1996
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –
I never thought I would say this about a book and mean it in a good way:
Bellwether is an adorable romance story.
It’s also a tremendously cute send-up of people slavishly following popular trends.
The main character, Dr. Sandra Foster, is a statistical researcher at a corporation called HiTek. Her area of research—her obsession—is to discover how fads start.
HiTek has several floors of researchers all engaged in different types of research, from stats to biology to physics. It is a sort of Dilbertian company in that it does not appear to actually create any products, but does spend tons of money and time holding trendy sensitivity exercises and producing reams of bureaucratic paperwork.
HiTek is interested in Foster’s research because they’d like to use it to create fads of their own. But Foster is doing it because she is simply fascinated by trends: the phenomenon of people blindly following the crowd’s lead in completely silly fashions, food, and entertainment. She wants to know what makes otherwise rational people subscribe to the pointless and idiotic just because it’s popular.Foster is surrounded by people who subscribe to the latest fads and try to enforce them on her—not only HiTek’s management, but also her friends, her friends’ kids, her maybe-boyfriend, the baristas at her favorite café, and the assistant librarians at her local library. Foster’s life is additionally complicated by Flip, the company’s twenty-something administrative assistant (later re-titled by management the “interdepartmental communications liaison”). Flip is on the bleeding edge of fashion, with blue hair and duct tape jewelry, but cannot make copies or correctly deliver inter-office mail to save her life. She invariably ends up making more work for Foster than if Foster had just done the administrative tasks herself.
Foster’s current project is to find the source of the hair-bobbing fad of the 1920s. She has methodically eliminated all of her most promising potential sources, and feels like she’s not getting anywhere. Then, one day, Flip mis-delivers a package to Foster that is supposed to go to a Dr. Turnbull down in Biology. Foster takes it upon herself to deliver it since it is marked “perishable.” Turnbull is not in her lab at the time, but her lab mate, Dr. Bennett O’Reilly, is there. And in O’Reilly, Foster meets the first and only person she has ever met who seems to be completely immune to fads.
O’Reilly is a complete fashion disaster. He wears clashing colors and patterns and has no idea whether tiramisu or bread pudding is in or out. And not only does he not care about fads, he seems to be unaware that they even exist. This is, of course, fascinating to Foster.
O’Reilly is working on chaos theory. He is trying to observe how chaotic systems behave and understand how they can sometimes reach such a point of total chaos that they will actually spontaneously organize themselves into a new, organized-seeming equilibrium. He and Foster quickly recognize the similarities in their goals, and decide to work together on a single project to find out how cohesive trends arise out of chaos and disorganization. They launch their project—which involves borrowing a flock of sheep from Foster’s rancher maybe-boyfriend—but their progress is hampered on all sides by friends and colleagues who want them instead to help them ban smoking from the parking lot, find a Romantic Bride Barbie, and win the elusive million-dollar Niebnitz research grant.
O’Reilly and Foster are as cute as buttons. Really. They’re the only people at HiTek—or even apparently in the greater Denver-Boulder area—who seem to have a dose of common sense. And they’re ideal for each other, but they don’t see it at all, of course.
There’s not actually all that much that goes on as far as plot in this book. It’s like Willis’ longer books in that most of the activity involves the main characters trying to get something done—like copying a bunch of clippings on hair-bobbing—and having it take weeks because it is interrupted by management all-hands meetings, administrative assistants (or interdepartmental communications liaisons) losing the clippings, and people wanting advice about filling out the incomprehensible new simplified funding forms.
As long as you don’t need a lot of actual plot or action, and you are okay sitting back and enjoying the ride through the chaos, you’ll get a lot of funny information about trends and entertaining character studies of impossible people, and a very sweet love story between two likeable characters fighting against all odds to follow their own stars.
