“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. Through a series of increasingly absurd machinations, 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. He is like all of us to some degree: stuck online under duress, eager yet unable to log off.
Kasulke’s novel is perhaps the most literal example of a recent wave of fictions that attempt to capture life online from within the Internet. The “Internet novel” is not new, but this wave distinguishes itself by being even more damaged and dissociative than the last. I’m reminded of deep-fried memes: the process of putting memes through a series of filters until they become grainy and demented, funny in a scary way.
Attempts to authentically capture the Internet have existed since its early days, especially within the Alt Lit movement—Tao Lin’s writing has long incorporated G-chat; Megan Boyle’s 2018 autofiction, Liveblog, is an effort to blog everything that happened to her over a period of several months. There are many more. 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.
It might have just been time for this type of book to cross over, now that most people are undeniably, irretrievably online. Or it might have been that Lockwood’s novel is extraordinary. 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?”
Throughout, Lockwood locates the strange poetry of the Internet with precision, humor, and beauty. She writes of the pile-ons that occur daily on social media: “Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate.”
“We don’t, but we want to remember the fifteen-years-ago internet and that was last week’s internet, once.”
Many others now join Lockwood, but they are not imitators exactly. 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 (forthcoming in September but with abbreviated excerpts out now); and Beth Morgan’s A Touch of Jen, in which a couple’s Instagram fixation unleashes a paranormal demon.
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 stories, for example, faithfully mimic the too-muchness of social media. Sometimes this works to amusing effect. The first, titled “Love Story,” begins: “He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b. She was giving damsel in distress, pill popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness.” The two scroll “into each other” and then fall back apart when the girl sends the boy, from an Olive Garden bathroom, a too-vulnerable nude.
But 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. Any oddity or outré opinion a writer could dream up already exists in some dank little corner. This creates a challenge on the language level. 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. She likes wordplay and steers directly at cliché. “I’m in no position to give advice, but I get a lot of it,” says the garrulous first-person narrator of a story called “Do It Coward.” “I always have. I’m baby in Babylon. I literally like Kant even. Men explain things to me and that’s why I love them. Tell me how to be or not to be.”
Another story takes the form of an alphabetical glossary of Gen Z terms, which seems promising until you find yourself 27 pages in and realize you’re only on the letter K. “Red pill. Blue pill. One pill. Two pill. Mad pill. Sad pill,” reads the opening of a section on the word “pill.” The book, and especially this particular story, positions itself in opposition to millennial piety. All well and good—and natural for writers to reject the generation above them—but certain readers might tap out at A, which is for “autism.”
People will say this writing is current, but it isn’t—it’s dated. This is the main issue with the latest iteration of Internet fiction. 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. Levy’s, for instance, contains a story about cancellation, a topic so stale by now that even New York Times op-ed writers have tired of it. We’re remembering not last week’s Internet but the Internet of 2, 3, 15 years ago. This is not necessarily the fault of the authors, but it is something to consider. Are old memes enough to hang a book on?
How do you heighten language that is already at an 11?
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. Tanner’s narrator, Jules, is addicted to Instagram, with a particular fixation on mommy bloggers, often Mormon, their creepy gender ideas, their anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
The book includes many of their posts. Jules recounts seeing online: “A graphic of many interlocking circles labeled things like OFF-PLANET ANCIENT BUILDER RACE and EXTRATERRESTRIAL NORDICS and PINEAL GLAND and NASA COVERUPS and WAVE/PARTICLE DUALITY and TIBETAN DREAM YOGA and DEEP LUNAR MINING OPERATIONS.”
But rather than leaning on snapshots like this to carry the book, Tanner provides a smart counterpoint by giving Jules and her sister, Poppy, a vivid physicality. Poppy, who is prone to hives, is “doppled with welts, some pinker and fresher than others.” They listen to each other use the bathroom. Their gross little three-legged dog pees everywhere and foams at the mouth. Instead of having sex with an ex, Jules grimly masturbates beside him while he uses some kind of mechanical penis sleeve “with terrifying whorled vortices swirled around its outside.” It’s oppressively visceral. Understandable then, and even poignant, that Jules seeks escape into her phone.
People will say this writing is current, but it isn’t. 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.
As I read these books, I kept returning to their relationship with the concrete. 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.
These passages come with sensory description: how the baby looks, the weight of her, her searching blue eyes that cannot see. It’s not didactic, not a prescription to get offline, as much as it is a reminder of the miraculous and fearsome fact that we live in bodies.
How to make Internet fiction about something greater than looking at a screen? The forms can be restricting. Several People Are Typing is funny, winning, and well executed, but by the end the reader can feel it bucking against its dialogue-only constraint.
At one point, the trapped protagonist dreams of seeing a sunset, and you can imagine the author’s desire to describe something, anything, to write a sentence that is not in the clipped and jokey vernacular of Slack. Gerald types: “Sunsets are not naturally occurring on the internet. I mean, there are plenty of web designers who try and convince us that’s not true with CSS all blues and yellows and pinks and the un-shittiest orange they can find which might be subliminally *reminiscent* of a sunset to soothe you into purchasing goods and/or services but it’s not a sunset.”
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.
Still, reading several in a row, I began to feel a bit like Kasulke’s protagonist. I began to long for something more real, less ephemeral. I longed to see a sunset.
Erin Somers is the author of the novels Stay Up with Hugo Best and Ten Year Affair (forthcoming from Simon & Schuster). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Esquire, The New Republic, and elsewhere