![\"Courtesy](\"http:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/151068dc-ef43-4825-8184-fe2a6e08852b.jpg\")
Those of us who love novels might find it difficult to disagree with so flattering an assessment of our favorite pastime, but Harris\u2019s equation of novel reading is defined more by what we\u2019re not<\/i> doing when we read (checking Instagram, replying to email, worrying about how many likes our post got) than anything to do with War and Peace<\/i>. Why does having Tolstoy in one\u2019s head count as solitude, but reading a particularly witty Tumblr blog equal social distraction? If solitary absorption allows us to cultivate our inner lives, then surely the hours one can lose in online rabbit holes must count for something. Is this how we want to justify reading Tolstoy? If anything, the vast, teeming, multilingual worlds created by novels are precursors of our digital-age diversions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n When novels and novel readers become objects of nostalgia, we risk overlooking how the novel form has adapted to our digital selves, and we to it. If Harris wants Tolstoy to save us from the Internet, recent novels suggest that it\u2019s already too late. Three new works\u2014Rick Moody\u2019s Hotels of North America<\/i>, Joshua Cohen\u2019s Book of Numbers<\/i>, and Louisa Hall\u2019s Speak<\/i>\u2014use the form to ask the same questions that propel Harris: has tech changed us? And, if so, how? Unlike Harris, though, these authors are less interested in how reading novels is different from being online than in how novels themselves capture our imperfect ways of communicating with one another\u2014digitally and otherwise. Characters turn to technology for recognition and companionable solace, only to find that their digital selves make their real ones more feel even more alienated.<\/p>\n In Hotels of North America<\/i>, the Internet\u2019s double-edged promise of fame updates the novel\u2019s longstanding preoccupation with its own fictionality. Moody\u2019s elaborate sentences and swelling page counts have famously inspired both loathing and acclaim, but Hotels<\/i>, as if anticipating a readership with diminished attention spans, <\/i>is disarmingly compact and approachable.2<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Structured as an anthology of posts from a Tripadvisor-style travel review website, each chapter, complete with hotel name, date, and a one-through-five star rating, reveals new details about the desolate life of its author, Reginald Edward Morse, a washed-up motivational speaker trailed by a long line of failed relationships and careers and relationships. Gradually, Morse\u2019s dispatches evolve from autobiographical reviews-cum<\/i>-confessions into responses to a handful of fans and haters known only by comment-section handles like TigerBooty! and WakeAndBake, whose own remarks we never see. Questioning Morse\u2019s identity and motivations, they provoke him first into revealing more about himself, and then into silence. A preface by the clueless director of a hotel business organization and an afterword by a fictional version of Moody bookend Morse\u2019s unusual body of work, nesting his attempt to bare and then defend his identity within a manifestly metafictional editorial frame.<\/a><\/p>\n In its preoccupation with the cultural detritus of contemporary American life, Hotels<\/i> recalls Moody\u2019s early and best-known works: The Ice Storm <\/i>and Purple America<\/i>. But the novel is a departure from his past fiction in more than just its length. Hotels<\/i> is the first of Moody\u2019s novels to fully embrace the first-person, a perspective he avoided up until 2010\u2019s The Four Fingers of Death<\/i>, which awkwardly pokes fun at Moody\u2019s habitual preference for the third person. According to Montese Crandall, a hack writer character who is Four Fingers\u2019<\/i>s putative author, \u201cthe first person is tiresome and confining. It is the voice of narcissists and borderline personalities.\u201d In Hotels<\/i>, however, the first person feels unpredictable and expansive, a break shot that sets off clashes between characters\u2019, authors\u2019, and readers\u2019 identities. When, for example, Morse responds to his comment-section interlocutors, he registers the queasy way real and fictional identity bump up against one another online. WakeAndBake and TigerBooty!, not to mention Morse himself, are at once faceless antagonists known only by absurd online avatars, quasi-real people with Googleable traces of everyday lives, and flesh and blood individuals capable of, as Morse says in one particularly anguished moment, \u201cgoing out into the yard and staring up at the night sky.\u201d For Morse\u2014as, perhaps, for Moody\u2014the Internet\u2019s ability to diminish the distance between authors and their readers is a decidedly mixed blessing. For all its self-conscious tech-age trappings, Cohen\u2019s novel is oddly traditional.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n In his afterword, the fictional Moody declares that Morse\u2019s writings are about \u201cwhat it means to be alone.\u201d In typical Moody fashion, however, he qualifies this statement as soon as it appears: \u201cThere\u2019s a danger in saying that this work is about only solitude and loneliness \u2026 We do not know. Our insistence on knowing is the limit of what we know about ourselves.\u201d Though perhaps the real Moody wants us to get caught in some feedback loop of knowing and not knowing, the first interpretation his fictional self offers seems, weirdly, right: Hotels<\/i> is<\/i> about what it means to be alone, and more precisely, what it means to be alone despite having access to what seems like an ideal medium for connecting with others. The first person is the perfect point of view for the Internet age, at once promising and impeding the kind of intimate, authentic understanding that Morse and his readers seek. \u201cIf you\u2019re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I\u2019ll only talk if I\u2019m gripped with both hands.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n For all its self-conscious tech-age trappings, however, Numbers<\/i> is oddly traditional. Before and after Principal conscripts Cohen, Numbers<\/i> might as well be a classical coming-of-age novel: our young male narrator-protagonist faces romantic and professional failure before being offered promising new leads in both departments. We\u2019re invited to identify with him as straightforwardly as we do with David Copperfield or Holden Caulfield. Though certain plot points are weighted with slightly transgressive allegory\u2014Cohen\u2019s failure of a first novel comes out the day before 9\/11; his love interests are an obsessively skinny Jewish New Yorker and a zaftig Saudi Muslim\u2014these details never amount to more than a general sense of topicality. Indeed, Numbers<\/i> is strongest when doing what novels have long done: cataloging our social flaws and throwing them back at us. This, for example, is Cohen describing a Silicon Valley bacchanal:<\/p>\n I waited for my hooch behind a pornstached chillionaire and his two brogrammer friends, by which I mean his coworkers at #Summerize, according to their shirts and shorts and hats. Cohen is a skilled chronicler of bullshit, and tech culture\u2019s knack for combining large quantities of self-regard with lack of self-awareness is a perfect target. What sharpens such humor\u2019s edge, though, is the fact that Numbers<\/i> doesn\u2019t let you forget that the chillionaires and brogrammers are the ones holding the strings to our online selves, and thus, increasingly, to us. As Numbers<\/i> chronicles the ability of Principal\u2019s company, Tetration (an Apple-Google-Big Tech behemoth), to take its users\u2019 data and do pretty much whatever it wants with it, the novel\u2019s fractured dialogue and eccentrically individuated characters come to seem like outcomes of the Internet itself, as generically hyperspecific as their clicks, GPS coordinates, and IP addresses. For Cohen, what we\u2019ve lost isn\u2019t the ability to create a sense of self, but the capacity to diminish it.<\/p>\n If Hotels<\/i> and Numbers<\/i> believe that tech\u2019s promise of self-realizing connection masks its atomizing effects, Louisa Hall\u2019s Speak<\/i> imagines an alternative that is even more disquieting. Made up of several interwoven stories and documents by characters who include a Puritan teenager, a computer chat program, a wayward computer genius, and a fictional version of Alan Turing, Speak <\/i>gradually reveals a future in which artificial intelligence has come to perfectly mirror our own. In Speak<\/i>, computers undermine us not by creating robot armies or harvesting our bioelectricity, but by imparting understanding, communication, and empathy infinitely more perfect than that which other people can provide. Once offered this kind of ideal identification (through, insidiously, robots that serve as children\u2019s toys and caretakers), humans find interaction with other humans so painful that they simply tune out a world that has itself become synthetic, made up of hermetic housing developments and plastic replicas of nature.<\/p>\n Through Hall\u2019s deft, grounded prose and well-wrought characterizations, none of this ever seems implausible. Instead, Speak<\/i>\u2019s premise is both fresh and discomfitingly familiar, like naming a sensation you haven\u2019t been able to put into words. Indeed, one almost wishes Hall spent more time in the future than in the past: not all of Speak<\/i>\u2019s narrative threads are equally strong, and the novel switches between them rapidly, often breaking them off on the cusp of some dramatic revelation or event. While such moves are good at generating suspense, they\u2019re also oddly distrustful of the reader\u2019s willingness to stay with one character for a substantial series of pages. Acclimated to divided attention, perhaps it\u2019s not just Tolstoy we find hard, but any sustained engagement with a single voice. Hall\u2019s premise is both fresh and discomfitingly familiar, like naming a sensation you haven\u2019t been able to put into words.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Witnessing these many different narratives feels like looking out from inside the Internet. We recognize the connections that the characters desperately want but can\u2019t find, just as we see the individual stories for what they are: searching testimonies whose larger, collective significance\u2014and the recompense it would bring\u2014is forever beyond each isolated speaker\u2019s reach. That we see these connections gives us a sense of power and, perhaps, satisfaction, but changes nothing for the characters. By placing the reader in a position of steadily increasing omniscience, and its narrators in states of blinkered isolation, Speak<\/i> makes tech\u2019s promise of networked connection look like the unwitting means of our own estrangement: what its characters want and lack is not the ability to articulate and broadcast themselves, but the presence of anyone who can really hear them.<\/p>\n Novels may be a means of escape, a way to disconnect. But, much like the Internet, they are also good at muddying distinctions between solitude and companionship, detachment and connection, reality and fiction. Literary theorist Catherine Gallagher has recently speculated that we are drawn to fictional characters not because we fool ourselves into believing that they\u2019re real people, but because they combine the illusion of depth with perfect knowability.3<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0In other words, they provide us what we may wish we could have with real people, but without any of the messiness such total insight would necessarily entail. In Hotels<\/i>, Numbers<\/i>, and Speak<\/i>, this dynamic has a twist: while their characters provide us with the satisfying illusion of knowability, the novels show them grappling with the ways digital life has made fictionality a kind of permanent state. Characters here are perpetually understood by others both too well and never well enough. Rather than just seeking retreats from connection, as Harris suggests, we might also look to novels for the history of the strange state the Internet finds us in, compelled to report, author, and update ourselves just to feel, in some weird way, real.<\/p>\n In The End of Absence, an alternately shrewd and sentimental account of Internet-age distraction, author Michael Harris offers an autobiographical parable: once a lonely pre-tech teenager obsessed with fantasy novels, the now 30-something Harris finds he\u2019s lost his ability to read more than a few pages without stopping to check his phone. Frustrated, he resolves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3017,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[17,68,49,33,46,50,69],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1866],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-1586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-fiction","tag-internet","tag-media","tag-nonfiction","tag-science-fiction","tag-social-media","tag-technology","section-speculative-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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\nHarris\u2019s insights into the Internet\u2019s relentless intrusions are shrewd, but when he turns to the novel, the acuity with which he describes our new digital norms falters. Though he doesn\u2019t say it outright, his celebration of War and Peace<\/i> is due in large part to its status as a challenging work of capital-L Literature. Reading it is hard<\/i>, and becoming absorbed in it is a badge of honor. It\u2019s difficult to imagine Harris having the same reaction to a deep dive into Harlequin romances, which many find far more absorbing than Tolstoy. Harris\u2019s chief exemplars of intelligent pre-tech reading are men like Thoreau and Milton, celebrated for their long, unbroken hours of productive contemplation. But surely the solitary labor of august men of letters has never been typical. Earning a living and caring for family intrude on absence as much as Google-equipped phones, and reading has long been as much a means of escape as an instrument of intellectual cultivation. Harris wants us to be more mindful digital users, yet by making the reading of classic literature an emblem of what we\u2019ve lost, he renders the line between pre- and post-Internet society more clear-cut than it is. If anything, the vast, teeming, multilingual worlds created by novels are precursors of our digital-age diversions.<\/p>\n
\n![\"<i>Tripadvisor<\/i>,](\"http:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/41fc547c-4b32-44d4-9ae8-c1f8dcaa9c82.jpg\")
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\nBut Hotels\u2019<\/i> first-person structure isn\u2019t just a reflection of Internet-age authorship. In their fraught claims to authenticity, its narrators recall nothing so much as the epistolary novels and fictional memoirs of 18th-century fiction. There, as in Hotels<\/i>, fictional editors\u2019 assertions of truth and moral relevance call attention to just how strange fiction\u2019s relationship to reality can be. What, in the end, is the difference between reading a confessional blog and a novel that pretends to be one? Though such questions might feel na\u00efve, they are at the heart of want we want from virtual realities like fiction: a feeling of inhabiting others\u2019 lives, edification, connection, consequence-free voyeurism. Hotels<\/i>\u2019 online setting and first-person perspectives update such concerns by emphasizing just how hard it can be to distinguish between them.<\/p>\n
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\nLike Moody\u2019s Hotels<\/i>, Joshua Cohen\u2019s Book of Numbers<\/i> marries digital-age alienation to questions of authorship and public identity, but while Moody\u2019s novel suggests that online communication diminishes us, Cohen makes the Internet seem like an unwieldy amplifier of tendencies we\u2019ve always had. Book of Numbers<\/i> is big, ambitious, and obvious about its themes: our narrator, a fictional version of Joshua Cohen, introduces himself with a provocation: \u201cIf you\u2019re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I\u2019ll only talk if I\u2019m gripped with both hands.\u201d Combinations of slashes, backslashes, and colons demarcate short sections and chapters (invoking code? urls?), while the novel\u2019s two final parts are titled, respectively, 0 and 1. Numbers<\/i>\u2019s middle section is comprised of a more than 250-page draft\u2014itself a loose transcription\u2014of the fictional Cohen\u2019s ghostwritten autobiography of another Joshua Cohen, a Steve Jobs-style tech guru, usually referred to as Principal, who has hired Cohen mostly on the basis that the two share the same name.<\/p>\n
\nOne said, \u201cYou can\u2019t change the scale without scaling the change.\u201d
\nAnother said,\u00a0\u201cEvoke transcendence.\u201d
\nThe chillionaire said, \u201cWill you stop reading that neurolinguistic reinforcement pickup artist shit? This party\u2019s got mad fucking latency to it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"](\"http:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/169f00ee-d606-4d83-9e30-477625d99f58.jpg\")
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\nStill, the acuity of Speak<\/i>\u2019s account of misunderstanding makes this fractured first-person narration an ultimately revelatory choice, uniquely suited to reading and writing about life under tech. Each speaker not only charts failed attempts at communication\u2014both in person and online\u2014but also writes or records as if seeking an ideal interlocutor. When Stephen R. Chinn, the computer genius, composes his dispatches from the rec room at the Texas State Correctional Institution, he imagines a reader who will both vindicate and sympathize with him: \u201cWe\u2019re all staring at our screens, stuck here, hoping somehow to break free. Wishing for more than we\u2019ve been given. My cursor blinks, blinks, blinks. A wall that appears and disappears \u2026 Do not stop talking, it reminds me. Do not stop speaking. You can never come to an end.\u201d Whether they speak to themselves, to a distant beloved, or to no one in particular, the novel\u2019s narrators, like Hotels<\/i>\u2019s Morse and Numbers<\/i>\u2019s Principal, imagine that telling their stories will allow them to both escape their embodied lives and locate the meaning in them. In Speak<\/i>, though, the reader herself is implicated in such projects\u2019 inexorable failure.<\/p>\n