Amazonia
Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut
by James Marcus
New Press, 261 pp., $24.95
ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO I was still telling my creative-writing students to think about moving to Seattle--advice offered on the old Trollopian principle that novels should reflect "The Way We Live Now." Things were happening in Seattle, as surely as they once had in Flanders Fields or Levittown. Why miss out?
I can't say I've ever seen a truly good dot-com novel, but I no longer feel deprived. With Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut, James Marcus has written the sort of book I was imagining--even if it has, as Henry Kissinger might say, "the added advantage of being true." This memoir of the author's life and cyber times is as fine a guide to the late 1990s world of Pioneer Square and Pike Street as we are likely to see.
In 1996, at age thirty-seven, Marcus was living in Portland with his wife and young son, translating Italian literature and freelancing "not only book reviews but also articles on jealousy, dental malocclusion, writer's block, hypnosis, and aluminum smelting." Presented with a chance to write reviews--in great quantity--for "Earth's Biggest Bookstore," just recently born in Jeff Bezos's garage, Marcus examined his artistic conscience and searched his mind for highbrow Stakhanovite precedents: "Samuel Johnson dictating the Rambler essays directly to the printer. Balzac with his coffee . . ." Probably from the start, though, he knew he would say yes, "the only word in a freelance writer's vocabulary."
And yet, Marcus had a pinch of real Miranda-like wonder when he moved up to Seattle and first gazed upon Amazon, then shipping only about 2,000 books a day and still with few enough employees that the newest of them could have james@amazon.com for his email address. The happy part of Marcus's tale takes place in what he calls "the Golden Age of Content," when he and the elfin, erudite Kerry Fried helped to create the company's literature pages. Together, they cooked up author interviews, contests, lists of bests, and favorites--features that soon attracted the participation of cultural totems from John Updike to Salman Rushdie. Along with publicity, the features captured hundreds of thousands of email addresses from the curious, "thereby propping the door open for future communiqués" from Amazon to all of them.
Single-paragraph squibs that Marcus wrote for the book-of-the-day slot may have amounted to "the haiku of book criticism," but these online utterances could enlarge a midlist author's sales to epic new proportions. What worked in some cases (Andrea Barrett's Voyage of the Narwhal) didn't in others (a posthumous collection of Randall Jarrell's essays), but Marcus and Fried always had a better chance of making something happen than most publishers' let's-see-what-sticks-to-the-wall marketing departments.
DURING THAT GOLDEN AGE, Amazon's Seattle offices became a standard stop on the literary novelist's book tour. I remember being there early in 2000, a few days after riding my own dot-com bubble. Fried had given every electronic goose she could think of to my book Two Moons--listing it, for example, for some heady days, as the no. 1 recommended title on the Literature & Fiction list. A friend called one afternoon during all this to tell me that my Amazon sales rank--out of all the books in the world, or almost--was 144. It would have taken a saint of authorial disinterestedness not to log on at this point, so I did.
"Hour by hour," says my diary for February 21, 2000, "I watched it climb--to 101, ahead of Updike [ Gertrude and Claudius], to 85, to 66, past Doctorow [ City of God] to 53." My giddiness subsided, about as fast as my ranking, when my level-headed editor assured me that all this activity--in the precincts of "literary fiction," remember--represented "tens of books." Still, I've always felt I had my moment in the now-busted New Economy.
Marcus and Fried's fame spread. They were noticed by CNN and French television, and even if the caption beneath their picture in Time managed to get both their names wrong, they could take pride in what content-providing had done for their own literary sense of self: "It made us feel much, much better about the e-commerce mark of Cain on our foreheads," writes Marcus.
Alas, while Jeff Bezos liked to say, "It's always Day One at Amazon.com," there inevitably came a change of season, what might be called the winter of their nix-content, in which begins the sadder part of Marcus's story. The signs appeared early enough: Employees began having to wear badges and were put through the "reorg" of an outfit that had once taken pride in having little organization at all. The warehouse grew to 93,000 square feet, and the company was soon taking publishers' "co-op" advertising to push particular titles--as if it were, well, any other bookstore. The MBAs had arrived, determined to "monetize those eyeballs" clicking on to the site, and get them to feast on all the nonprint products Amazon was now selling.
Marcus doesn't have the heart to dwell on this diversification for very long, with good reason. Once "Books" became just one tab amidst a whole online megamall of lawn furniture and coffeemakers, something went out of the site forever--at least for those eyeballs that had discovered it, in its infancy, as a paradise of print. Books started to seem the least of it, a momentary indulgence the patron would be allowed before being hustled on to the business of real, big-ticket shopping. "If a customer comes to the site looking for a book, that's great," an overlord from the new consumer-electronics division explained to Marcus and Fried. "But we also want you to sell them a DVD player."
The earliest suggestions for further shopping, in the way of proffered hotlinks to Amazon's auction area, weren't just presumptuous; they were free-associative to the point of stupidity. Buyers of Two Moons, for example, were invited to purchase not only my previous novels (no complaints there), but also a $6.50 piece of jewelry called a "Moon Pendant." (Fans of Peter Gay, Marcus tells us, were asked if they'd like to add Blueboy magazine to their electronic cart.) These days, when I log on to Amazon, I'm ushered toward "Thomas's Store," the weirdly intimate name for an array of consumables the company flings together with its "personalization engine." Marcus says that the programs creating these one-of-a-kind bazaars have gotten a lot better since the time when, "If you bought a guide to Poland for an impending vacation, you would have titles on vodka and Thaddeus Kosciusko thrust in your face until the day you died." When it comes to Thomas's Store, I'd say any improvement has been pretty slight; either way, this noodgy boutique seems to take the browsing out of one's browser.
AFTER CONCLUDING that content was cost-ineffective, Amazon's MBAs solved the problem by outsourcing it. To the customers. The old shrug that "everyone's a critic" became the literal, prolix truth when the company's managers decided to "shift the emphasis" away from Marcus and Fried to the Common Reader, who was no longer, in all cases, the solid, sensible creature who'd gotten that title from Dr. Johnson and Virginia Woolf. Dispensing or withholding their one-to-five scale "stars," these everyman Menckens tended to make up in passion what they lacked in orthography. Rave notices for a novel misname its characters and mangle its plot, while pans--instead of wrapping the next day's fish--are left to hang in the ether, to an author's distress, for years after they've been posted. (I remember one guardian of the public taste reporting that she'd had to apologize to her dissatisfied book club for having recommended that they read a novel of mine.)
One always surmised that a lot of five-star encomia really came from the author's own keyboard; the suspicion proved true early this year when a server malfunction briefly revealed the anonymous reviewers' identities. Needless to say, the same glitch provided a converse revelation--that some negative "customer" comments were really cloaked vendettas. (Not for these authors the manly, face-to-face action of Richard Ford: This March, after two years of waiting for his opportunity, the Pulitzer Prize-winner literally spat on the writer Colson Whitehead for a review Whitehead had given Ford's stories in the New York Times Book Review.)
MARCUS IS SUCH A DECENT, bibliophilic fellow that his being at Amazon never really was about the money, except to the extent that the job meant he would no longer have to scoop coins from an old Tupperware stash to pay for his little boy's flu medicine. The yea-saying freelancer having his first interview with Bezos didn't even know what a hedge fund was, let alone that, as one of the company's early stakeholders, he himself would in a few years' time be possessing nine million dollars' worth of stock options. Nor did he know that he would hold on to them for too long, and then not long enough, selling short his financial future at just the wrong moment. He tells the whole tale of his virtual "lost riches" quite early in the book, jumping chronology in order to get this part of the story out of the way--perhaps because it's still too painful for him to dwell on, but mostly, I think, because he knows it's a subject that nice people (if that term still means anything) might find a little vulgar.
Amazonia is the antidote to David Denby's account of the dot-com boom in American Sucker. Amazonia is modest rather than manic, reticent instead of compulsively confessional. The author's troubled marriage and eventual separation are made more poignant by the sketchy discretion with which they're rendered. Afraid of losing his bearings as he rides the juggernaut of his subtitle, Marcus begins a prolonged reading of Emerson. By this point the reader may be thinking, "Hasn't he already suffered enough?" But the author perceives a connection between the web and Transcendentalism (both are "a rebuke to the very idea of physical reality"), and finds "a perfect companion" in Emerson's work. His "lofty, inept, semi-comical detachment," Marcus observes, "was something I understood."
"Lofty" and "inept" I'll leave to the Sage of Concord, but semicomical detachment (coupled with sadness) is what makes Amazonia work. The book has a lightly worn erudition and a witty line-by-line texture ("Our boss, the sole proprietor of all he surveyed"), and while Marcus functions just fine as the picaresque hero of this nonfiction novel, genially suffering through the company picnic and a downtown-shaking earthquake, he never forces himself to be a "character" in any literary or hey-look-at-me way. He's likely to remain the single best historian of Amazon's ethos, if not its spreadsheet.
He moved to New York a week before the attacks of September 11, and heard the first plane strike the World Trade Center after walking his son to school. He resumed his old freelancer's life, while 2,400 miles away, Amazon, a chastened survivor of the dot-com debacle, hunkered down and began heading toward its first full year of profitability. If Marcus no longer has 9 million virtual dollars, he has something he almost certainly values more highly: a very good book to his name.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Emerson's fellow Lyceum lecturer, once marveled: "Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?" Well, in the DVD section, or on Travelocity, or inside all the other ever-more-accessible venues for human avidity and weakness. The book business lurches on, through the (welcome) failure of the e-book, and into the bar-coded new age of Nielsen BookScan, which leaves every writer's retail-sales figures nakedly available to whatever publisher he may desperately need to approach next. A lot of commercial fiction's old warhorses have lost the strength to pull along the literary lame, as they used to.
But not for nothing were Mr. Micawber and Dr. Pangloss invented by writers. Something will improve, and until then it's all a matter of how you look at the sales chart. Just the other week, my agent told me to take special cheer in the second printing, however small, that had been ordered up for my new novel. "Flat," he instructed me, "is the new up."
Thomas Mallon is the author of twelve books, including, most recently, the novel Bandbox.