Po Bronson: The Nudist on the Late Shift

(Vintage $24.95)

Review: by Peter Sinclair*

Nakedness sells, as Quentin Crisp proved years ago.

Po Bronson, however, remains fully clad - indeed, buttoned up - throughout this book, its title inspired by a mythic programmer who felt he coded better in the buff, only to mistake the time one morning and find himself confronted by a female co-worker.

This is one urban legend of Silicon Valley which turns out to be true, and Bronson uses it not only to justify his book's title but to establish a dubious correlation between work and play and personal values - some kind of digital right not to wear clothes.

Nudist sets out to distil the energies of the electronic revolution but it's really about money, although the author hastens to distance himself from a vulgar fascination with the stuff: "I have an accountant's clinical calm around figures big and small, I don't go weird around money, and people get less weird around money when I'm there"

A sense of humour might have been nice, too.

He is drawn to the synergies of youth, wealth and the electron - "sub-35 billionaires" and billionairish behaviour. We're introduced to Yahoo's David Filo as a paradigm of all the codesters who ever slept, however briefly and fitfully, under their office desks; and an eccentric supporting cast of prophets, programmers and suits in the small area of Northern California which is the chief engine of the new economy.

Yet the phenomenon has produced a strangely trivial book. Perhaps topography is its problem.

"A terrain too flat to deserve the name valley," Bronson writes, adding gnomically: "There is very little there, there." And this apercu, repeated, inadvertently takes its place as the philosophical heart of the book.

I can't help feeling Nudist might have been better as a series of articles - written, preferably, by Tom Wolfe.

* Peter Sinclair is an Auckland writer and Herald internet columnist.