A very serious story about the perniciousness of conspiracy thinking, wrapped in a very funny yarn about the shallowness of celebrity culture ... Reboot wrings brilliant laughs from the absurdity of David’s predicament, and the way Hollywood and internet language can seem like foreign tongues.
Reboot is an anxious book ... Taylor’s gently comic tone and kinetic prose make this hard-going travel easier, as do his many clever reinventions ... A performance full of wit and rigor freed of the familiar polarizing semantics, making legible something the actual streaming-posting-retweeting world, with its relentless pace and all-too-real stakes, can easily obscure, which is just how much conspiracy theory and pop culture have fused ... The book seems caught between an honest reckoning with dread and an impulse to reassure. There will be blood, but it’s not as devastating as it deserves to be.
A pretext for Mr. Taylor’s ruminations on streaming television, celebrity brand management, social-media memes and the fever swamps of online conspiracy-theory forums ... The meditations are undoubtedly intelligent, but they require a wide range of cultural knowledge ... To really enjoy Reboot you need to delight in finding and identifying these textual "Easter eggs," as David likes to refer to them, because the story itself is static and half-hearted.
A Borgesian feast of real and invented films, Broadway shows, video games, records, and television ... Taylor’s expertise far surpasses name-dropping. His cultural references are functional; they build the world, propel the plot, develop character, make us laugh—and occasionally squirm ... I was very rarely bored while reading this novel, except when it feared I was.
The result is like an overflowing tureen: the stew is tasty, but less might have been neater. Despite its excesses, the novel is great fun, with witty gibes at pop culture, conspiracy theorists, and the cult of celebrity. Remakes have their pleasures, but clever, original novels are worth tuning in for.
While there’s plenty of plot... the narrative also overflows with witty and incisive ideas ... An affecting character study and excoriating indictment of the way we live now.
Entertaining if overstuffed ... Some sections, like one long tangent chronicling the backstory of David’s second ex-wife, seem superfluous, but Taylor makes up for it with Webster’s caffeinated pop-culture patter and David’s indomitable determination. Readers will find plenty to applaud.
