Jennifer Government

Max Barry (Doubleday, New York, 2003)
Reviewed by Hyong Yi

When we talk about reinventing government, the Ash Commission, Volcker I and II, the National Performance Review, and the President’s Management Agenda, all come to mind as serious efforts to change how government operates. However, it takes a fiction writer, an Australian at that, author Max Barry, to truly envision a different reality for government, which while extreme has a certain attractiveness.

Stylistically hip, but uneven in writing, Jennifer Government, Barry’s second novel, describes a reality where freedom reigns supreme. As the jacket sleeve states:

the world is run by giant American corporations; taxes are illegal; employees take the last names of the companues they work for; the police and the NRA are publicly-traded security firms; the government may investigate crimes only if it can bill a citizen directly. It’s a free-market paradise!

In this reality, Jennifer Government pursues Hack Nike, a merchandising officer, for the murder of 14 children as part of a stealth marking campaign for a new line of $2,500 Nike sneakers. While not exactly a mystery as to who the “advertising mastermind” behind it all is, the entertainment value is not in knowing if Jennifer Government will get her man—you know she will—but in seeing how radical a vision of reality Barry can truly present.

Barry offers a reality that truly is twisted to the extreme, treating the federal government, as another corporation similar to the corporate alliances of Team Alliance and the US Alliance. The role of government is limited to what it can charge on a fee-for-service basis, even the goods most public in nature, such as public safety and justice, can only be had at a price paid for by the consumer, not taxpayers. And making a profit, at any cost, is idealized as a virtue.

While deeply funny, it is disturbingly so using the right we hold most dear as Americans “freedom” to challenge everything we take for granted about the role of government and corporations in society. At the end, with corporate alliances renouncing the government’s authority, NRA jet fighters shooting down Air Force One, and Nike preparing to launch artillery barrages against its competitors, the reader can see how destructive and self-consuming unregulated individual and corporate freedom, taken to the extreme, can be. While corporations are not nearly as unscrupulous as Nike is characterized in this book, Barry gives you a deep appreciation for government’s role in society through his satire. It almost makes one happy to pay federal taxes to prevent such a profit-driven, ethically bankrupt world.

Some readers may disagree with Barry’s vision of a possible future as going too far or not far enough, but it will certainly entertain and provide plenty of opportunity to be shocked and awed by his vision. In the Volcker II Commission Report, it states that certain recommendations for reorganizing the federal government may “discomfort” certain members of the audience. If they truly believe this to be the case, they haven’t read Jennifer Government and could learn a thing or two about what radical really means.