Hari Kunzru populates his second novel with anti-heroes, victimized by greed, hubris and technology. In doing so, he falls back on well-worn themes about modern life.

While some of his twists are colorful and clever, others are a bit of a stretch. In the end, the novel, like its characters, spins out of control, losing grip on its early promise.

The main anti-hero is Arjun Mehta, a bright but distracted computer whiz kid living in middle-class North Okhla, India. He nurtures a serious love of Bollywood movies and the romanticized notions of adventure they represent, and he longs to escape home. Being a computer geek, it's no wonder that the target locale of his dreams is Silicon Valley, Calif.

To that end, he applies to the (sarcastically dubbed) "Databodies" company, hoping to land the much-touted computer consulting jobs the company offers in the U.S. His interviewer at Databodies, the mockingly named "Sunny" Srinivasan, is described as ". . . a man who appeared to be less a human being than a communications medium, a channel for the transmission of consumer lifestyle messages. From his gelled hair to his lightly burnished penny loafers, every particular of his appearance carried a set of aspirational associations . . . "

As a result of Arjun's dreams and Databodies' effective marketing to people like him, Arjun becomes hooked into a kind of modern-day indentured servitude. Deposited in a California slum, he must await company-sponsored opportunities to work. His meager earnings dwindle, and his personal pride traps him in the situation - especially once he makes exaggerated claims of success to the folks back home.

The second anti-hero (again mockingly named) is "Guy Swift." Born of lower middle-class English folk, Guy is now the founder of a cutting-edge public relations and marketing firm named "Tomorrow*" (yes, with an asterisk).

Guy has expensive tastes. He works very hard cultivating his ultra-hip image. For example, he has an extremely beautiful and high maintenance girlfriend. Also, his cell phone plays a ring tone with the hook from a 1980s soft rock tune. "Like his occasional visits to greasy spoon cafés, his collection of John Holmes videos, his current haircut and the posters of state-socialist leaders in the dining room," writes Kunzru, "Guy's ring tone was ironic."

Guy is a millionaire - on paper. His company is struggling to meet the demands of the venture capitalists who bought into his cutting-edge creative vision. It is this same creative vision that Guy is finding increasingly difficult to sell to actual paying clients.

Out of desperation, Guy goes far outside his comfort zone to provide a proposal to a Middle Eastern golfing conglomerate. Kunzru's passages describing Guy's presentation are some of the most embarrassing and frightful in the pages of Transmission. In a different way from Arjun, Guy also is a victim of the profit machine, driven by his own dreams of wealth (not to mention the demands of his girlfriend).

Arjun's desperation to keep his job provides the meat-and-potatoes of the plot. Arjun's computer hobbies revolve around virus hacking. His tinkering, meant to secure his position at work, leads to an out-of-control computer virus that touches the lives of every character. (In an ironic twist, he negatively involves his favorite Bollywood actress, Leela Zahir.)

Despite all the colorful, cross-cultural props, Kunzru's novel contains several distracting problems. The first is an overreliance on self-conscious witticisms: the many sarcastic and mocking names of the characters, the detailed but predictable descriptions of those characters, the extended passages about laughable computer geek life, and so on.

Less forgivable is a mood and an atmosphere that strikingly resemble those of another recently published novel. Pattern Recognition is the crossover novel from cyber-punk veteran William Gibson, detailing the life of a marketing consultant with an allergy to uncool product marketing. Guy Swift bears a remarkable likeness to that novel's Hubertus Bigend.

Another major problem is the technical unlikelihood of Arjun's computer virus in all its permutations. Kunzru clearly is trying to ride the trailing wave of Y2K hysteria but doesn't pull it off. He insults the intelligence of computer-literate readers and interrupts the suspension of disbelief.

Lastly, even though Kunzru's writing often is witty, hip and clever, the moral of the story remains heavy-handed and trite. It's another case of hapless people, trapped in a system of greed, corruption and overweening pride, ruled by technology they barely understand or control, robbed of soulful individuality and forced to perform according to market demand.

That may well be the story of 21st century mankind, but Kunzru's version is not a fresh Transmission.

Eric J. Blommel is a freelance writer living in Centennial.