Volume 48, Number 7 · April 26, 2001
Double Lives
By Andrew O'Hagan
Aiding and Abetting
Muriel Spark
Doubleday, 166 pp., $21.00
Certain kinds of inquiry are born and bred for the Internet: the creepy, the supernatural, the unidentified flying, the bizarrely sexual, the CIA-involved. The kinds of people who seek information on these things, or who seek to share the fine print of their expertise, are people who used to subscribe to weird magazines, used to meet in pool bars or in fields on weekends, and who can now be found in Inter-net chat-rooms at three o'clock in the morning. It is becoming possible to understand these groups as new international tribes: the People of the Grassy Knoll, the Clan Roswell, the Global Fraternity of Boys Who Love Pamela Anderson, the Elvises, the Hitlers, the Worldwide Believers in the Sanctity of the Meteorite. Every classroom in the New World used to have one or two of these types; every mall had a dozen or so; but now, thanks to the glories of the World Wide Web, these odd twos and dozens can link hands across time zones and space, making of each contingent, from Dundee, Scotland, to Delmar, Iowa, a brotherhood of cranks the size of Katmandu.
Review, 3709 words
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