1.
“Can the hoary trope of mistaken identity still play in the age of Google images?” asks Alex Witchel in the New York Times Book Review. Witchel is talking about the premise of Michael Frayn’s new novel Skios and soon answers herself: “Well, no,” she says, “but since the author is Michael Frayn…it’s tempting to cut him some slack.”
Is it? Maybe — it’s fiction, after all, and that being the case Frayn can do whatever he wants — but as a reader, and a writer, I wonder about that slack. More generally, I wonder about works of fiction that take place in a world identical to that which you and I inhabit, except for one thing: technology is all but ignored. I’m not referring to Luddite authors here — to Jonathan Franzen’s rejection of e-books and Twitter. I’m talking about whether a character in a literary novel set in the year 2012 need even be aware of Twitter, or at the very least, email.
It isn’t hard to make a case against including technology in fiction.
First, technology can be awkward to write about. Also, to read about. The jargon is clumsy: download, reboot, global positioning device. It’s embarrassing, really. So I understand an author’s impulse to avoid littering pages of otherwise lyrical prose with the bleep-boop-beep of tech speak. For this reason, authors often forgo current technologies when they want their characters to communicate with one another, or to reveal important, plot-forwarding information. I get it. What could be less romantic than a text message?
Fiction allows for a certain level of restraint, after all, where the author need not include a protagonist’s every bathroom break or end each scene with the characters saying goodbye. Why then, if it’s common practice to avoid including other unglamorous functions of characters’ daily lives — like said bathroom break — is it necessary to show them texting and refreshing their inboxes?
Think of it this way: in most cases, a bowel movement will not move the plot forward; an email will.
Despite all the trouble technology might cause, when it’s absent from contemporary novels, a big white elephant appears on the page and starts ambling around. (Perhaps searching for an unprotected Wi-Fi network?) Usually these are good books, full of beautiful language and arresting characters that teach me what it means to be human. But, as was the case with Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, the obvious absence of things like search engines and smart phones makes me pause and think, “Couldn’t she have at least Googled her father’s name before she set off to the Arctic in search of him?”
In “A Kind of Vast Fiction” — an essay in the form of an email thread published in The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (edited by Jeff Martin and The Millions’ C. Max Magee) — David Gates and Jonathan Lethem discuss strategies for including, and avoiding, technology in fiction. Midway through the conversation, after Gates admits to being wary of certain social networking sites, Lethem asks, “So you’re Googling and YouTubing, if not Twizzling or Fnorgling, fair enough. But are your characters doing the same? Do you find it as difficult as I do to get this un-Brave, no-longer-that-New World onto the page in any credible way?” Gates’s response is packed with insight:
I have no idea how to handle this new mode of living (I guess “living” is the word) in fiction. I probably spend more time emailing and reading online than I do having non-virtual human contact — and I bet I’m not that unusual. If my characters were like that, would their lives be eventful enough to write about? On the other hand, if I write about people for whom the internet is — as far as the reader can see — peripheral or nonexistent, am I not essentially writing historical fiction? In the last story I finished, I used the expedient of sending my main character on a vacation where she’s sworn to limit her internet and cell phone use. And how do you deal with the problem of writing something that may be dated by the time the book comes out? My novel Preston Falls, which appeared in 1998, has a now-hilarious account of an email exchange — “He hit Send,” and so forth. And I just received a piece of student fiction which mentions Facebook and Skype in adjacent paragraphs; my instinct is that this is showing off, but maybe it’s no different from Jane Austen mentioning a fortepiano and a huswife on the same page.
I’m interested in novels that render what Gates calls “this new mode of living” — those that successfully incorporate technology into their characters’ experiences. The following came to mind when I began to think about what recent works of fiction had either pulled this off or at least tried.
2.
Consider Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding:
The fact that they didn’t communicate by cell phone, didn’t chat or text, could reasonably be chalked up to the fact that they didn’t need to, they lived fifty yards apart and saw each other five days a week, but then again the students did little but chat and text, text messages were their surest form of intimacy, and to never have texted or been texted by Owen, not to know Owen’s number even for emergency purposes, not that this was an emergency, seemed suddenly to expose a great gulf between them.
The above appears almost 300-pages into this 512-page novel. Though The Art of Fielding takes place on a college campus, this is one of the first mentions of texting in the book. And I can recall no mention of social networking in the first few hundred pages. This struck me as odd, perhaps because I recently spent two years on a university campus as a graduate student; I’m all too aware of how fiercely attached students are to technology. (I saw more bicycle accidents than I can count at USC because cyclists tend to keep both their hands and their eyes glued to iPhone screens while they ride.) So when these basic technologies are finally acknowledged in the book, the moment feels inevitable, as if the white elephant has at last grown impatient and begun to scuff his great foot, threatening to charge.
But the above excerpt is more than a cursory reference to text messages. This paragraph-long neurotic meditation, written from the point of view of sixty-year-old Westish College president Guert Affenlight (who has fallen in love with a student), provides the book’s most profound thoughts on modern relationships. College student or otherwise, who hasn’t known the specific despair of being unable to get a hold of a lover? These days, to get a hold of means to text or to Skype or to email with an all caps subject line. Chad Harbach knows this. He might have fought it at first, but with this passage he illustrates that there is no way around mentioning technology — that if your characters aren’t going to use it they still need to acknowledge it. Because either way, it’s going to affect them: they are alive and in love in the Twenty-First Century.
Now here are a few sections from early on in Jennifer Egan’s 2006 novel The Keep. In it, Danny has traveled from New York to stay at his cousin’s remote castle-cum-New-Age-resort, somewhere in Austria, Germany or the Czech Republic (he isn’t sure), where there is no internet or cell connection:
Danny tried to get away after breakfast to set up his satellite dish. The need to be back in touch was getting uncomfortable, distracting, like a headache or a sore toe or some other low-grade physical thing that after a while starts to blot out everything else.
And when he finally does get his satellite dish hooked up (is there any less elegant sounding piece of equipment than a satellite dish?), it soon falls into a mucky, black swimming pool and he in turn chucks his phone into the forest:
Eventually Danny calmed down enough to start looking for his phone. The longer he groped in the cypress, pulling threads in his jacket and sending fat little birds squawking out into the air, the more precious that clunky plastic thing started to get in his head. Like a relic. Just to have it. And there it was, finally, caught between two branches. Danny felt like sobbing. He couldn’t resist holding the phone up to his ear one more time.
Maybe that’s all a tad melodramatic, but isn’t it accurate that even in 2006 a person who’d been separated from his cell phone would be brought to some level of hysteria? It isn’t for nothing that there are two ways of being haunted by a missing cell phone: the phantom weight of it in your jeans pocket, and the phantom vibration of a call you couldn’t possibly have received. You miss the object — the gadget — and you miss what it represents. Egan’s use of technology in this book is successful because it speaks to both gadget lust and a longing to be in touch in a way that only technology can deliver.
A quarter of the way into his 2009 novel Await Your Reply Dan Chaon plugs in a concise, seemingly arbitrary chapter written in the second-person. After briefly painting a portrait of “you” as an unknowing target of identity theft and victim of suburban malaise, the narrator says:
You don’t feel particularly vulnerable, with your firewall and constantly updating virus protection, and most of the predators are almost laughably clumsy. At work you receive an email that is so patently ridiculous that you forward it to a few of your friends. Miss Emmanuela Kunta, Await Your Reply, it says in the subject line, and there is something almost adorable about its awkwardness.
“Dear One,” the email begins.
What follows is perhaps my all-time favorite fictionalized email, if not my favorite page of published writing of the last decade: a spam email claiming to have been sent by a nineteen-year-old girl from the Ivory Coast. The fact that the passage nearly brings me to tears each time I read it has to be proof that what we tag as technology (email and the like) is surely more human than machine. Or maybe it’s proof that Dan Chaon is a master of the art of fiction. I’d argue both.
Technology propels the plot throughout Await Your Reply, a book about shedding and remaking identities. Chaon is smart enough to capitalize on the many ways that the internet and gadgets make this work more possible now than ever before. Where he excels is in knowing just how and where to aim his lens at these tools. Rather than blur the human element of the narrative, technology helps bring into focus an honest story about our modern life: computer viruses and stolen identities and missed connections:
“Who falls for this?” you would like to know…But for some reason, driving home, you find yourself thinking of…Miss Emmanuela Kunta in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, the orphan daughter of a wealthy gold agent…and she walks along a market street…and she turns and her brown eyes are heavy with sorrow. Await your reply.
If an email can demonstrate this kind of vulnerability and hope, then email it will be. Technology it will be.
3.
It turns out that each of these instances of technology in fiction has to do with the way that technology connects characters. And what are characters if not people like us — people for whom the stuff of connecting with others is messy and hard and all we ever really want?
Maybe, then, if this is the truth about technology, there shouldn’t be any slack given to those authors who forgo including it in their books. You might even say it’s foolish to miss the opportunity to show that technology is not a series of tubes, or a high-pitched beeping sound, or an awkward element to work around, but rather a vital part of the modern human experience.
Image via Nate_Steiner/Flickr
So are the stories, like, good, or…?
Perhaps read the stories for yourself and decide…
Ok. So the point of this piece is…
Have never been able to grasp the popularity of Junot Diaz. The Oscar Wao book was far and away the most overrated novel of the last decade.
Diaz is pretty much a straight-up racist. A friend of mine (a Caucasian woman with a Latino boyfriend) went to one of his readings a few years ago and tried to talk to him and he completely ignored her until her boyfriend arrived. Then Diaz got all smiley and friendly with her; a complete and total phony, she said. The goal is to pick the BEST stories. If that happens to be 20 white guys, so be it. If it’s 20 black women, so be it. “Celebrating the multitudes” is code for quota-ism. Who the sitting president is has absolutely nothing to do with art. Anything with “Best” in the title should be judged blind, on merit alone. The author should be irrelevant to art anyway, but some people, when given the power to select things, cannot be trusted to not let their identity politics get in the way (ie: Sherman Alexie, who was famously punked and admitted that part of the reason he chose a poem for a Best American Poetry anthology was because he thought its author was Asian).
It’s easier to “address the problem” with quotas than it is to reverse the momentum of American culture and interest “minority” kids in reading… reading broadly, even, outside of their assigned zones. That’s where Writers come from: Readers. Talent is a numbers game… the larger the pool of wannabe-writers to choose from, the more likely you are to produce a few genuine talents.
Of all the kids who are currently book-mad, in America, how many will carry the obsession through into high school and then college and from there to the first wobbly steps as Writers themselves? Statistically speaking, most of these kids are going to be “white”… and most of them will be mediocre. A handful will be pretty good. One in a blue moon will be a Great Writer (and it doesn’t help that TV/movies have moved (and widened) the goalposts: people seem to think, increasingly, that a Great Book is anything featuring a character arc. The technology of Lit is becoming an arcane practise; too few Writers and an underwhelming surfeit of Scriptwriters).
Now apply that above-mentioned winnowing to the much smaller starting-pool of “minority” bookworms… the odds are depressing if you care for Lit. If you want Great Writers of Color, you have to expand the pool by improving the initial conditions. Quotas and Hype won’t change a thing. And, in the meantime, we’ll just keep getting this shameful shitstorm of award-winning Meh. Coming soon to a theater near you.
Sean H,
Both disagree and agree with this comment. As far as Diaz’s selection in this BASS goes, he is free as guest editor to apply whatever metric he wants. If, in his opinion, a part of being “best” is a for a story to concern a relatively unique or underrepresented cultural experience, and not, say, a failed dinner party in Brooklyn, so be it.
I will entirely agree, though, about Diaz being an asshole and phony, as well as a misogynistic self-promoting scumbag who enjoyed every institutional privilege imaginable on the way up, and then shit on everyone who helped him in order to aid his bs anti-establishment pose. And yeah, Oscar Wao sucks.
BASS has been shit for a long, long time, and isn’t getting any better. Junot Diaz has always been shit. That is all.
Why was my comment on “Forty-Two” censored? It wasn’t any meaner than other comments in this thread.
Happy for the diversity fetishists. But it can’t be the “best” by definition. It’s now the Best Most Diversified” American Stories.
No. It means the New Yorker doesn’t dominate as much.
Richard Albarino,
“Happy for the diversity fetishists. But it can’t be the “best” by definition. It’s now the Best Most Diversified” American Stories.”
I see. So if, say, TC Boyle picks a story for BASS that he finds compelling, both in terms of writing style and subject matter/milieu, we can assume he brings none of his own biases to the table, and is picking mostly white people solely based on merit. But if Diaz picks a story using his own metrics, about subject matter/milieu he finds compelling, we should assume he is making biased choices, and that the enterprise is no longer merit-based.
Do you see what a completely obvious, racist double standard this is? As I said upthread, I cannot stand Diaz personally or artistically, but come on people, you can do better than this.
White male bad
I’m not usually big on the term “white fragility,” but if there’s a better example of it than this thread, or the general pearl clutching displayed on this site any time the idea of diversity is put forward, I’d like to see it. Or no, I wouldn’t.
:/?
I tend not to like the term white fragility, as it immediately puts people on the defensive (see: your response), but it describes a real thing, i.e. white people’s incredible sensitivity to the notion that the deck might be stacked in their favor or that they might have their own identity biases (see: this thread, and any other like it on this website when notions of diversity are put forward).
The responses here of “white people bad” and “down with whitey” are perfect examples. No one is saying white people are bad besides you–it’s just a defensive reaction when notions of inequality are put forward, an oversensitivity to having to think about identity and privilege, and a resulting impulse to turn any minor criticism into “Oh, you just hate white people.”
Hope that helps!
Does anyone know who this year’s editor will be?