The Optimum Brainwave

Jack Weller spends the novel switching between two systems that promise the same thing — access, validation, a shot at mattering — and Norman Spinrad's real trick is making the reader forget, for pages at a stretch, which one he's currently inside. Transformationalism, the thinly veiled Scientology surrogate at the book's center, offers "life directives," Monitors, Q-level clearances, a brainwave monitor that produces a "psychomap" of a subject's blockages. Hollywood, the system Weller was already trapped in before Annie ever walked into a Celebrity Center, offers agents, contracts, four-episodes-a-year strategic scarcity, and a party circuit where the same faces perform the same status calculus under a different name. Spinrad's satire works because he refuses to let either system be the control and the other the aberration. Transformationalism turns out to be Hollywood's own logic, relocated a few miles up the canyon and given a mythology and an