(2024-05-04) Whos Afraid Of The Internet Novel

Erin Sommers: Who’s Afraid of the Internet Novel? Why would anyone want to remember last week’s internet,” writes Calvin Kasulke in his 2021 novel, Several People Are Typing. “We don’t, but we want to remember the fifteen-years-ago internet and that was last week’s internet, once. Humorously, this thought is delivered by a character named Gerald, who has been sucked into his computer’s Slack app.

the virtual helper within the app, known as Slackbot, manages to trade places with Gerald and take over his corporeal form. Meanwhile, Gerald’s consciousness is trapped at remote work, answering user queries

The “Internet novel” is not new, but this wave distinguishes itself by being even more damaged and dissociative than the last.

Attempts to authentically capture the Internet have existed since its early days,

But the mainstream watershed moment for this sort of stylistic pillaging might have been Patricia Lockwood’s Booker-shortlisted No One Is Talking About This (2021), which is partially told in the chaotic argot of the platform then known as Twitter.

Written in short chunks of text, like posts, the book follows a woman who has become world-famous for tweeting: “Can a dog be twins?”

Twenty-plus years of the modern Internet have given us a generation of writers who have grown up online and are reckoning with the consequences.

Recent examples include Alexandra Tanner’s Worry, in which a pair of sisters in Brooklyn bicker and scroll; Honor Levy’s My First Book, a collection of very online and very Gen Z short stories; Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, a hilarious and troubling portrait of some of the Internet’s most dire sufferers

Sometimes the books, like Lockwood’s or Kasulke’s, borrow the format of social media, but more often they crib the language. They seem interested in trying to forge a new literature rooted in the online idiom, and their attempts are interesting, if not always successful.

**Levy’s direct-transcription approach wears thin quickly. Part of the problem is that the Internet, which already exists at a fever pitch, cannot be exaggerated.
How do you heighten language that is already at an 11?

Levy has not fully cracked it. Her sentences skew not toward parody but bad slam poetry

People will say this writing is current, but it isn’t—it’s dated.
It’s presented as of the moment, but due to the production cycle of a book, the content will always be at least two years old.

By contrast, Tanner’s Worry succeeds because it pairs endless, disembodied scrolling with the intensely physical experience of living in close quarters with another person.

Part of why Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This is so good is that in the second half, the narrator is thrust into the real world. Her niece is born with a rare genetic disorder, and in becoming involved in caretaking, she discovers for the first time something more urgent and gratifying than posting.

How to make Internet fiction about something greater than looking at a screen?

These recent projects point in the direction of the Internet being the source of global derangement. There is a great and formative pain here. The Internet is not the world, and yet it is. Its lexicon is exciting, ever fluid, worthy of recording and playing around with, so we will likely see many more works like these.