Novels 2023

[Arridano Tillo]

Inmore general terms, the guilt which underlies the gothic and motivates its plots is the guilt of the revolutionary haunted by the (paternal) past which he has been striving to destroy; and the fear that possesses the gothic and motivates its tone is the fear that in destroying the old ego-ideals of Church and State, the West has opened a way for the inruption of darkness: for insanity and the disintegration of the self. Through the pages of the gothic romance, the soul of Europe flees its own darker impulses.

The gothic felt for the first time the pastness of the past; and though it did not, like the later novels of Manzoni and Scott, attempt with scholarly accuracy to document that difference, it tried to give some sense of it: the sense of something lapsed or outlived or irremediably changed.

Anyone who, in full consciousness, surrenders the hope of heaven (what everyone says heaven is) for the endurance of hell (what everyone knows hell to be) has entered into a pact with Satan; and the very act, therefore, of writing a gothic novel rather, than a sentimental one, of devoting a long fiction to terror rather than love, is itself a Faustian commitment.

But for most part, the Internet Novel is preoccupied with the degradation of society at the hands of the online. The remaking of the world into a series of psychically linked quick-twitch fibers that fire at the slightest provocation.

How could one tell where the American dream ended and the Faustian nightmare began; they held in common the hope of breaking through all limits and restraints, of reaching a place of total freedom where one could with impunity deny the Fall, live as if innocence rather than guilt were the birthright of all men

The internet saved my life when I was younger. I slithered out of the dark and into the bright Gehenna of message boards and online roleplaying games and chatrooms. Bit by bit, I built up a self. And it saved me. Time and again, it saved me. Because while the world I lived in told me one thing about myself, the greater world, told me I could be something else.

This is a great essay. I never thought of these kinds of novels as being gothic, but you've definitely convinced me. My impression of the internet is more or less the same as yours. I'd be curious how many people would credit the internet with saving their lives. I think it would be many. Way more than people might think. Anything you're struggling with, there's likely a space you can find to connect with others. If you've survived abuse, or are in the midst of it, if you have some obscure disease, if you have relationship or family problems, if you're grieving, if you have mental health problems, if you're escaping a cult, etc. The possibility for connection and help is well beyond what was available before the internet. I can't think of any novel that really gets into that... Anyway, this essay is a nice companion to your Millennial Novel essay and I would probably buy (but definitely take out of the library) a book of essays about contemporary fiction were you to write and compile enough of them (it'd be worth buying, I'm just cheap and being honest here).

In the current zeitgeist, mostly meaning publishing and media Twitter, Internet Novel is a misnomer, a false-cognate, because the two novels put forward by that very zeitgeist as being emblematic of the form and genre aren\u2019t really about the internet. Fake Accounts and No One Is Talking About This are primarily concerned with social media, mostly meaning Twitter, and its effects on the mores of white upwardly mobile media writers.

Usually, so it goes in the Internet Novel, these effects are for the most part negative. Online, communication is more subterranean and referential than before. We communicate by way of thin, tensile epigrams. In memes and ASCII drawings. Online, we bathe in the glow of each other\u2019s affect. Perpetual access to knowledge has turned everyone into a pedant. Did you see that tweet? Did you see that video? I sort of read an article. We are distracted. We are unable to be political. We are unable to effect change. To save the world. To imagine a world in which people do or do not wash their feet. We read Reddit. We scroll our For You pages. We watch a video and wonder how it ended up recommended to us. We watch that Netflix show. We do not watch that Netflix show because the star tweeted something bad once. We laugh about media people getting fired for old tweets. We marvel at how anyone could fail to delete their tweets before getting a new job. We nervously search our tweets for bad politics or for things that might, in the next five to ten weeks, be considered bad politics. We wish we had better digital hygiene. We tweet about our cardio. We take pictures of books we read. We do not read. We tweet instead of reading. Instead of writing. We get into a Twitter fight with a man who looks like a big toe because while we were reading he interpreted our tweets as being a reference to him. We do not think that being online is healthy. We distrust what being online has done to us. We pantingly paw at our screens.

In the view of the Internet Novel, the internet is a corrupting force, persuasive and totalizing in its effects. This to me is one of the more Gothic impulses in the Internet Novel. In Fiedler\u2019s Love and Death in the American Novel, this impulse is partly described in the following formulation:

The characteristics of the Gothic novel were more or less established in Horace Walpole\u2019s The Castle of Otranto: a decaying setting that represents a corrupt (and often Catholic) past, an atmosphere of ambient dread and suspense, supernatural phenomena, a maiden in distress fleeing an awful man (often a would-be rapist or tyrannical dude-bro), heightened emotion, etc. In Fiedler\u2019s view, the Gothic with all of its gloom and abjection and haunted manors full of moaning ghosts and bleeding portraits is the result of a failed flight of independence.

The Internet Novel captures some of the weird Gothic horror that white people have come, by way of their new digital Calvinism, to accept as being inherent to digital life. The Internet Novel is a Gothic novel both because it is preoccupied with a past it considers itself both superior and inferior to and also because it is unable to shake the sense that in trying to destroy that past, it has instead become vulnerable to the darkest impulses of the culture it seeks to flee. In some sense, the aestheticized past of the Internet Novel isn\u2019t meatspace so much as an earlier, more democratic internet. What is marked as \u201Coffline\u201D in the Internet Novel isn\u2019t even really offline. It\u2019s just the slightly less online of 2005 or 2007. But that\u2019s maybe a point too fine to argue.

Fake Accounts is critic Lauren Oyler\u2019s debut novel. It opens in that tense, nervy period between Trump\u2019s election and inauguration when it seemed that all of America was seized with the Spirit of 1776 and/or 1903 and/or 1965 and/or 2011 and/or 2012 and/or 2015. People poured from their comfortable homes into the streets of the nation\u2019s capital to protest the ascension of fascism while wearing their pink hats and waving their signs. But the novel isn\u2019t about that. Instead, the novel is animated by the keen awareness of the extent to which all of that noise and tumult and political agita were mere posture. Or, if not posture, then certainly scannable as such. The narrator of Oyler\u2019s novel is very, to use the modern parlance, sharp. Her perception bathes the whole novel in a patina of, what, knowing? Irony? It\u2019s hard to say because so much of the book\u2019s posture is predicated on short-circuiting any critical apparatus that would describe and evaluate it.

The narrator discovers at the opening of the novel that her boyfriend is running a conspiracy alt account, the kind of hub that flared brightly into the public consciousness over the last couple of years as the mainstream became aware of the reverse world that runs parallel to the internet most of us inhabit. What the narrator does with this information is decide to break up with the guy. She\u2019s unhappy in their relationship, kind of, and almost for want of a reason, she locks in on this as a sign, not that he\u2019s evil, but that he\u2019s maybe kind of deceptive. She goes to the march, meets up with a gay friend, and on her way home, she finds out that her boyfriend is dead.

Our narrator then takes the money that the boyfriend\u2019s mom sent her and heads not to his funeral but to Berlin, where they met. The novel then turns collagic in its mode as it delivers the backstory of the narrator\u2019s relationship with the dead boyfriend and also her life in Berlin: we get fragments, we get fragments about fragments, we get a weird chorus of ex-boyfriends. In a move not dissimilar from one of those videos with titles like 50 Years of Underwear in America, Fake Accounts (starting somewhere near the end of the first section through to the end of the novel) is like a timelapse of styles in American literature. It\u2019s bold and impressive and kind of ironic. I mean, it wasn\u2019t moving because Oyler is so determined to make you feel stupid for feeling anything at all, but it was a masterstroke of technical virtuosity. She can fucking write. Her talent is astonishing. Both the flexibility of her idiom and the quicksilver flourishes of her mind are on full display in this novel, and she has the kind of churlish native fluency in the mores of the media class that made H.L. Mencken kind of a menace back in the day. It\u2019s amazing, and so much fun, even if it is emotionally vacuous.

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