Living In Pixels

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of dalbera.

S. Kirk Walsh wrote a long review of Dan Chaon's latest novel on Double X last week, claiming that the book is an example of how fiction authors have failed to capture the emotions of the internet. But I think the review has two problems. First, the piece doesn't actually have any other examples under than the Chaon novel that demonstrates that authors are unable to maintain the full depth of emotion that they can bring to the real world when they turn to the virtual one, which seems to be a significant problem if you're going to indict novels about the internet as a whole. And second, as often happens with reviews like this (and I'm fully aware that I'm guilty of this; it's a function of criticism), the piece seems to reveal a great deal more about how Walsh feels about the internet than about how Chaon writes about it. For example, Walsh says she thinks this passage, about a fantasy an unhappy character has:

When she begins to feel a wave of grief or terror washing over her, she likes to visualize a line of cheerleaders in her mind’s eye. They jump and do splits and wave their pom-poms: "Push it back! Push it back! Push it wa-a-ay back!" they chant, and it seems to work. She thinks of how much Allen would like these mental cheerleaders. How he would laugh.

Is better than this passage, about the creepiness of spam:

The message arrived on his computer his first night in Las Vegas, and once again Ryan couldn’t help but feel antsy. This was the third or fourth time a stranger had contacted him out of the blue, writing to him in Russian or some other Eastern European language.

But she doesn't give us any reason why. I suppose the first image is slightly more detailed, and the passage is longer. But Walsh doesn't provide any qualitative reasons why a cliche image of some bouncy cheerleader should be accorded greater weight than a somewhat novel twist on how someone interprets unreadable email in foreign languages.

If you live a lot of your life on the internet, the way you're portrayed there, and the information that comes to you from the internet are more important. I remember preparing for a trip to China last year, and worrying that the Chinese email I was getting were the responses to emails I'd sent to set up interviews. I had no way of telling for sure, but suddenly a huge amount of my spam was freighted with unusual significance. Similarly, I feel like most people I know Google themselves on a fairly regular basis or have Google alerts set up: we want to make sure we know what's being written about us, and we want to that we're being written about. Not everyone behaves like this, of course. But I think more and more of us are aware of the vastness of the internet, and that novels that try to capture that, even if they're imperfect, are looking to the future. Experience isn't less impactful just because it happens online.