Sometimes you just want to read a book with a plot. You know, the kind where people meet each other, go places, fall in love, fight, fall out of love, even die—a good, old-fashioned story. Jordan Castro’s new novel, cheekily titled The Novelist, is emphatically not a good, old-fashioned story. Even calling The Novelist a novel at all is a gag. “I opened my laptop,” the narrator says in the opening lines, and those first four words are the beginning, middle, and end of its narrative. The winking title was the right choice: The Guy Who Opened His Laptop doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
The Novelist takes place over a single morning, following an unnamed writer as he faffs around on social media while his girlfriend sleeps in their apartment; he occasionally fiddles with novels in progress in Google Docs. That’s it. The first 16 pages describe the protagonist looking at Twitter in minute-by-minute detail, thinking inane thoughts like “my Twitter was horrible—Twitter in general was horrible.” A more annoying premise for a book is, frankly, hard to imagine. And yet, here I am, recommending it. What’s good about a novel with a plotline so insipid it borders on openly hostile? Well, for starters, it’s funny—a rare and cherishable quality in contemporary literature.
It also contains some of the most accurate—and accurately abject—depictions of the experience of using the internet ever captured in fiction. There’s a tangent in The Novelist where the narrator remembers a popular girl from his high school named Ashley. He looks her up on Facebook, clicking through her digital photographs. “Moving quickly, almost frantically, as though trying to complete an urgent task, I navigated back to Ashley’s profile and clicked her header photo: a group of wealthy-looking small women and thick men, all white, wearing dresses and high heels or blazers and partially unbuttoned button-ups, standing crammed together on a roof, a skyline I didn’t recognize behind them. I did, however, recognize some of the people in the picture. At least I thought I did—when I moved the cursor over their faces and bodies, the names that appeared were unrecognizable to me,” the narrator thinks, before daydreaming about what these people he may or may not know may or may not be like. “I imagined arguing about racism with one of the thick men in the picture,” he continues, poring over Ashley’s social milieu like an amateur sleuth. This passage will, I suspect, resonate with anyone who has ever let an hour or two drift by playing detective over corny acquaintances on Facebook, and it establishes Castro as a psychologically precise chronicler of life online.