Sometimes only they want to read a book with a plot. You know, the kind of people that are, go to places, fall in love, fight, even take off to die—A good story, old-fashioned. Jordan Castro’s new novel, with a cheeky title The novelist, obviously not a good old-fashioned story. Even calling The novelist a novel is a gag. “I opened my laptop,” the narrator says in the opening lines, and those first four words are the beginning, middle, and end of his narration. The title of the wink was the correct choice: The guy who opened his laptop it does not have the same ring.
The novelist takes place throughout a single morning, following an unnamed writer as he moves on social media while his girlfriend sleeps in his apartment; Occasionally plays with novels in progress on Google Docs. This is. The first 16 pages describe the protagonist looking at Twitter in minute-by-minute detail, thinking of absurd thoughts like “my Twitter was awful; Twitter in general was awful.” A more annoying premise for a book is, frankly, hard to imagine. And yet, here I am recommending it. What good is a novel with such an insipid plot that it is openly hostile? Well, to begin with, it’s fun: a rare and appreciable quality in contemporary literature.
It also contains some of the most accurate and abject representations of the Internet user experience ever captured in fiction. There is a tangent inside The novelist where the narrator remembers a popular girl from his high school named Ashley. Search her on Facebook by clicking on her digital photos. “Moving quickly, almost frantically, as if trying to complete an urgent task, I went back to Ashley’s profile and clicked on her header photo: a group of rich-looking little women and fat men, all white , with dresses and high heels or blazers, and partially unbuttoned buttons, piled on a roof, a skyline I didn’t recognize behind them. However, I recognized some of the people in the picture. moving the cursor over their faces and bodies, the names that appeared were unrecognizable to me, “the narrator thinks, before daydreaming about how these people he may or may not know may or may not be. . “I imagined discussing racism with one of the fat men in the picture,” he continues, examining Ashley’s social environment as an amateur detective. This passage, I suspect, will resonate with anyone who has spent an hour or two acting as a detective on known cheesy Facebook, and establishes Castro as a psychologically accurate chronicler of online life.
Courtesy of Soft Skull
With a middle finger moved for anyone who can be wrong The novelist for autofiction, Castro invents a strange version of himself to get the narrator obsessed, a literary semi-celebrity who has become a left-wing internet bogeyman despite saying nothing morally reprehensible. This fictional Jordan Castro writes a novel, which is then incorporated into the gears of a cycle of online outrage, giving the author an opportunity to reflect on how fatus the so-called progressive media can be: “The narrator of one of Jordan Castro’s novels was an amateur bodybuilder, and the novel, due to its publication when the culture was having a “toxic masculinity account”, was harshly received by many, who described her in various ways as “fascist,” “proto-fascist,” “grossphobic,” or, curiously, “not what we need now.” Jordan Castro’s body, so you don’t have to “and” Jordan Castro’s Fitness Privilege, “which dealt not so much with the literary qualities of the book as with the effect it might have on reality, in because of the supposed hidden meaning in some of the sentences. ”As with the description of the outsider worm ts of social media, these acid tangents on the state of online speech are extremely accurate.
While “Internet novel ”is now its own subgenre, it is still rare to see these usual experiences of being online represented so realistically, with an eye towards the unfavorable, humiliating and real. The best of the recent “Internet novels”, Patricia’s Lockwood Nobody talks about itcaptures the sensitivity of an extremely online mind, but its fragmented style and playful, absurd language create an impressionistic portrait: no discussion about, for example, typing a wrong password or the urge to delete Facebook after wasting an afternoon there. The novelist, on the other hand, has a daily, block quality. Castro, poet and exeditor of New York Tyrant Magazinehe has high-enlightened loyalties (thanks to Tao Lin in the thanks), and snippets of his protagonist’s true story of a morning splashed on social media would not have been out of place. Thought catalog in, for example, 2011. (Although now often associated with discarded personal essays, Thought catalog was in his early years a frequent editor of alternate voices such as Tao Lin, Megan Boyle and Castro himself.)
People often dismiss self-centered writing as the “navel gaze,” but Castro’s protagonist’s extravagant and defiant solipsism isn’t exactly that. In any case, “looking at the anus” would be a more appropriate descriptor, given that the narrator is pooping, thinking poop, or emailing his friend about poop during a remarkably large part of the novel. (The novelist must have some sort of record for the longest description of toilet paper cleaning techniques in fiction.) The whole eschatological talk is mixed with all the descriptions of screen time; sometimes the protagonist poops. i browse Instagram: suggest a connection: in the end, it’s all the same shit.
