Didn’t read it: The Novelist: A Novel, by Jordan Castro, a noview
Imagine that you wake one morning and at the foot of your bed is a glowing blue portal cut from the air, a shimmering gateway to whoknowswhere, you step blearily and excitedly toward it, it could lead anywhere, anywhen, turn you into anyone, the vibrating, shimmering edges seem to pulse with possibility, this, finally, is the escape from your dreary godforsaken repetitive live of wake work sleep wake work sleep. Tears of hope trickle down your face as you step, without a look back or a goodbye to anyone, into the portal
and immediately find yourself awake in your bed, in your exact same life.
That searing, heavy depression–the numbing, tiring monotony of living ones life–is what washed over me as I read the introductory pages of Jordan Castro’s new book, which contained intricate description of the narrator signing in to their laptop, opening their email, replying, clicking on twitter, reading tweets, all preserved in exact detail down to the position of their fingers on the trackpad.
I’m not going to read this, I thought, there is no way on earth I would continue reading this, I thought to myself as I scrolled disbelievingly on through the sample on Amazon, what kind of person would continue reading this, I asked myself aloud in my office as I dragged my middle finger down the scroll wheel causing the words to scroll up.
“Superbly captures the circuitous psychosis of the degenerate social media user who can’t stop clicking and eventually becomes one with the cursor ” says Alex Perez of the Washington Examiner.
Twitter, over time, had proven calamitous when it came to getting work done. I clicked unthinkingly, often feverishly, and if I started in the morning, I would generally continue, unhinged, throughout the day, on both my laptop and my phone, everywhere I went, no matter what else I was doing. Through trial and error, I’d observed that if I refrained from clicking Twitter in the morning, I wouldn’t check it so much throughout the rest of the day, and so I turned this into a kind of rule: Don’t check Twitter before noon. But this-self-knowledge and the imposition of a rule-didn’t do me any good; the clicking continued more or less unabated, and once it began, it was out of my hands. The more I clicked Twitter, the more I wanted to click Twitter, and so on.
I watched as it loaded in front of me.
White header, matte blue background, tweets against a white background do you want to kill yourself yet? Are you desperate to shut the book and take a breath of cold air outdoors, to get out of that featureless landscape that is an exact mirror of your current existence? I was, and I did, and I thought about the desperate loathing I felt for the light, halfhearted way in which the modern world is described in these pages, how the narrator (and presumably the author) is a writer, yet only uses the most mundane, straightforward language to describe only the most boring things that a basic twitter user does every day, the surface level, baseline thoughts every average social media consumer has had, typed up in simple dull words. Why did I feel physically ill, as If I’d been staring at a spiraling optical illusion, after reading these few pages of simple, bland prose?
Perhaps it was the knowledge that so many others enjoyed it, found it unique and witty and fresh, and that they all read onward, perhaps while chuckling and thinking ‘haha, that is just like me’ and smiling with anticipation for the next facet in the mirror, and perhaps it was dread that I felt twisting inside me, perhaps it was the inescapable unease of being an outsider, of being separate from the crowd in my disgust with the banal and the common, of being alone in my desire for the new, new, new, I can not take another page of something so familiar, something so painfully normal which by virtue of being published and praised is being presented as a revelation. God get me out of here
-Rating: no, please god no
