SILICON FOLLIES

Subtitled “a dot.comedy,” Scoville’s formula-beset debut concerns romantic, social, and office politics in the boom economy of California’s Silicon Valley.

Paul is adrift. In college he dreamed of writing “the Great American novel,” but his only marketable skill is an innate flair for computers. Liz is unemployable. At Stanford, she majored in English, and she still views the world of technology as “a blizzard of acronyms in a vacuum of time-delayed adolescence.” With their worthless degrees, the two find themselves at a start-up company called TeraMemory working for Barry, a young, graceless dot.com millionaire with tortured syntax, Paul as a computer consultant, Liz as a personal grammarian. Despite their personal and ethical misgivings, romance ensues as stock options accrue. Meanwhile, Steve, an expert hacker with limited social skills and anti-capitalist aggression, plots TeraMemory’s undoing under the metaphysical auspices of Psychrist, a Bay Area techno/performance-art wizard. For the techno-challenged (“Terans”), the prose here can be challenging, as in some of the e-mails that consist primarily of computer code, but it can also amuse, especially when it charts Steve’s plans for hacker actions. Still again, it’s also way too often hackneyed—here, daylight “flees” and “geek” appears as a verb. No irony goes unexplained, characters often mutter to themselves (“Marriage, he scoffed to himself”), and chapters are cutely titled (“Hacked in Seattle”; “Bidding for a Date with the CFO on the e-Bay of Love”). The idea—that all this wealth requires some foundation in something—isn’t original, and here it drives characters straight from movie-of-the-week casting.

Air is said to be leaking from the dot.com balloon, but, important as that may be, a novel about stocks can’t rely on stock characters. Even dot.comedies need real humor, not overdoses of cuteness.