DOG DAYS

With its trendy software-industry backdrop (featuring obligatory scenes of computer geeks slaving over hot terminals, fueled by enormous amounts of caffeine and forsaking personal hygiene in the name of productivity), the novel at first seems as if it may click over onto a track already covered by Douglas Coupland’s ”Microserfs” or any number of Hollywood scripts involving the Internet and technically impossible plots. But when it leaves this insular environment for the outside world’s realities of bad neighbors, bad relationships and bad decisions, ”Dog Days” heads in a different direction from the rest of the pack. -New York Times Book Review