Review by New York Times Review
After a dirty bomb renders Times Square radioactive, the upper classes in Manhattan retreat to the heights of their luxury buildings and slumber in high-tech virtual reality "beds." Meanwhile, the lower classes scurry in from the outer boroughs to monitor the dreamers' tubes and change their "feed-bags." And the middle class? They've moved to New Jersey. Having lost his wife in the terrorist attack, a former garbage collector who calls himself Spademan takes the elites' abdication personally. Becoming a contract killer, he specializes in eliminating those who have forsaken the city streets. But he's a killer with principles - and first on that list is to avoid murdering children. So when he's told that a target named Persephone is pregnant by her wealthy evangelist father, Spademan decides to save her, which leads him into a complicated hacker plot involving the liberation of captives from a virtual paradise. With this first novel, Sternbergh, an editor at The New York Times Magazine, has entered William Gibson territory, but the future in "Shovel Ready" lacks the gritty texture - the inventive worldliness - of Gibson's cybernoirs. The novel does, however, have its moments as a commentary on economic inequality and cultural devolution. (A tent city in Central Park is much larger than Occupy Wall Street's downtown warren. At the public library on Fifth Avenue, study tables have been replaced by per-hour virtual reality beds.) Though Spademan's weapon of choice is a box-cutter, he calls himself a bullet and narrates in bullet-point bursts - one-word fragments, one-line sentences, one-sentence paragraphs, quick-hitting chapters. At least half the text is presented as staccato dialogue, as if the author assumed a leap straight to the movies, with a director filling in the setting and actors fleshing out the characters. Perhaps Spademan's primer prose is meant to suggest that the "Incremental Apocalypse" caused writers to abandon Brooklyn, leaving this hit man to record society's dereliction. Gertrude Stein told a tough guy named Hemingway that "remarks are not literature." Neither are bullets. Maybe soon, but not yet.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 23, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It's been a banner year for debut thrillers. Last February, we were treated to Roger Hobbs' Ghostman, about a thief who specializes in making all traces of his capers disappear. Now, not quite a year later, we have another galvanizing thriller boasting an equally unique premise and another compelling, antiheroic protagonist on the wrong side of the law though the concepts of right and wrong, law and lawless, have little meaning in the world of Shovel Ready. Yes, the novel falls under the postapocalyptic umbrella Times Square has been hit by a dirty bomb, and Manhattan has become an eerie demilitarized zone but Sternbergh is not merely re-creating The Road or any of the countless other novels that posit what happens after the bomb. Spademan was a garbage man before Manhattan was nuked. Now he has a new job: a hit man for hire (have box cutter, will use it) walking the city's desolate streets. Those streets have become desolate for a very peculiar reason. While Central Park is a twenty-first-century Hooverville, home to the dislocated poor, the rich have taken to their beds but not just any beds: these special contraptions connect their inhabitants to the limnosphere, a new kind of Internet that allows its users to construct their own virtual world and live there permanently. When Spademan agrees to kill the daughter of a famous televangelist but then falls in love with her instead, he attempts to transform himself from hit man to avenging angel, which requires some dexterous jumping from postapocalyptic reality to limnosphere (have box cutter, will time travel). Like Nick Harkaway in Angelmaker (2012), Sternbergh, culture editor for the New York Times Magazine, combines stunning narrative sleight-of-hand with an ability to create flesh-and-blood characters who bring humor and a resilient humanity to their torn-asunder world. Mixing dystopian science fiction and urban noir with a Palahniuk swagger, this could well be the first novel everybody is talking about over the next few months. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Extensive online and social-media promotion will combine with mainstream marketing to set this debut on its way. Oh, and that movie deal with Warner Brothers won't hurt, either.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A dirty bomb explosion in Times Square leaves New York City half-emptied, save for the rich and the poor, in Sternberg's first novel, a low-rent Raymond Chandler noir told in the style of very late James Ellroy. A former sanitation worker who calls himself Spademan now makes a living as a hit man. When Spademan agrees to kill 18-year-old Grace Chastity "Persephone" Harrow for an unknown client, he seeks her out among the park-living poor. That Persephone's father is famed evangelist T.K. Harrow, who is about to hold a revival service in Radio City Music Hall, is just one of the complications that leads Spademan into deep trouble-both virtual and real. Evidently inspired by 1980s cyberpunk and movies like Strange Days, Sternbergh, the New York Times Magazine's culture editor, adds nothing new to a near-future scenario in which the narrator, despite his insistence on strict moral standards, is little better than the book's bad guys. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick & Williams. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Former garbageman Spademan is a box cutter-wielding death dealer in a near future New York City decimated by car bombs and dirty bombs. Geiger counters are chic accessories for stylish youth, and jacking in to a thoroughly immersive virtual reality world is all the rage. Spademan thinks his life is simple-do the job, get paid-until his new mark turns out to be a young girl who calls herself Persephone. She's on the run from her very powerful father, and he'll do anything, and take down anyone, to get her back. Persephone's got secrets that could topple an evangelical empire, and she is determined at all costs to save herself. -VERDICT First-time author Sternbergh takes a heavy dose of noir and sets it in a dystopian setting. Spademan is an unlikely yet tragic hero, and it takes a talented author to make a reader root for such a damaged and ruthless man. Lean prose is punctuated by moments of shocking violence that only serve to underscore the novel's underlying humanity, and Persephone is a shining, brutal example of the will to survive at all costs. This is a gripping genre mash-up and a stunning debut. [See Prepub Alert, 7/15/13; this title was selected for Barnes & Noble's Spring 2014 Discover Great New Writers season.-Ed.]-Kristin -Centorcelli, Denton, TX (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A postmodern view of a dystopian, bombed-out New York City, as recounted by Spademan, a hired assassin. Spademan is a cynic, as any assassin worth his salt should be, but in this case, even his cynicism is tested when he's called upon to kill the 18-year-old daughter of T. K. Harrow, a famous evangelist. (Spademan kills men and women with ease but has always drawn the line at killing children because "that's a different kind of psycho.") The daughter, whose name is Grace Chastity but who goes by the more appropriate name of Persephone, is an elusive figure whom Spademan needs to track down, and when he finds her, she's five months pregnant. Her story is both horrifying and tragic, for she claims her father, the revered religious figure, is himself the father of her unborn child. Spademan finds his mission changing, for not only does he refuse to kill Chastity/Persephone, but instead decides to track down the well-protected Harrow. Along the way, he meets a raft of unsavory sociopathic types (is there any other kind?), like Simon the Magician, Harrow's head of security, a sadist of the first order. In this bleak, futuristic world, the rich immerse themselves in virtual reality for weeks at a time while the rabble has to contend with the charred remains of Manhattan. Spademan, who used to be a garbage man, discovers that dealing with the human detritus of New York is not that different from his previous profession. Telegraphic in style, this book is tough, sordid and definitely not for every taste.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
