Life:  
      Relatively little biographical information is available about Anderson, who explains “I have a very New Englandy horror of self-promotion, and for that reason, I haven’t put anything about me online” (Shoemaker 98).  He studied literature at Harvard and Cambridge before getting an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse; he currently teaches creative writing at Vermont College and lives in Boston.  He has revealed to an interviewer that he is single with no kids.  His first book was Thirsty, about a boy who is coming of age as a vampire (1997).   Anderson admits to creating characters who “are struggling with masculinity. . . my characters are, as a rule, suspicious of its certainties and confused by its sureties.” (Shoemaker 99)
      To comments that his books are unusually complex, he says:

      We live in a culture of corporate-sponsored narrative, which is a culture of underwritten endumbening.  In an attempt to reach an ever wider audience, television, movies, magazines, and even publishers rely on three elements pernicious to complicated narrative: first the sapping of particularity (for fear that eccentricity will frighten off potential viewers, or more dangerously, encourage the splintering of mass demographics); second, the simplification of narrative (because of an assumption that the bulk of people want to hear over and over again the stories they have already heard); and third, the pursuit of anything, be it tumbling helicopters or showering cheerleaders, that might constitute “action.”

      This creates a vicious cycle, however.  As children are raised on simpler and simpler narratives, they become acclimated to that banality, and grow distrustful of anything that deviates from it.                                                                                    (Shoemaker 99)

 Feed:
        Anderson explains that he wrote the first two parts of Feed just before the terrorist attacks of 9-11; the day after, while in a music store, he overheard snatches of conversation that later made it into the novel (e.g., “Dude! I think the truffle is totally undervalued”) and realized for some people, “it was as if nothing ever happened. . . . these two statements stuck in my head as a graphic illustration of what so many of us do when confronted with disaster.  We turn away.  We refuse to be confronted.” (Blasingame 98)
      The book ends with the words “Everything must go. . .” being repeated in progressively smaller type, as if the words themselves were disappearing:

      That has particular meaning within the story, but also in a broader sense, that willingly or unwillingly, we’re going to have to change radically the way we live.  Our lives as Americans are built on superstructures that are not self-sustaining.  Our nation has a vicious prejudice against anything that doesn’t yield quick profit.  There’s little sense of long-term planning, and there’s open scorn when ethical questions arise in opposition to short-term business goals.                                                                                             (Blasingame 99)

Feed as Simple Love Story
      At the level of plot, Feed can be seen as a basic relationship story – boy meets girl, they fall in love, discover they have different expectations of the relationship; she dies and he can’t respond properly.  It's such a basic love story that it was incarnated in the 1970s under the generic title Love Story in Erich Segal's weepy best-seller.  This is, with the exception of Violet's death, a pretty typical adolescent scenario - or, indeed, the story of any kind of love.  One member of the relationship may be planning a never-ending future of togetherness, the other is already planning his next relationship.  Eventually, such relationships will fall apart; this one seems particularly tough because Violet is dying, and we expect that Titus should be more attentive to her.
       When Anderson is on record against the simplification of narrative (see above), we might question why he chooses such a simple narrative on which to hang his novel - indeed, students in class asked precisely this question.  The answer lies in part in the book's satiric nature; if Anderson's primary purpose is to satirize our society, the plot itself needs to be simple, or plot complications might get in the way of the satire.

Feed as a Satire      
      Feed is best thought of as a satire on consumer culture with its obsession with immediate gratification, on the computer-mediated society, and our obsession with instant communications.  Anderson says, “I conceive of Feed as a novel that uses images from an imagined future in an almost allegorical way to discuss things we’re dealing with now.” (Shoemaker 100)
      One element in our culture is a tendency to conceive of everything in relation to patterns mediated for us by popular, commercial culture: “It’s impossible for us to think of life without conceiving of it in images that are taken from movies, from songs, from ads, all of which are challenging us to be better consumers rather than better people.” (Anderson, qtd. in Shoemaker 101) We can see this operating even with Violet, the least manipulated of the teens in Feed, in this passage where she is discussing her concept of “living a full life” with Titus:

  Everything I think of when I think of really living, living to the full – all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms.  See what I mean?  My idea of life, it’s what happens when they’re rolling the credits.  My god.  What am I, without the feed?  It’s all from the feed credits.  My idea of real life.  (174 - page references to the test are to the hardcover edition)

Violet has been resisting the feed as much as possible.  She spent the first part of her life unconnected, and has been home schooled by her father with the more conventional kind of knowledge we associate with education, rather than the education in how to consume that the other kids get at School^TM.  She remains aware of the various kinds of resistance going on elsewhere, protest movements, etc., and is genuinely angry at the deteriorating condition of the world.  She intentionally tries to misdirect the feed, to frustrate the corporation's attempts to create a consumer profile of her.  Thus it is particularly frightening that she, too, is susceptible to the feed's images.  In part, she is attempting to fit in by embracing some of the feed's styles (e.g., she seems at least initially to accept the vogue for lesions); in the world of Feed, conformity consists of aligning yourself with the mediated environment.  Having once submitted to the feed, however, she becomes  incapable of complete resistance; her very protest of refusing to be profiled is why the corporations will not provide a free repair to her feed, and in the end the system successfully profiles her interest in requiems, offering up variations that she likes.

Language as Satire, and Other Uses
     One of the targets of Anderson's satire is the debasement of the American language, both in the ubuiquitous use of foul language and in the tendency to substitute meaningless catch-phrases for actual conversation.  Anderson is well aware of the concerns some of the language in his book may excite, in terms of profanity and sexuality, but observes that the book is not intended for young adolescents.  He notes: “A ten-year-old, for example, may basically be able to understand the plot and language of Feed, but there are parts of the book predicated on a sexualized youth culture that is (I hope!) far beyond those readers’ real comprehensions.” (Shoemaker 100)  The language issues also tie in to the book’s basic critique of the direction of U.S. consumer culture: “The intensity of the profanity is just one example of the way that English is deteriorating under the influence of a highly commercialized anti-intellectualism.” (Shoemaker 100)
       Anderson calls our attention to language in various ways.  For instance, one mark of Titus’s difference from the other kids in his group - the reason that Violet is interested in him - is his ability to describe things in language. Unlike the others, Violet tells him, he uses metaphor (52 - actually, here and elsewhere he is actually using simile, but the point is that he is capable of figurative language), and we do note that his descriptions of the world around him are effective. Violet’s father intentionally uses convoluted syntax and difficult words; his style of speech would never be described as effective, but his purpose in generating more difficult language is to resist the tendency to oversimplify (in a similar way, some Marxist theorists insist on using convoluted, dense prose to express their ideas as a means of resisting the tyranny of conventional language).  Marty gets a “speech tattoo” that renders him almost incomprehensible - an emblem both of the tendency to meaningless phrases replacing actual conversation and the domination of corporate consumer culture, since his tattoo randomly inserts a brand name ("Nike") into his speech.
      The book's slang is not so much a part of its satire as an attempt to extrapolate current usages into future developments.  For example, Anderson discusses his use of the word “unit”: “There are certain linguistic positions that we as Americans tend to fill with a slang term.  Like the ‘buddy’ position, used as a filler to reaffirm the connection between interlocutors. . . . I started to think about these idiomatic place-holders, and I just inserted fabricated ones – ‘unit’ and so on.” (Blasingame 99)

Protest as Fashion
       Marc Aronson cites as evidence of an enduring tradition of adolescent anger Arthur Rimbaud's Deliriums:  "I will make gashes over my entire body, I will tattoo myself. . . you will see, I will howl in the streets.  I wish to become quite mad with rage." The image of "gashes over [the] entire body" resonates with the vogue in Feed for creating artificial lesions, especially Quendy's "fashion statement" (153).  But where Rimbaud's image expresses rage at the world he finds himself in, Quency's lesions are adopted with the sole aim of out-voguing Calista.  This conversion of protest/rage to fashion has occurred in our world, as well, where the "punk look" and piercings which originally expressed young people's anger at the adult society has become, to some extent, normative.
       The same applies to the fashion vogue in Feed of "Riot Gear" (128): "It's Riot Gear.  It's retro.  It's beat up to look like one of the big twentieth-century riots.  It's been big since earlier this week."  The Riot Gear fashions are identified with specific acts of social protest: Kent State, (128 - a 1970 anti-war protest in which four college students were killed by National Guardsmen called in to counter the protest) Stonewall, (130 - a 1969 police raid on a gay bar in Greenwich Village erupted into violent confrontations between cops and gays), and Watts (a 1965 outbreak in response to frustration with efforts to thwart civil-rights gains).  Yet the clothing the kids wear has been totally removed from the original social context of the riots, and indeed, the names have become nothing more than labels to kids whose concept of history is expressed by Titus's reliance on the feed: "You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit." (39)

^{Sources: Marc Aronson, Exploding the Myths: The Truth about Teenagers and Reading, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001;James Blasinghame, “An Interview with M.T. (Tobin) Anderson,” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 47, 1 (September 2003) 98-99; Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Exhaustion of Literature: Novels, Computers, and the Threat of Obsolescence,” Contemporary Literature 43, 3 (Autumn 2002) 518-59; “M.T. Anderson,” Walker Books http://www.walkerbooks.co.uk/M.T.-Anderson April 25, 2005; Joel Shoemaker, “Hungry . . . for M.T. Anderson: An Interview with M.T. Anderson,” VOYA 27, 2 (June 2004) 98-102.}

^{A. Waller Hastings
Professor of English
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD  57401}

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