"The Enthusiast" by Josh Fruhlinger: A review

I recently came across a copy of "The Enthusiast" by Josh Fruhlinger, the blogger who runs The Comics Curmudgeon blog. It came out a few years ago, and I had always meant to get a copy, but never got around to it. And now a brand, spanking new copy was right in front of me at a library book sale, mine for next to nothing. I felt embarrassed about buying it in such a way, but I also felt like it was a damned shame that this copy had gone unread. I needed to buy it, and I needed to read it.

That was over a month and a half ago. I finally read it over the past two weeks. I finished it a few days ago. And it's been rolling around in my head ever since.

This is a novel of ideas. Josh presents a new sort of consulting firm, one that is part guerrilla marketing, part psychological operations. The motto of the Subconscious Agency (its name a clever play on a psychological term) is "Enthusiasm is our business." Through subtle nudges, online interaction, and direct work in the field, the agency and its agents encourage, cultivate, and direct naturally-occurring enthusiasms in ways that are useful to their clients. The story follows agent Kate Berkowitz as she takes the lead on two seemingly unconnected campaigns: encouraging the purchase of a client's trains to replace the outdated ones in service on the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, and helping a charming but vain movie star build interest in a movie project based on a decades-old comic strip - with him playing every male character.

Josh takes us on a ride that is full of twists and turns, more roller coaster than commuter train. While there are chapters of necessary exposition to get through and over a dozen characters to keep track of, once the story gets rolling it moves faster and faster, even as it is peppered with Mao-like aphorisms from Christine, the founder of Subconscious Agency, who is one part New Age visionary and several parts K Street scrapper. There is suspense, menace, ill-considered romance, lies and subterfuge and rugs that get pulled out from under characters at inconvenient times. And through it all is the theme of harnessing enthusiasm to achieve not just a desired outcome, but a desired shape of a process.

It's hard to believe that an organization like Subconscious Agency isn't already out there, subtly manipulating opinions in ways that benefit its clients. And then it becomes clear - these agencies are already out there, these manipulations are real. While the novel was published in 2013 2015 and written in the years that preceded, it's a prescient and fairly believable description of the psychological warfare and opinion manipulation that went on in the 2016 election and continues to this day.

What are you enthusiastic about? How can your personal mental energies be hijacked to produce a desired outcome for someone else, to establish a shape of a process, a template for future thought? Who is manipulating you through the things you care about? Read "The Enthusiast" by Josh Fruhlinger, and think very hard about these questions.