Perhaps taking inspiration from that jocular hamburger jester Ronald McDonald, in the futuristic world Max Barry created for his book, Jennifer Government, people take as their surnames the names of the companies they work for. If a person is unemployed, well, good luck finding his name in the phone book. In Jennifer Government, the U.S. rules the world-except for France and a select group of other countries -and at the top of that world is not a government, but two giant conglomerates called the U.S. Alliance and Team Advantage. These head honchos are made up of smaller companies such as Nike, ExxonMobil, McDonald's, IBM and hundreds of other companies. Taxes are illegal while fraud is encouraged, and greedy CEOs look for more ways to make another billion dollars they do not need.

Jennifer Government takes place in U.S.-owned Australia and New Zealand, London and Los Angeles. The story itself centers around one company, Nike, in the Melbourne district. The executives want to make their newest product, the Mercury sneaker-selling at a whopping $2,500 a pair, but costing only 89 cents to produce-the hottest piece of merchandise on the global market. To do this, they come up with the ultimate master plan: kill at least a dozen people just for buying the product and make the sneakers the most desired piece of fabric, leather and rubber this side of the Pacific.

This is how we meet Hack Nike, a lowly merchandising officer who is brought up the command chain by bad boys John Nike and John Nike, who work in marketing. After signing a contract he never bothered to read, Hack sets into motion a landslide of political and economical turmoil. Hack's job is to kill 10 teenagers the moment they purchase the new Nike Mercury sneakers to create a desire to own your own pair because they are so popular, "people will kill for them."

Hack of course, being one of the good guys pulled unknowingly into this horribly wrong situation, goes for outside help when his conscience gets the better of him. Unfortunately the outside help, the police, refuse to uphold the law just because it's the moral thing to do. They actually ask for money to carry out the job for him so he doesn't get arrested and have the government after him. Hack, being an easily influenced fool, sub-contracts the police to take the job and goes home to his unemployed girlfriend, Violet. Violet is a tech person with all the right talents, but without a job. She is creating a massive virus to sell to any corporation that will buy it from her for an extremely reasonable sum of money.

Meanwhile, we finally meet Jennifer Government herself-a sly, slick, cunning and very intelligent field agent looking for one thing: retribution on John Nike. A while ago, John did something to Jennifer that made her hate him and lust for revenge. But to find out that little tidbit, read the book; I'll just let you know it's important. One interesting thing about Jennifer is that she has a barcode tattooed under her left eye. Nobody she works with, including her partner Calvin, seems to know why she has it or what it means.

The book also contains many other fun and interesting characters. There is a wonderful fellow named Buy Mitsui who works for, as one may have guessed, Mitsui. Buy is an interesting character because he came to U.S.-owned territory from France, one of the only countries left in the world not under American control. He learns how the Americans do business and sometimes wishes he were back in France, especially after they made him change his name from Jean-Paul to Buy. It is ironic that a free country forces people to drop non-American names.

Another important person to know is Billy NRA, as in the National Rifle Association. Billy is a guy who just wants to go skiing, but somehow ends up tangled in a very huge political and business scandal, partly because people in the book confused him with another person who is also a part of the NRA. He ends up on bad terms with Jennifer, who drags him halfway around the world on her search for John. The plot starts out very confusingly but everything is sorted out in the end.
When John and John Nike show up at Hack's apartment, they end up in a whirlwind of trouble that only persists, involving many people who do not even know they are connected. While Jennifer is looking for the people involved in the killings (John and John), the Nike men are getting their heads bashed in by Hack's girlfriend, Violet, because one of them tried to attack her. Hack and Violet leave their apartment and move into her sister Clare Sears' apartment. Violet goes off to a meeting a few days later and then ends up in Texas with the executives of ExxonMobil, who want to pay her for her program and have her use it on one of their competitors during the stock exchange.

Meanwhile, Hack had received a call from Violet ending their relationship and he started seeing Clare. Jennifer, having been at one of the malls where a shooting had occurred, was interviewing anyone she could get her hands on to get information about one of the John Nikes and his relations with the shootings. She ends up speaking to Hack, Billy and Buy. Buy had tried to save one of the victims at the mall and was still in shock following that day. Buy and Jennifer are instantly attracted to one another, and even Jennifer's eight-year-old daughter, Kate, loves him.
From this moment on, everything is set up to show signs of disaster. John is a very ambitious person and believes the world can do without a government. He believes that the government always gets in the way of business transactions, marketing techniques and job fulfillment. John seems to have no conscience, since he has no qualms about killing a few people to increase the sales of his company's products. Luckily for the rest of the world, the U.S. Alliance, which Nike is under, and the other companies in conjunction, do not feel his policies are the right way to go about promoting their companies and finally get up the nerve to terminate him and refuse to accept responsibility for the consequences of his decisions and actions.

Jennifer Government gives stressful situations that will hopefully never become a part of our world as we know. Corporations are huge, but do not yet rule the world. Max Barry, on the other hand, presents a brilliant glimpse into a possible future (stating of course at the very beginning that the situations are fictitious and would never happen) and makes us all a bit more wary of letting big money-making conglomerates acquire more power than our government can control. Jennifer Government is a fantastic book about greed, money and how to succeed in business without really trying. Readers interested in imaginative futuristic societies should definitely check out Jennifer Government.