Is Facebook tearing us apart? Now there’s a loaded question. Say yes, and, on top of sounding like a Luddite or an insufferable contrarian, you’ll have insulted millions of people. Say no, waving away all qualms, and you risk aligning yourself with an equally lazy camp: those who think that because all novelty is initially resisted, all resistance to novelty will seem laughable in time. Roger Scruton, in The Uses of Pessimism, notes that John Ruskin objected to railroads as “an assault on rural tranquility,” a position we moderns are sure to regard as “quaint.” To take from this example that objections to Facebook will one day sound similarly quaint is to put one’s judgment on autopilot—another invention that must have been terrifying before being indispensable and, finally, a matter of indifference.
The British novelist Jonathan Coe’s Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim gives Facebook, and some of modern life’s other supposedly alienating technologies and conditions, the scrutiny they deserve. The middle-aged Sim (“like the card you put in a mobile phone,” he explains to a younger woman, and also like the Sims™-style avatar on the jacket of the American edition) has seventy-four Facebook friends but zero real ones, and his wife, perhaps winded by her husband’s social and emotional failure, has left him and taken their daughter.
Prior to a bout of depression, Sim was a customer-service liaison for a department store. He prizes the consistency afforded by chain restaurants and by highways, with their dependable rest stops and reassuringly repetitive signage. We are given to understand that he’s a bore and a loser, but his reflective, articulate narration, downer though it so often is, would be welcome in a flesh-and-blood friend. He also has a bit of a villainous streak, inventing an online persona through which to carry on a relationship with his estranged wife on a message board. Nasty, yes, but hardly boring.
Is the internet, and the ease with which it lets one invade another’s privacy while jealously guarding one’s own, responsible for Sim’s alienation, or is Sim? The truth about Facebook given short shrift by those for whom it portends civilization’s collapse is that its users post pictures of themselves—way too many, it’s true—doing things with other people, in real life. For every user with seventy-four Facebook friends and zero real ones, there are plenty of those with more than enough of both. Those Sims to whom the internet delivers but a shabby simulacrum of connectedness probably aren’t too sociable in real life. Their problems precede technology’s mediation and amplification.
Whether or not he means to—one likes to think he does—Coe gets this part exactly right. Sim’s problem isn’t his wireless connection, or his taste for fast food, or the almost sexual allure of his GPS’s disembodied, non-judgmental voice. It’s that he prefers these easy comforts to the difficulty of doing battle with his shortcomings in the arena of the live-and-in-person. He recalls the period when his wife, Caroline, began to immerse herself in virtual reality:
After a while I seem to remember asking her something sarcastic like how many hours a day could you spend having online conversations about MMR injections and breast pumps, and she told me that actually she was contributing to threads about books and politics and music and economics and all sorts of things . . . . I can understand why she needed to go online to find all these friends and have these discussions. She certainly wasn’t finding them at home.
Reading this wince-inducing confession, one can’t help wondering if those writers most skeptical of virtual friendship—the philosophers and essayists who rail against “hiding behind the screen” (Scruton) or “the new narcissism” (Christine Rosen)—have much experience with the more traditional alienation of a boring job, an undesirable geographic location, or, as in the case of Sim’s wife, a mercilessly silent marriage. If one’s life and work consist of discussing interesting things with interesting people, it’s easy to forget that many others lack everything from the brains to the will power to the opportunity to find that kind of fulfillment. Maxwell Sim is an encouraging reminder that some of them simply need to try harder.
Coe is an accessible writer, a second-rate Dickens (that’s a compliment) whose ready humor, propulsive prose, and plotting—neither willfully frustrating nor too predictable—compensate for a sometimes forehead-slapping lack of subtlety. He devises an elaborate parallel between Sim, who is sent by an environmentally-friendly toothbrush company on a PR trip to the North of England, and Donald Crowhurst, an amateur sailor who lost his mind and his life while trying to fake a solo circumnavigation of the globe, in a catamaran, during the late 1960s. This adds little to the novel apart from a history lesson and justification for a scene in which a drunk and distraught Sim converses with his GPS just before winding up in the hospital.
The road-trip framework, organized in loose parallel with the Four Quartets beloved of Sim’s poet father, would have achieved Coe’s desired effect on its own, but he adds a number of other heavy-handed contrivances. Much like Walter Berglund in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Sim acquires a manuscript by his wife in which his flaws, his incuriosity and inadequacy, are viciously exposed. Coe does a finer job with this conceit than Franzen did, writing like an amateur (an adverb after every “said”) and not an award-winning novelist. The trouble is, he performs this trick three other times. Sim reads a letter by the uncle of a fellow airline passenger, a college paper by an old flame, and a memoir by his aged, estranged father. These texts, and their serendipitous discoveries, are too contrived. The structure and symmetry are exhausting, and the resolution of the novel’s central mystery—why Sim has a terrible relationship with his father, and thus with people in general—is pat, though at times quite moving in spite of itself.
What do Coe and his Sim tell us about modern life? Only that man in the Facebook era is often lonely, bad at forging and maintaining relationships, tormented by regret, and prone to episodes of cruelty, delusion, and self-destruction, just as he was before Mark Zuckerberg tapped out his first line of code. For his “terrible privacy,” his loneliness, Sim has nobody but himself to blame. For his triumphant reintroduction to the society of man, however, he has countless people, and the enlightening complications they present, to thank. Coe’s lesson seems to be that no technology can make human interaction any easier or any harder than it’s ever been. One is tempted to add, don’t shoot the Instant Messenger.
Maxwell Sim is a social novel, to be sure, but Coe resists the impulse to make information his main character—an impulse James Wood cautioned against in several essays about the “hysterical realism” of novelists like Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace. The information, the “richly observed” minutiae of our times, shouldn’t be the star; neither should it be booted off the stage. In the right hands, it can be used to great effect. Coe makes it a counterpoint to his hero’s failings, a pile of excuses to be examined and sniffed at. Stewart O’Nan’s Emily, Alone—a sequel to 2002’s Wish You Were Here—uses precise information about modern life to build an obstacle course, so to speak, for his heroine, an old widow named Emily Maxwell. But the story is no more “about” the twenty-first century than it is about ancient Rome. It is about the fresh challenges of old age and, even more than that, preparing to depart this earth.
Eighty-year-old Emily is alone in O’Nan’s native Pittsburgh, and the author’s familiarity with this territory shines whenever Emily leaves the house: “Emily . . . [watched] the stately brick homes lining Highland pass, their columned porticos and many chimneys a testament to the city’s former wealth. They perched high, each with its swath of lawn and loop of drive, separated from the common street by wrought-iron gates and black granite walls worthy of a churchyard.” It’s fitting that this tale unfolds in a city whose relative decline reflects Emily’s own. Needless to say, being an old woman, she just as often stays inside. Remarkably, the result is not a boring book.
This isn’t to pretend it’s an exciting book, either, but it exerts a powerful hold on the imagination: O’Nan makes it impossible not to imagine being Emily, which is, for lack of a delicate way to put it, frightening—and humbling. “If Dr. Sayid expected her to be devastated by the idea [of dying],” he writes, “that only showed how young he was. There was no point in going into hysterics.” It’s one thing to imagine being old, another to imagine a point at which the prospect of death is no more alien, abstract, or upsetting than the delivery of one’s morning Post-Gazette.
Unless, of course, the reader is herself old. The inclination to assume the average reader of this book will be young or middle-aged, someone voyeuristically observing the grim trials of later life, redounds to O’Nan’s credit. The book functions as a gentler, less explicitly allegorical Somonyng of Everyman, a reminder that the things of this world are fleeting and that our last days will give us ample time for recollection and regret. Every mundane task summons a memory, and even the pleasurable ones have their sting. Here is Emily, packing away the liquor cabinet in anticipation of her alcoholic daughter’s arrival. She finds her husband Henry’s flask:
She lifted it out and angled it toward the light to admire the filigree. Slim as a cigarette case, it fit perfectly in the back pocket of his favorite corduroys. He carried it on their fall walks in the park, and while he tinkered in the garage at Chautauqua. Winter nights in Panther Hollow, as they sat by the bonfire of broken-down pallets and watched the children skating where they’d once courted, he handed it to her first and then pretended to disinfect the mouth with his sleeve.
Emily, Alone has plenty of the sort of information that delighted fans of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. (Sam Tanenhaus, who wrote that Franzen “seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life,” will thrill to O’Nan’s observation that house guests always leave behind their cell phone chargers.) And, again, much of it is put to good use. The careful descriptions of ostensibly tedious routines, or the tone of Emily’s one-sided dialogues with her dog, or the feeling of driving too slowly in traffic, or the tightrope-walk of etiquette involved in asking a neighbor for help—O’Nan’s prose brings all of this to disturbing life.
But Emily’s memories are the real information, the stuff that moves the reader most. In this there is another warning to the happy, oblivious young, one having nothing at all to do with hourglasses and hooded skeletons: Your parents remember everything—every slight, every forgotten phone call or thank-you note, every visit backed out of at the last minute. Conversations between Emily and her children, and the icy insight with which she reflects upon them, place O’Nan among the finest dialogue writers and psychological portraitists. And they put the rest of us on notice: Call your mom. Otherwise, you’ll have worse things to fear than the Reaper.
Sometimes, after a potent dose of information about modern life, one craves escapism. Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!—oh yes, the title has an exclamation point, which will henceforward be omitted as a courtesy to the reader—promises plenty of that, and its “critics” vouch for exuberance, invention linguistic and otherwise, nothing short of the greatest show on earth. The titular Swamplandia is a dilapidated alligator-themed park in Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands, the existence of which is threatened by the death from cancer of its alligator-wrestling headliner, Hilola Bigtree, and by competition from the World of Darkness, a hell-themed park on the mainland.
If you’re the sort of Grumpy Grundleshanks who doubts that an insular family of Ohio-born, ersatz-Indian swamp rats, who hang a shingle reading ANY BODY COULD GET HURT above their alligator pit, would name their park “Swamplandia”—with or without the exclamation point—this isn’t your book. All fantastic tales require suspension of disbelief, but truly successful ones offer in return a scrupulous internal logic. Russell’s title may seem like a minor failure to follow that rule, but it isn’t every book whose first word fires this kind of a warning shot.
Most of Swamplandia is narrated by Ava Bigtree, who is twelve years old during the book’s action but speaking from the vantage of adulthood. She is the youngest of Hilola’s children, who also include flighty sister Osceola or “Ossie” and ambitious, autodidactic brother Kiwi. (Ava and Ossie, who communes with spirits, first appeared in a short story, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” included in Russell’s 2006 collection St. Lucy’s School for Girls Raised by Wolves.) Ossie elopes with the ghost of a Depression-era dredgeman named Louis Thanksgiving. In the face of Swamplandia’s financial woes, Kiwi makes for the mainland and takes a low-paying job at World of Darkness. He’s also initiated into the debased, anti-intellectual, titty-twisting, mother-dissing world of the mainland teenager.
This fish-out-of-water scenario is more entertaining than the magical realism of Ava’s sections, but it isn’t as comic as it thinks it is, and the contrast contributes to Swamplandia’s general incoherence. To revisit the question of internal logic, of consistency, why is the reader expected to believe that the mainlanders—portrayed, like every other non-Bigtree, as insensitive, Big Gulp-swilling toads—would flock to a theme park replete with references to Leviathan and the Four Horsemen, or Acheron, Lethe, and Styx? Where the drinking fountains spew salt water? Can death or money possibly matter, to the characters or to the reader, in a fictive universe where showy jokes like these keep snapping the reader out of his reverie?
Such a complaint would be gratuitous were Swamplandia what it clearly wants to be, and ought to have been—an imaginative and colorfully written Young Adult novel. Ava, who goes off with a mysterious Bird Man to rescue Ossie from the “underworld,” belongs to the sisterhood of Pippi Longstocking and Matilda; sitting in a boat with an older fugitive doesn’t make her Huck Finn. Whatever sort of book Russell insisted on writing, there should at least have been an editor to tell her, “You can have the World of Darkness or the realistically depressing Indian casino, but not both. You can have Ossie’s spectral bridegroom or Ava’s sexually violent predator, but for God’s sake not both.” Yes, the Bird Man is a rapist, but don’t feel cheated by the spoiler. If you refuse to see it coming, it’s only because you can’t fathom how a writer of Russell’s relative talent could be so tone deaf.
There is only one thing the rape of a twelve-year-old girl could signify in a book like this, and that’s the abrupt, pitiless destruction of a child’s self-propelled fantasy world. But here it isn’t allowed to mean that, because the fantasy is left largely intact. The reader wonders briefly if the Bird Man and “Louis Thanksgiving” are the same person, if both girls have been manipulated and victimized. But Russell took this interpretation off the table when she put a long, persuasively detailed “Louis Thanksgiving” origin story (think Billy Budd on an Everglades dredge barge) in Ossie Bigtree’s mouth.
“The Dredgeman’s Revelation,” which ran in the July 26, 2010, issue of The New Yorker, is unlike anything else in Swamplandia, tone- or content-wise, and its purpose seems to be—you guessed it—the ostentatious display of information. In a New Yorker Q&A, Russell explained, “I was . . . doing some pretty heavy research into Florida history and the Army Corps Dredge and Fill campaign, and this little story within the story opened up.” It is fabulously detailed and fascinating stuff, sure, but in the context of Swamplandia it can only have come from a real ghost. This makes Ava’s rape difficult to see as anything but an ill-considered attempt to turn zany YA gothic into the literary equivalent of Oscar bait. Russell doesn’t appear to be half that mercenary, though, so the whys and wherefores are an open question.
Swamplandia comes to us blurbed by terrific writers (Carl Hiaasen, Joseph O’Neill) and recommended by valuable critics, but the claims for its prose are inflated, too. “There is a documented correlation between unconventional speech and genius,” Kiwi says at one point, and Russell seems to have taken this to heart. She turns out many passages of great descriptive beauty, but seems to benefit from a see-what-sticks approach. Figurative language proliferates in Swamplandia like the invasive Melaleuca so despised by Ava Bigtree. It’s compulsive, an irritating distraction, and results in a book far, far longer than it needs or deserves to be. Much of it is careless to the point of being nonsense: “the pins of my knees became twin suns”; “I . . . felt a little yellow slurry of excitement”; “his big knuckles popping from the pressure of his grip like ten white valentines.” This isn’t genius—it’s Tourette’s.
One could go on all day. If only the other reviewers would come back down to earth, one wouldn’t feel the need.
The King of Information, the man who packed more of it into more pages than any writer of his generation, is David Foster Wallace, and his posthumously published unfinished project, The Pale King, tells us a great deal about why. For many readers, including this one, Wallace’s Infinite Jest was at once astonishing and disappointing. Those who got to the end of it will wonder how anyone can say with confidence that The Pale King is unfinished—well, that’s going too far, but they’ll certainly reject the suggestion, offered by Slate’s Tom Scocca, that it’s unfair to guess what a finished Pale King would have looked like. It would have looked like The Pale King, but there’d have been a lot more of it.
What exists of The Pale King puts Wallace’s work and his singular consciousness in a new, saddening context. It’s a reminder that what came to seem like his worst qualities only looked that way because they were so widely and badly imitated. Wallace wrote like he did—helpless before his own digressions, footnotes, manic investigations of peripheral questions and subject matter, circuitous self-corrections—because his mind worked that way. His acolytes tried to reproduce the effect, like Borges’s Pierre Menard “writing” Don Quixote, and the results were often so exasperating that it was difficult not to fault Wallace for setting the wheels in motion.
The lapsed fan of “DFW” may feel like hell after reading The Pale King. It would be reductive to say the man was “crazy.” That he was deeply and suicidally depressed is no longer in dispute. What his final act as a writer makes clear is that he was curious, in a disciplined and productive way, about the value of observation and concentration as tools to transcend boredom, fight despair, and find meaning in life. His inescapable interest in everything seems to have made this filtering excruciatingly difficult for him. In his famous Kenyon commencement address, he seems at times to be describing empathy—related to but not the same as attention—with the wonder and terror of someone who has to concentrate just to keep his own heart beating. Really. Dial up his supermarket analogy: Wallace takes nearly two thousand words to say, in effect, “Put yourself in the other guy’s shoes.”
His attention to detail, in other words, was a curse he devoted his whole life to turning into a blessing. To take the IRS, the tax code and its servants, as the subject of The Pale King was an almost masochistic act for someone of his sensibilities. It would be funny to say that reading The Pale King is as dull as doing one’s taxes, but of course that isn’t true at all. Wallace assembles a cast of characters—none of them realistic, many of them more like boredom-powered superheroes than real people—shackled by variations on his obsessive, compulsive focus. One character requires every iota of his concentration to keep from sweating profusely; another, a sort of autistic master yogi, hopes to kiss every inch of his body; still another can’t keep from psychically receiving random, pointless facts about the people he encounters. There’s even a self-sacrificing evangelical Christian who stares into the jaws of boredom to provide for an unexpected child.
Is this self-indulgent? It would be perverse in the extreme to say so. These are not the pomo, look-at-me punchlines they might be in a different book. They are case studies Wallace invented to investigate aspects of his mind, and, in turn, all minds. The characters in The Pale King aren’t human beings, exactly, with one exception. David Foster Wallace is himself a first-person narrator in the book. In an onion-layered intro, he calls his contributions a “memoir”—the authorial insertion being the oldest trick in the book, used by novelists from Miguel Cervantes (Don Quixote) to Martin Amis (Money) to Jonathan Coe (The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim—really).
Here, it’s no joke. Wallace was one of the funniest—one of the only funny—writers on the scene, but one senses that passages like this, however comical, were anything but for their author:
The show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, ‘You’re watching As the World Turns,’ which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—‘You’re watching As the World Turns,’ until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—‘You’re watching As the World Turns’—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. I don’t mean any humanities-type ironic metaphor, but the literal thing he was saying, the simple surface level. I don’t know how many times I’d heard this that year while sitting around watching As the World Turns, but I suddenly realized that the announcer was actually saying over and over what I was literally doing. . . . It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep. . . . It was beyond being feckless or a wastoid—it’s like I wasn’t even there. The truth is I was not even aware of the obvious double entendre of ‘You’re watching As the World Turns’ until three days later—the show’s almost terrifying pun about the passive waste of time.
The actual quote is longer, hypnotically long, mantra-like, and yet fully intelligible. But Wallace’s manuscript notes read: “David Wallace disappears 100 pp in. . . . David Wallace disappears—becomes creature of the system.”
Like hell he does. For Wallace’s epitaph, we might borrow these words from Paul Theroux: “When I considered our certain doom, my memory was sharpened. I remembered what I saw and heard, every fugitive detail, and became a man on whom nothing was wasted.”
