Move over Big Brother: After a comprehensive market study, the inner party is replacing you as the spokesperson of dystopian oppression. In A.D. Nauman's new novel Ms. Dolla Dare is the well-tanned new face of society gone bad. Blonde, busty and quick with an insult, the leggy TV personality looms omnipresent over the action, much as her Orwellian predecessor did - a clever update to be sure - but it begs the question: how much more mileage is left in fictional electronic surveillance?

The answer is, not all that much. Messrs. Orwell, Huxley, Zamaytin and the like have seem to have captured the essence of dystopian fantasy. And though Nauman has attempted to stake out some new futuristic territory, the literary land grab on the future's bleak terrain has long since passed.

Nauman's intentions are laudable, though, in that she starts from an original premise. In the beginning of the novel, what distinguishes Scorch from the dystopian genre's big boys is its timely vision of a market driven hell, where the source of oppression comes not from a totalitarian regime or a Mao-style cult of personality, but from supply and demand run completely amok. Much as Big Brother was the tip of the iceberg for a sinister political machine, the TV goddess Dolla Dare is the most palpable manifestation of a bleak new world, governed only by what sells. Nauman's landscape is littered with the remains of double jumbo diet cokes and super-sized beers from "neighborhood" establishments like the Good Buys pub.

The three merged companies that dominate the world - Holoco, Sunco and Paterco - are your garden variety oppressive monoliths, and the helpless yet heroic protagonist, Arel Ashe, is no new archetype. The novel derives most of its significance from sharp descriptions of perceptively exaggerated reality, rather than from futuristic imaginings of murderous hyper-capitalist gangs, cleansing the suburban landscape of slackers - all at the behest of the evil ex-motivational speaker Dr. Aslow.

Nauman manages several nice set pieces on temping, cube life, and homelessness, even as she fails to maintain a coherent narrative. Unfortunately, the novel's last half screeches to its messy conclusion like a train wreck after an ill-advised privatization scheme. The awkward resolution of the cluttered plot elements left me longing for the elegant single bullet that killed off Orwell's Winston, as he cried his "gin-stained tear." The reader becomes very disoriented as Nauman attempts to establish Dr. Aslow as a grand villain mid-story. Nauman backs away from her original treatise of an unseen iron fist, bloodying normal people into submission with sixteen-hour office days and non-stop adstories (as feature films have come to be called).

Adstories dominate the novel's television screens, which are a constant flow of advertainment. Typing at her cubicle in the trenches of an adstory production company sits Scorch's heroine, Arel Ashe. She holds a minor copywriting job, working on lesser accounts at Sunco, a position somewhat akin to Winston's minor post at the ministry of information. Incidentally, in the scorchian future, there are myriad adstory remakes of 1984 running on the story's cable channels, allowing supple viewers to have a good laugh at inefficient old "Big Brother Government."

In the parlance of the novel, Big Brother Government is a "scorch." Arel Ashe knows what a scorch is: she's been one herself. The Scorch is the subject of derision around the office, or more often, in an adstory. A scorch just isn't motivated enough, isn't driven to succeed, she's not quite on top of the game. A scorch thinks too much, or worse, actually reads books. Scorches include professors, feminists, do-gooders, dreamers and the unfashionable - basically anyone who doesn't quite meet the Dolla Dare standard.

Arel Ashe's mother would have been a scorch. She was feminist professor who lost her job when the University of Illinois sold off its assets to private contractors with an eye for downsizing and efficiency. Yet, Arel, through remembering her mother's books, and then actually reading some of them, is gradually able to comprehend the awful world she lives in. However, the media saturated, fast food society has its hooks so far into her that she is hard pressed to effect a change in herself, much less the world. (It's hard to start a revolution when an episode of Dolla Dare's sitcom can still hold you riveted to the screen.)

Having Arel discover old books is smart, but ultimately it detracts from the novel. Nauman uses it to spout whole chunks of well-known criticisms of the market and the human alienation it causes. It's as if she doesn't trust us to pick that up for ourselves. The assault continues on to the last few pages of the novel, when a main character bludgeons us with this:

You need other people, not just to use - not just to fuck or boss around or mix chemicals for you - but to know. To really know. But how can you really know someone when you never have time to spend with them? Time traded for money, money traded for stuff, which you think is going to make you happy, and for awhile you do feel happy, because you expect to, but then the happiness starts to fade - just like one of those old time photos.

Scorch is, unfortunately, a pedantic novel. Nauman, after all, is an assistant professor of education at Northern Illinois University. She repeats her main themes for us generously and helpfully. She obviously has no use for the old maxim: show, and don't tell. Nauman's ideas are sound but her fictional execution is less so.

For my dystopian money, I'll take Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which features all Scorch's clever ideas about the marketplace turned foul, only fleshed out with details and descriptions that seem effortlessly humorous but are nonetheless devastating. Stephenson's world gone wrong is free of Nauman's academic baggage, and it manages to look twice as smart. I wish Professor Nauman had left this one to the private sector.