Book Review: Frederic Beigbeder – Was 9.99, Now 6.99

The back cover of this book compares it to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and it wouldn’t be too far off. In fact, it’s kind of the bastard child of American Psycho and Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Beigbeder was a respected advertising executive when he wrote this fictional condemnation of his trade and of the materialistic culture of branding that it supports.

This novel tells the story of Octave, a successful, 33-year-old advertising executive earning a ridiculous amount of money for selling a lifestyle to the world for his clients. He has just dumped his girlfriend, who is carrying his child. He has a terrible cocaine habit, a very bad attitude and he has decided he wants to get himself fired. Of course, he doesn’t actually manage this, not even when he runs out of a meeting with his most important client with a massive nosebleed caused by his drug intake and uses the blood from his nose to write the word “pig” all over the walls of the client’s toilets and hallway. In fact, he gets a promotion instead.

Beigbeder, through Octave, has created a ruthless diatribe against the way in which we, the modern consumer, have allowed ourselves to be manipulated into believing that we must consume to exist and that our lives are empty if they don’t mirror the perfection preached in advertisements. He accuses everyone, especially his cynical and knowledgeable lead characters, who realise that they are corrupted by their jobs and by their lifestyle but continue to go into work because they like the obscene amounts of money they earn.

This book is funny, and I do mean laugh-out-loud funny, as well as disturbing and very very astute. It captures the idiocy of noughties culture where the rich try to look poor, the poor try to look rich and everybody uses their clothes, their posessions and their lifestyles in general as a giant billboard for their favourite products and brands. Octave makes lists of his prized posessions as if to show off his taste by owning the right brand of furniture, the right fabrics, the right labels and art by the right artists, even though he knows all fashion is manipulated by corporate money via clever marketing. The book is about being unable to take pleasure in anything other than image and as a result being miserable as styles change faster than the minutes tick away on a clock. It’s about being trapped in modernity where life as we know it makes you miserable, but to throw it all away is equally miserable. Beigbeder’s work stands in stark contrast to the work of his existentialist countrymen such as Sartre or Camus and almost as a philosophical counterfoil to them, because Octave, try as he might to get himself fired, seems to constantly be a victim of fate rather than an instrument of free will. He is forever trapped in his world, dragged along by circumstance and those with more power.

In Was 9.99, Now 6.99, Beigbeder has captured the essence of our age: the frustrations, the beauty, the corruption, the insanity and the surreal rhythms of modernity. Everybody is disillusioned with the world yet feels that it is always someone else’s problem to fix. Characters wash their hands of responsibility for the way in which their own behaviours propagate a system they despise because that system enables them to be physically comfortable, surrounded by their expensive posessions.

At times achingly comical, yet hopelessly depressing this book is certain to become a cult classic.

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