An exclusive excerpt from Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Purity
Renewable Solutions didn't make or build or even install things. Instead, depending on the regulatory weather (not climate but weather, for it changed seasonally and sometimes seemingly hourly), it "bundled," it "brokered," it "captured," it "surveyed," it "client-provided." In theory, this was all very worthy. America put too much carbon into the atmosphere, renewable energy could help with that, federal and state governments were forever devising new tax inducements, the utilities were indifferent-to-moderately-enthusiastic about greening their image, a gratifyingly non-negligible percentage of California households and businesses were willing to pay a premium for cleaner electricity, and this premium, multiplied by many thousands and added to the money flowing from Washington and Sacramento, minus the money that went to the companies that actually made or installed stuff, was enough to pay fifteen salaries at Renewable Solutions and placate its venture-capitalist backers. The buzzwords at the company were also good: collective, community, cooperative. And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions. From her mother she'd learned the importance of leading a morally purposeful life, and from college she'd learned to feel worried and guilty about the country's unsustainable consumption patterns. Her problem at Renewable Solutions was that she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out than she was asked to sell something else.
At first, and in hindsight least confusingly, she'd sold power-purchase agreements to small and midsize businesses, until a new state regulation put an end to the outrageous little cut that Renewable Solutions took of those. Then it was signing up households in potential renewable energy districts; each household earned Renewable Solutions a bounty paid by some shadowy third party or parties that had created an allegedly lucrative futures market. Then it was giving residents of progressive municipalities a "survey" to measure their level of interest in having their taxes raised or their municipal budgets rejiggered to switch over to renewables; when Pip pointed out to Igor that ordinary citizens had no realistic basis for answering the "survey" questions, Igor said that she must not, under any circumstances, admit this to the respondents, because positive responses had cash value not only for the companies that made stuff but also for the shadowy third parties with their futures market. Pip was on the verge of quitting her job when the cash value of the responses went down and she was shifted to solar renewable energy certificates. This had lasted six relatively pleasant weeks before a flaw in the business model was detected. Since April, she'd been attempting to sign up South Bay subdivisions for waste-energy micro-collectives.
Her associates in consumer outreach were flogging the same crap, of course. The reason they outperformed her was that they accepted each new "product" without trying to understand it. They got behind the new pitch wholeheartedly, even when it was risible and/or made no sense, and then, if a prospective customer had trouble understanding the "product," they didn't vocally agree that it sure was difficult to understand, didn't make a good-faith effort to explain the complicated reasoning behind it, but simply kept hammering on the written pitch. And clearly this was the path to success, and it was all a double disillusionment to Pip, who not only felt actively punished for using her brain but was presented every month with fresh evidence that Bay Area consumers on average responded better to a rote and semi-nonsensical pitch than to a well-meaning saleswoman trying to help them understand the offer. Only when she was allowed to work on direct-mail and social-media outreach did her talents seem less wasted; having grown up with no television, she had good language skills.
Today being a Monday, she was telephonically harassing the many 65+s who didn't use social media and hadn't responded to the company's direct-mail bombardment of a Santa Clara County development called Rancho Ancho. Micro-collectives only worked if you got near-total community buy-in, and a community organizer couldn't be dispatched before a fifty per cent response rate was achieved; nor could Pip earn any "outreach points," no matter how much work she'd done.
She put on her headset and forced herself to look at her call sheet again and cursed the self she'd been an hour earlier, before lunch, because this earlier self had cherry-picked the sheet, leaving the names GUTTENSCHWERDER, ALOYSIUS and BUTCAVAGE, DENNIS for after lunch. Pip hated the hard names, because mispronouncing them immediately alienated the consumer, but she gamely clicked Dial. A man at the Butcavage residence answered with a gruff hello.
"Hiiiiii," she said in a sultry drawl into which she'd learned to inject a note of apology, of shared social discomfort. "This is Pip Tyler, with Renewable Solutions, and I'm following up on a mailing we sent you a few weeks ago. Is this Mr. Butcavage?"
"Boocavazh," the man corrected gruffly.
"So sorry, Mr. Boocavazh."
"What's this about?"
"It's about lowering your electric bill, helping the planet, and getting your fair share of state and federal energy tax credits," Pip said, although in truth the electric-bill savings were hypothetical, waste energy was environmentally controversial, and she wouldn't have been making this call if Renewable Solutions and its partners had any intention of giving consumers a large share of the tax benefits.
"Not interested," Mr. Butcavage said.
"Well, you know," Pip said, "quite a few of your neighbors have expressed strong interest in forming a collective. You might do a little asking around and see what they're thinking."
"I don't talk to my neighbors."
"Well, no, of course, I'm not saying you have to if you don't want to. But the reason they're interested is that your community has a chance to work together for cleaner, cheaper energy and real tax savings."
One of Igor's precepts was that any call in which the words cleaner, cheaper, and tax savings could be repeated at least five times would result in a positive response.
"What is it you're selling?" Mr. Butcavage said a mite less gruffly.
"Oh, this is not a sales call," Pip lied. "We're trying to organize community support for a thing called waste energy. It's a cleaner, cheaper, tax-saving way to solve two of your community's biggest problems at once. I'm talking about high energy costs and solid-waste disposal. We can help you burn your garbage at clean, high temperatures and feed the electricity directly into the grid, at a potentially significant cost savings for you and real benefit to the planet. Can I tell you a little bit more about how it works?"
"What's your angle?" Mr. Butcavage said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Somebody's paying you to call me when I'm trying to take a nap. What's in it for them?"
"Well, basically we're facilitators. You and your neighbors probably don't have the time or the expertise to organize a waste-energy microcollective on your own, and so you're missing out on cleaner, cheaper electricity and certain tax advantages. We and our partners have the experience and the know-how to set you up for greater energy independence."
"Yeah, but who pays you?"
"Well, as you may know, there's an enormous amount of state and federal money available for renewable-energy initiatives. We take a share of that, to cover our costs, and pass the rest of the savings on to your community."
"In other words, they tax me to pay for these initiatives, and maybe I get some of it back."
"That's an interesting point," Pip said. "But it's actually a little more complicated. In many cases, you're not paying any direct tax to fund the initiatives. But you do, potentially, reap the tax benefits, and you get cleaner, cheaper energy, too."
"Burning my garbage."
"Yes, the new technology for that is really incredible. Super clean, super economical." Was there any way to say tax savings again? Pip had never ceased to dread, in these calls, what Igor called the pressure point, but she now seemed to have reached it with Mr. Butcavage. She took a breath and said: "It sounds like this might be something you're interested in learning more about?"
Mr. Butcavage muttered something, possibly "burn my own garbage," and hung up on her.
"Yeah, bite me," she said to the dead line. Then she felt bad about it. Not only had Mr. Butcavage's questions been reasonable, he also had an unfortunate name and no friends in his neighborhood. He was probably a lonely person like her mother, and Pip felt helplessly compassionate toward anyone who reminded her of her mother.