Nils Bobgren is an undeniably talented programmer, but he’s remote and secretive, with a disturbing tendency to personify his demons: the Bitch-Goddess Disaster, for instance, or the specter of dark motives he calls Blackley. So everyone is on guard when he volunteers to web-enable his uncle Stan’s alt-hippie headshop and stake a claim in the late 1990’s e-commerce bonanza.One of Nils’s new workmates, Sky Nichols, introduces Nils to Kirsta Girard at a karaoke bar in Northeast Minneapolis. Nils dedicates a song to her, and when he’s done passionately kisses Kirsta in front of her husband. It’s all part of a plan, he tells Sky: he will love Kirsta completely and unrequitedly, and let her inevitable rejection destroy his foolish notions of romance forever. It’s a silly, disastrous plan, Sky thinks, and for good reason. Because at the wedding of Stan’s daughter a few weeks later, Nils’s plan backfires. With her marriage going bad, Kirsta has turned to Nils for affection, and they begin a precarious affair.
This was life in the dawn of the Internet age: infinite shimmering potential and absurdist gold-strikes studding a near-Fitzgeraldian tapestry of romance and idealism, all hounded mercilessly by monied interests with motivations that have nothing to do with love. So inevitably, Stan’s idea that the Internet can be a subversive equalizer yields to his family’s need for money and the tempting promises of big rewards from predatory venture capitalists. And when Kirsta throws Nlis over for a boy from a Silicon Valley start-up, HempAmerika must inevitably, and spectacularly, go the way of so many other Internet flame-outs.
Excerpt:
I watched his calm profile as he continued in a low voice: "She was unattainable, of course. Remote, lovely. She fit a pattern. It's as if unavailability were what I loved. I've been told, on reliable authority, that I have an idealization delusion, that what I love must be by definition perfect. I'm tired of fighting it. I think one of these days I'll just fall in love for the last time and throw myself on its rocks of devotion and let love like giant breakers beat me to death."
It was a ghastly thing to hear the conviction with which this speech was delivered. I listened in drunken fascination, trying to imagine that he was joking, but his face, even flush with drink, was steadfastly earnest.
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