I've been enjoying Lauren Oyler's critical essays for awhile (this recent one, on the new Sebald biography, is absolutely brilliant), and, full disclosure, have also been enjoying hanging out with her and talking to her about literature and people and life, etc. I hadn't gotten her book yet, despite being curious about it, because I refuse to buy books in hardcover, but then she gave me a copy, so yay, I could read it! And surprise surprise (not really), it's great.
There are so few really funny novelists working today — the only two contemporary writers who have really made me laugh that spring immediately to mind are Maria Semple and Taffy Brodesser-Akner — so it was such a treat to launch into a book that literally had me cackling on damn near every page. It is very, very funny. Oyler has a razor-sharp wit, and, like the best Millenial authors, finds the perfect balance between a wry irony and a vulnerability that evinces a commitment to being a part of the world; a sense of proportion that ensures that the narrative doesn't remain suspended in the clouds mocking the mere mortals below.
The novel is surprising, less because of the more spectacular plot fireworks of the opening, as for the slow, subtle work that follows them. It made me reach once again for Stephanie Insley Hershinow's Born Yesterday, a book that brilliantly analyzes (18th-century) realist novels in which characters resolutely do NOT develop (thereby showing us new things about our idea of character, and realism as a form. It's just so smart, and has made me notice things about novels featuring young women protagonists that I otherwise wouldn't), because here, too, we have a story about a character who doesn't know what to do with herself, which therefore turns out to be a story in which not much really happens. Or so it seems, because there isn't the neat and tidy plot of Bildung that we tend to expect — the formative lessons of the Grand Tour that bring some kind of clarity and purpose to the protagonist's life.
But actually, all kinds of things are happening — indeed, the book is a startlingly accurate portrayal of what it's like to be an American living abroad on a day-to-day basis, rather than in the tidied up Story of An American Living Abroad version. The little frustrations, the odd quirks you notice about the culture, the loneliness, the sense that you're trying to be cosmopolitan and interesting, or perhaps the main character in the Story of An American Living Abroad, while suspecting/worrying that maybe your life... isn't really all that interesting. There was an added pleasure in it, for me, because I lived in Berlin for a year in high school, and have had my own sort of experience of being a confused young woman in that city, and so some things were extra familiar, but also from the perspective of an older person, in a Berlin that has changed in some ways but not others (and is still one of the greatest cities in the world, just saying).
It's also interesting, as a work of realism, for the way that it minutely describes various things that seem utterly obvious, but are of course incredibly of-the-moment. So, for instance, what an iPhone home screen looks like, how you open an app, how instagram works. It's startling at first, and then incredibly fascinating (and really well done — if you've never tried to write descriptions like that, I'm telling you, it's HARD. I used give my comp students an assignment along such lines and I stopped because they were terrible and reading them was no fun). In many ways, the novel is a really precise ethnography of a very specific cultural moment.
Finally, amidst all this apparent lack of action, things are happening conceptually, as the ideas that the book circles coalesce and combine in really intriguing ways. I guess people probably think of this as a novel about social media and inter-personal relationships in the internet age, and it is that, but it's more broadly a novel about identity, authenticity, and social life. The internet gives a particular inflection to those issues, sure, but they also aren't fundamentally different simply because they're mediated through Tinder, I don't think. Perhaps because I know Lauren, and thus could recognize parts of the story as drawn from her life, and because we've had a lot of conversations about auto-fiction (and what that term even means), I was also musing on the book's own playful blending of fiction and reality, which is heightened by the moments when the narrator pauses to comment on the form of the novel.
The ultimate effect, for me, is a text that dazzlingly brings together literary form and self-presentation, and playfully questions (challenges?) the notion of straightforward honesty in both art and life, and the idea of intimacy.
It's a cool novel, definitely on my top 10 of books published in 2021. Check it out.
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