cover image The Deal

The Deal

Joe Hutsko. Forge, $23.95 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-312-86872-7

Hutsko debuts with a clumsy effort to re-create the near-demise of Apple Computer with a thinly disguised cast of fictional alter egos. Hutsko, who worked closely with Apple CEO John Sculley, casts Peter Jones in the role of Apple founder Steve Jobs. As the novel opens, Jones is unseated from his position by his best friend, Matthew Locke, a buttoned-down Sculley type who engineers a power-play and steals control of Jones's innovative computer company, Via Technology. While Jones reels from the loss, Locke moves in for the kill, forming a strategic alliance with Via's former rival, ICP, the narrative's IBM-equivalent. As Jones licks his wounds during a Maine sabbatical with the help of an older computer inventor named Byron Holmes, the power-hungry Locke defies the wishes of his boss, ICP head William Harrell, to turn the alliance into a full-blown merger. Jones and Holmes combine to reinvent the hand-held computer, with some assistance from a comely coed named Ivy Green, who supplies the software after seducing Jones and then bears his child in one of several ludicrous romantic subplots. The explosive growth of Internet technology lends a myopic, nostalgic feel to the self-congratulatory climax, which celebrates Jones's triumph over his former partner with a new hand-held computer that implements a semi-intelligent voice-recognition system--not exactly a surprising development. Hutsko's plotline suggests he is an Apple fanatic seeking to rewrite history. Author tour. (Jan.) FYI: The New York Times on the Web will serialize The Deal in its technology section.