BUNNY MODERN

David Bowman’s Bunny Modern is an imaginative but dyspeptic collection of farfetched futurisms: In a postmillennial New York suffering from an inexplicable blackout and a radical drop in fertility, armed nannies protect babies from kidnappers and snort drugs that prevent them from bonding with their charges. The narrator falls in love with a nanny who guards a baby that hasn’t grown since the Reagan era. In his enthusiasm for gimmicks, Bowman misses the opportunity to comment meaningfully on both the Reagan ’80s and the nanny-dependent ’90s, making this a high-concept, low-content novel. B-