Astrologer, advertiser, gambler, hack, consultant, sociologist, investment banker: There are many labels that describe a professional prognosticator. Yates, the protagonist of James P. Othmer’s debut novel, “The Futurist” (Doubleday, 272 pages, $23.95), calls himself a “futurist.” It’s an interesting – but telling – choice: Mr. Othmer bets the reader is more likely to associate the label with Faith B. Popcorn, a successful self-proclaimed corporate “futurist,” than with the early 20th-century Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of “The Manifesto of Futurism.” He’s probably right. As Popcorn once wrote, “These are bizarre times.”

In “The Futurist,” these are really bizarre times. If you credit Yates’s vortex of self-pity and loathing, much of it is his fault. In the span of a week or so, Yates watches a group of wealthy adventure tourists die aboard a space station that he endorsed and a suicide bomber in Rome look directly at him before blowing herself to smithereens; receives e-mails from someone claiming to be Nostradamus, that infamous futurist; falls in love with a would-be prostitute; and finds himself embroiled in a shady quasi-governmental organization, leading him to a fictional Baghdad, among various other adventures. Worst of all, his girlfriend dumps him.

Yates didn’t foresee any of it. But, then, he wasn’t looking very hard. His job, he’s come to realize, isn’t actually to predict the future; companies hire him to validate their vision of progress. They put him on their boards and ask him to speak at fancy conferences, where he’s meant to coin catch phrases, endorse their products and, ultimately, make them feel good about themselves. He’s meant to say that they are the future, and the future will be good.

Yates began his career as an idealist. “He believed that science had a heart,” Mr. Othmer writes, “that progress had a conscience, and that true art happened in the last synapse before epiphany, in the unstoppable momentum of an original idea.” It didn’t last. After realizing the shallowness and chicanery of the corporate world and, for a brief period, warning his audiences against greed and excess, he learns that the surest way to success is to play the game. Predictably, all this spinning makes him feel bad about himself.And so, at the Futureworld conference in Johannesburg, he has a Jerry Maguire moment and tells the audience the truth: He’s clueless.

The speech isn’t received well at first. But a couple of guys called Johnson, with some undefined connection to the government, take notice and pull him deeper into the morass of duplicity – ostensibly on assignment to report on anti-Americanism across the globe. First stop: Greenland, where he stays with his best friend, a dot-com billionaire who divides his time between watching ice calve and an affair with the 6-foot-tall, dirty, bearded daughter of the head of the Greenlander mafia. (“She’s an artist,” his friend explains.) From there, the novel is a thriller – a successful one, tight and dizzying, with only a few sections, mostly regarding Yates’s relationship with his father, veering into sentimentality and cliche.

Mr. Othmer, a former advertising executive, is a smart, slick writer, and he clearly knows the power of product placement. Yates sees the world as most of us do – as a collage of highly coded brands. Sizzler, Makers Mark, Tom Friedman, Emeril, KitKat, Hotmail, TiVo-ing – each brand is perfect shorthand, prime meat for satire. The cumulative effect of so many trademarks, though, makes the novel seem strangely thin and already dated. (Wouldn’t the futurist gmail?) I have the sense that reading the novel in five years will require annotation.

The ephemeral, destructive quality of a culture in which spin is news and trends cycle ever quicker is, of course, part of Mr. Othmer’s point. The refusal to pause, to interrogate the present and seek lessons in the past, is the root of American arrogance. We only need to look at Marinetti’s vision of Futurism, which trumpeted, “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women,” to see where the danger lies. Before long, Futurism had aligned itself with fascism.