Kipper's Game: A Novel

by Barbara Ehrenreich

From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a futuristic thriller about science, love, politics, and social disarray.

Della Markson is searching for her son, a brilliant, nihilistic computer hacker who has invented an addictive computer game. She teams up with her former professor, Alex MacBride, an academic has-been desperately in need of a publication and a drink, is looking for the papers of an obscure, long-dead neurobiologist. As they stumble through a suburban landscape littered with broken marriages and blighted careers, they discover that their personal quests are of great interest to mysterious others, and that they have been drawn into a grand design full of wondrous possibilities and perilous meanings.

For Della and Alex live in a hyper-real world of strange portents and accelerating decay. Caterpillars are destroying the trees. A cracked but eerily lucid evangelist preaches apocalypse on a pirate frequency. And in the renowned biological research institute where Della and Alex work, escaped laboratory animals roam the corridors, hazardous wastes leak unchecked, and a lethal new disease is outwitting the researchers. The search for Della's son and Alex's missing papers turns out to hinge on the ancient quest for the ultimate purpose of human intelligence and life.

A startling feat of the imagination from one of our sharpest social observers, Kipper's Game is a daring and sophisticated adventure at the interface of science and metaphysics, human love and the equally human hunger for knowledge.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

416 pages, Paperback

First published May 7, 1993

About the author

Barbara Ehrenreich was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and the Erasmus Prize.

Reviews

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Gibson was clearly on Ehrenreich's mind, but that's not a bad thing.

If you like words, sometimes words for words' sakes, wrapped about your cyberpunk, you'll get your money's worth from this novel.

[Oanh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t know. I read it and enjoyed reading it - it is well written - but feel like either I missed the point or there wasn’t one? Reminded me of Bellwether by Connie Willis, and maybe the superficial similarities is what caused my discombobulated reading experience.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

A first novel from one of the U.S.'s most impressive public intellectuals, and a generally compelling if often overwritten tale of skewed family dynamics and biodisasters.

[Sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 1993 attempt at fiction by a good nonfiction writer. It is well written with clearly delineated characters, but doesn’t quite succeed. Enjoyable, anyway.

[Dylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

there was a five-year period in the nineties when every big writer was writing hefty novels with the plot "what if technology, but too much???" and you know what, all of them were correct.

[Scratch · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm disappointed. I love Barbara Ehrenreich, so I was excited to check her --so far as I know-- sole foray into fiction. But, I think she got a little lost in the weeds.

There are only a few story elements that get hit upon repeatedly.

1) There is some sort of viral outbreak. However, no one practices any real form of social distancing. In fact, people in the lab can watch someone cry blood after having been infected, and no one feels the need to quarantine themselves from the experience. They just send the infected person home.
2) There is some sort of pestilence involving slugs/caterpillars that eat leaves; and their bodies squish really easily.
3) Della's son Steve was working on some sort of video game, possibly with the goal of educating people.
4) Della works in academia, but did not complete her degree. She serves as our borderline-blue-collar viewpoint character.
5) Alex also works in academia, actually as a scientist/professor, but he minimizes this as any real accomplishment. Also, Alex is a drunk. Not just a has-too-much-at-dinner drunk, but the kind of drunk whose whole day revolves around drinking, and wakes up puking every morning. He is our secondary viewpoint character. For some reason Della considers him a potential romantic prospect.
6) There may be some sort of conspiracy tying together the virus, the video game, the caterpillars, and academia.

...

I feel like Ehrenreich must have been really disillusioned from her time as a scientist/academic, so she was trying to capture her sense of disenchantment every damn chance she got. Her descriptions of professors at this college, and the types of courses they taught or were fascinated by, felt more critical than anything else. You don't meet any graduate students getting master's degrees in ornithology and Russian literature, purely for love of learning; instead, it is suggested that these Ivory Tower academics are arrogant and out of touch. That science involves a lot of people who are just tiny cogs in the machine, and individual scientists might be very ordinary people.

I disagree with the unnecessarily heavy-handed criticism of academia. But I also just don't think this story really works. Ehrenreich was able to tie everything together by the end. I guess. ... Did I forget to mention that Della, the protagonist, periodically listens to the semi-religious tirades of a voice on the radio, Sister Bertha? Because that turns out to be really pivotal. I guess.

Like I said, just disappointing. And I knew the whole time that Ehrenreich was just airing her disenchantment because I had already read several works of hers that could be described as autobiographies. I already know that she got a bachelor's degree in chemistry, and was nearly complete with a Ph.D in biology when she abandoned the hard sciences altogether to become a journalist and sort of amateur anthropologist. I remember reading how Ehrenreich described how she felt like she stumbled into being the person in charge of managing a particular machine, and gathering its data, and how she wasn't sure how exactly she fell into this life gathering tiny bits of unimportant data from a device in the corner of the lab's basement.

I get it.

But I can't relate. I, for one, would be thrilled to actually contribute to science.

[Nicole Rice · Rating 1 out of 5]

uh. dnf

[Lorie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dnf. I usually like her work …. Dull

[St Fu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who knew she wrote a novel? The imagery is extraordinary. The plot, less so.
Here's an excerpt:

Della watched a young mother with a tattoo on one bare arm moving furiously ahead; the stroller she was pushing might have been a minesweeper; the older child who dragged behind looked like a prisoner of whatever war the mother was serving in.

Della had never been like that. Even when Steve was little they had walked along side by side like a settled, older couple separated only by the accident of height.

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nobody ever mentions her novel, which I think is quite good. A portrait of a woman who's marriage dissolves, leaving her to try and learn how to live her own life. Meanwhile, her son seems to have fallen in with some cult that thinks aliens are coming...feminist novel with cyberpunk tendencies? Yep.

[Timaree]

I stopped reading midway through, actually. Ehrenreich should stick to nonfiction.