Existential despair tinged with senseless hope
and other dystopian thrills
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Dear friend —
At the tail end of 2020, I took a Twitter poll that received cautiously optimistic responses:
Then 2021 hit — boom!
Riots! Vandalism! Mayhem! Five dead! Plus L.A. emergency rooms turning away patients because they’re way over capacity! Calls for impeachment! 1 in 10 in L.A. County infected with the coronavirus! Dozens arrested! Trump kicked off Twitter and Facebook and even Pinterest! Parler kicked off Amazon and Google and Apple!
In the midst of it all, Apple started censoring my texts.
I find that dystopian times are best escaped by reading — dystopian novels. They whisk you off into another world while providing an odd comfort of the familiar. Here are three I think you might love.
Severance by Ling Ma (FSG, 2018)
If during the coronavirus crisis you’ve stopped and thought, You know, what I really want to read right now is a novel about a viral pandemic that starts in China and spreads through the world to kill millions, well, then I have the book for you.
This apocalyptic novel is insanely good. The world is in the grip of Shen Fever, an infection that causes people to mechanically repeat rote tasks they did in their lives, then after a few weeks, die. Office workers can’t stop filing, girls try on their entire closet then start all over again, cabbies keep driving, zombie-like. It’s a disturbing phenomenon that turns the dictates of capitalism into deadly disease.
Most of the US is decimated over the course of a few months, but a small caravan of survivors band together to travel to a safe house of sorts. Then the guy leading them slowly reveals himself to be a religious autocrat….
But this novel is so much more than an apocalyptic story. It’s the story of Candace, a twenty-something girl, and her memories of family, her loneliness, and her search for a sense of being. And it’s about our world, the rote repetitiveness of our jobs, our lives, and the meaning and purpose of all of it. Read it if you like slow-build thrills and existential despair tinged with senseless hope.
Buy from Bookshop
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (Ecco, 2020)
A Brooklyn family rents a nice Airbnb for a vacation away from the city — then gets creepy visitors that mess up their plans on an apocalyptic level. If this sounds like the movie Us to you, well, it is, though the scenes in this novel are more surreal: gigantic herds of deer, a flock of flamingos in the pool, teeth falling out of mouths. And the apocalypse remains cryptic all the way to the end.
This novel builds slowly. In fact, the first fifth of the book is downright boring, with tedious descriptions of middle-class life, including an exhaustive list of items bought at the grocery store that goes on for two pages. But I stuck with it because I was reading it for a book club and, thankfully, once the unwanted guests arrive, things pick up. Read it if you like creepy stories where none of the loose ends get tied up.
Buy from Bookshop
The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker (Random House, 2019)
Here’s another novel about a viral infection. The Dreamers features a fictional college town called Santa Lora, Calif., where a mysterious sleeping sickness suddenly hits a dormful of teens and spreads through the population.
Reading this 2019 novel is a lot like living in 2021. College kids spreading contagion? Check. Weird conspiracy theories? Check. Makeshift hospital facilities? Check. The main difference is that — thanks to strict quarantining — the disease in the novel is contained within the town. Also, this particular disease makes you fall asleep and dream really hard. Inception hard. The infected wake up after many days, weeks, months — or just keep sleeping until their hearts slow down so much they’re no longer alive.
We follow a first-year student who just doesn’t fit in with the rest of her dormmates, a man scared of losing his newborn daughter, a little girl who follows her apocalypse-ready father’s orders — until he falls asleep. The story is sort of dreamy and sort of real — and sort of creepy in its prescience. Read it if you like that liminal space between sleeping and waking and occasionally fantasize staying in that state way forever.
Buy from Bookshop
Once a month, I share book recommendations. Shape it by recommending a read!
Stay safe during these dystopian times.
Love,
Siel
3 links you might love — the viral edition
I tweet, therefore I am. Is it possible that a simple desire for viral social media attention is what’s fueling a lot of today’s political polarization and violence? Former Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith talks about how he saw social media transform one of his former colleagues — who earlier this month was part of the crowd that stormed the capitol.
I’m already hearing what seem to be two competing explanations of what happened in Washington last week: that the overwhelmingly white, sometimes overtly racist, mob embodied old, deep unexpurgated American evil; or that social media reshaped some Americans’ blank slate identities into something radical.
Here’s one take from Max Read in Bookforum: What if the reason we tweet is because we wish we were dead?
Instagram felt innocent by comparison, writes Dayna Tortorici in n+1, of her decision to get into the Facebook-owned platform. Reading her piece helped me figure out how to change my privacy settings so the ads I see on social media aren’t so creepily personal.
