found it ironic that I’d used the Kindle onboard dictionary to double-check some of the meanings when the over-reliance on technology eroding language skills is one of the themes in the book. I did not, however, look up any of the words produced by the flu.
The Word Exchange is a bit like a horror story where you have to keep reading in the hopes things get better. The scariest part, however, is that I have seen or experienced the early warning symptoms that most likely sparked the idea for this book but which also makes it seem terrifyingly plausible.
A quick example of the over-dependence on technology before I let you go find yourself a copy: My phone software updated this week. I used to push the caps button whenever I wanted to type “I” as in me, myself and… But my phone would automatically capitalize it whether I did the other step or not, and sometimes it got confused and removed the caps. So I’ve stopped capitalizing “I”. This update removed that feature. Deliberate or not, it created a dependency it no longer fulfills. It took me a bit to notice that I had lost some of my personhood in texts, no longer warranting a capital “I” to mark my place in the world unless I woke up to the need to make an effort.
I’m a programmer. I write on the computer rather than by hand, and I read most often on a Kindle. The story is strong enough and plausible enough to overcome my reactions to its overt anti-technology message and see the complexity behind that position. It’s worth the time to read. I think I’ll try to handwrite a letter to my future daughter-in-law who actually likes the old style postal mail.
P.S. I received this book from the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.