Heppner, Mike 1972-

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HEPPNER, Mike 1972-

PERSONAL: Born 1972. Education: Columbia University, M.F.A., 2000.

ADDRESSES: Home—Providence, RI. Agent—c/o Author Mail, A. A. Knopf Publishers, 299 Park Ave., 4th Floor, New York, NY 10171.

CAREER: Writer.

WRITINGS:

The Egg Code, Knopf (New York, NY), 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A book about a plane that is about to crash and how the lives of the passengers are infinitely related to one another.

SIDELIGHTS: Mike Heppner wrote a thesis for his M.F.A. degree at Columbia University, and two years later it was published as a well-received novel, The Egg Code. The book focuses on the history of the printed word from eleventh-century China through the early years of the personal computer. Heppner has stated that he does not know much about computers, so although the book touches on computer use, it really is about how computers and the Internet affect the everyday lives of the people who use them. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called Heppner's book a "bumptiously clever debut novel."

Many reviewers have mentioned The Egg Code's density of information. According to the New York Times's Scott McLemee, "The future belongs to M.F.A. maximalism: fiction that sprawls, with narratives as complex as the page can bear, its story lines branching out across whole continents or eons." Countless characters people these stories and their lives are cleverly and intricately interrelated. With this new breed of writing. McLemee continued: "The saga is to be rendered in prose having the texture and intricacy of a circuit board, with all metaphors ultimately deriving from esoteric fields of knowledge." Such is the case, he found, with The Egg Code.

In the novel, much mischief arises through a fictional Web site called "www.eggcode.com." The hacker behind the site, Olden Field, almost completely paralyzes the Internet by feeding it reams of misinformation. It is through this event—the near collapse of the Internet—that the lives of the characters are loosely tied together.

The book is unusually long—sixty chapters, almost five hundred pages. The cast of characters includes Lydia Tree, a pushy mother who tries to help her son pursue a career as an actor. Lydia is married to Steve Mould, a furniture store manager, who finally lands a spot for his son in a commercial that turns out to be a farce. The husband and wife end up divorced. The Internet hacker earns an even worse fate. He ends up in jail, but not before many more complications in the story unfold. A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that Heppner's writing style "operates on multiple levels, alternating among an evidently empathetic intelligence, an uncommon comic brio and outrageously sophomoric symbolism." McLemee, however, commented that "there are no ideas here—only gestures," concluding that "Somewhere inside The Egg Code . . . there may be a perfectly good novella about unhappy families and the strange alliance of self-help and self-loathing. But it is not struggling nearly hard enough to get out."

"Heppner has bitten off more than he can chew," commented a writer for Kirkus Reviews, who added "but so did Dickens and Balzac." Hailing The Egg Code as an "ambitious" debut, the reviewer deemed the book "a wild ride" that is "too long and too much fun."