1. At 62 pages, "This is the Future" is more a novella than a novel, which I register as a good thing. Most "novels" are too long; that's my personal opinion. I don't know how many extra pages of filler I've read in my lifetime by authors who seemed to think that a novel by very definition has to be at least 280 pages long (usually longer) and keep droning on accordingly but it's been a lot, too much, and I don't want to read any more of it. My eyes are full of filler. Most writers only have about 62 pages of stuff worth saying anyway. Besides, shouldn't form fit content and content dictate form, thereby dictating length? Didn't someone very important say that, or something very much like it? Wasn't it someone like Aristotle or Walter Benjamin? Joe Marchia seems to understand this principle. Personally, I formulated some years ago that the perfect novel should be 111 pages long, no more, no less. You should start with 111 sheets of paper and start typing until you've filled them all. You can fill them with anything—drawings, grocery lists, coffee rings, dialogue—and you should stop when you get to the 111th page no matter what. Joe Marchia has done me better by almost half.
2. The "Future" is narrated by Nick. He narrates in a kind of disembodied, factual voice that retells stuff in a flat, affectless way that reminds me of the narrative voice in a lot of Bret Easton Ellis novels. Actually, it's the voice in all of Bret Easton Ellis novels, the ones I can remember, anyway. It's the kind of voice that many autobiographical blogs and online diaries use. You can almost think of "This is the Future" as a post-Facebook "Less Than Zero" but it's not as nihilistic as Ellis, its characters not quite as narcotized and beyond hope and stuff. I've always liked stories and novels employing this voice. It's the predominant voice of my time. I'm writing in a voice like it right now. But it's a voice one tends to tire of if it goes on too long, so 62 pages (see 1.) of it seems just about right.
2. This review won't go on for 62 pages, I promise.
3. One thing I like vis-a-vis Bret Easton Ellis and his ilk is that Nick isn't totally zombified in his reactions to the world. He is actually trying to feel something. Love, for one thing. But the dilemma is how to go about feeling anything in the post-postmodern age. Postmodernism was all about being ironic and self-referential, pointing out you were feeling something if you thought you might be feeling something and saying "Look, I seem to be feeling something" which, of course, took you outside of feeling it and became "quoting" feeling, playing at feeling, doing a kind of "feeling pastiche" of earlier people having earlier feelings, etc. Now we ask ourselves what is a genuine feeling anyway? How can we have them even if we want one? There is a scene in the novel that highlights this point or dilemma or whatever you want to call it perfectly. Nick and his boyfriend Jim are in a cheesy Atlantic City gift/souvenir shop and Nick sees a greeting card with a dog on it and a message that says "You're just so dog-gone wonderful!" (or something like that) and he bursts out sobbing. He tries to explain that as stupid and awkward and cliched as the card is it expresses a truth that's got no place in today's world. It's an attempt to say (and feel) something true that we've lost the ability to say, being all postmodern and whatnot. We haven't lost our humanity (we hope) but we've lost at least the ability to express it without feeling stupid and artificial. You could rewrite Sartre's "No Exit" and have this frustration be what the characters are suffering and it would be a much subtler, more horrible depiction of Hell.
4. This is being written at 3.36 in the morning. Just to be clear—or clearer.
5. Nick and his friends are in their last year of college. I should probably have mentioned this much earlier. It's a dicey stressful time in a person's life because you've put off joining the real world as long as possible. Unless you're truly determined to go on avoiding the grim realities from which school shields you—and have someone, parents most likely, willing to continue financing your folly and escapism and extend your adolescence to the eve of middle-age—by going on to graduate school. Nick doesn't know what he's going to do when he graduates. Neither do most of his friends. So they drink a lot, take a lot of drugs, and have a lot of casual sex. But it's an empty, unsatisfying kind of hedonism, if you can imagine that. Nick and his boyfriend Jim start a blog called "Everything is Drugs" where they record their experience on drugs. Their "research" leads to some of the most hilarious and poignant moments-discussions-revelations of the novel.
6. Another thing that's different between Joe Marchia and someone like Bret Easton Ellis is that Marchia's characters aren't rich privileged brats. Marchia's characters are basically from blue-collar or frayed white-collared, middle-class families. So you don't get the famous Ellis smarminess. You don't get a peek into the dysfunctional lifestyles, wastefulness, and incredible callousness and amorality of the rich either, but there are plenty of novels that have shown us that, not just Ellis's, but the apers of Ellis ever since. Personally, I've grown to despise the rich. I'd just as soon not know how they live and where they vacation, what elaborate and uselessly expensive cars they drive, how many unnecessary unused rooms their mansions hold, what fancy and complicated crap they own that's causing the starvation and sickness and exploitation of more than half of the rest of the world. It'll interest me when the revolution comes and it's time to climb Society Hill with pitchforks and torches, not a day earlier.
7. Another thing that's different between Joe Marchia and someone like Bret Easton Ellis is that there isn't the same sense of criminal dread in "This is the Future" as there is in any Bret Easton Ellis novel. I mean the eerie sense that someone has been murdered or is about to be, raped or soon to be raped. There are no kidnappings, snuff films in the desert, Mexican drug lords, serial killers (although Nick does meet someone on Cragslist who he speculates might be a serial killer but this is an ironic cultural-reference moment because after reading so many novels and seeing so many movies by people like Bret Easton Ellis how can we not have "serial killer" flash through our mind when we meet someone new?) The darkest thing that happens in "This is the Future" happens before the novel begins and that is the suicide of "Timothy"—a person we never learn much about except that Nick is depressed about his death. He seems to have been a friend, maybe a lover. The point is that his suicide is in the background, shadowing the present, and therefore "the future." Nick acknowledges that there was a time after Timothy's suicide that he considered killing himself, too. (I guess this is one of those lemming-like contagions that suicide is supposed to set off in people, especially high-school kids, although personally I never understood it. I can't remember a time when I didn't want to kill myself so I hardly needed anyone to set an example for me; besides, I was always so utterly isolated and alienated from other people that nothing they did had any effect on me whatsoever. In fact, if someone else in my school had killed him or herself I would probably have felt less pressure, not more, to kill myself. It would seem so unoriginal and lame to kill myself just because someone else did it, like going out and buying the same kind of hat they wore or something, as if I had no originality whatsoever. I've never been a joiner, always been a contrarian. Right after someone else's suicide would probably be the last time I'd even think of killing myself, the closest to zero percent probability of suicide as I'd ever get, just out of fear that other people might misinterpret my suicide as a copycat kind of thing; it would totally cheapen the whole act, like I didn't have good, cool reasons of my own for killing myself. If nothing else, I'd probably get mad at the person who committed suicide, not for dying tragically or unnecessarily or whatever, but because they robbed me of the very good option of suicide by placing me in this lousy secondary, follow-the-leader, imitative, join-the-club position vis-a-vis suicide. How many years would have to pass before the option of suicide could become my own again? If it were someone in your immediate family that killed themselves, probably never. It would always be, "well you know her father-sister-brother-uncle etc committed suicide. She must never have gotten over it, it must run in her family, etc." What can I say? I'm not like ordinary people, even fucked-up ordinary people like those in Joe Marchia's novel. I'm more like a fucked-up person in a Bret Easton Ellis novel.) But Nick doesn't kill himself for basically the same reasons that I didn't; as far as I'm concerned there are only two really valid, rational arguments against suicide: 1. You're going to die anyway and be dead forever, so what's the rush? 2. Curiosity—you might as well hang around and see what happens.
8. I've brought up Bret Easton Ellis way too much. Why? I don't know. It's not like Joe Marchia's novel is that much like a Bret Easton Ellis novel; in fact, I keep saying how it's not like a Bret Easton Ellis novel, but in all the ways that it isn't like a Bret Easton Ellis novel it is like one in a weird reverse kind of way. Do you know what I'm saying? No? Neither do I really. Okay, let's put it this way: by referencing Bret Easton Ellis, Joe Marchia's novel is kind of an answer to Bret Easton Ellis's novels. Does that make more sense? It does to me.
9. Internet writing has, by it's nature, a kind of Bret Easton Ellis quality (maybe that's why I keep bringing him up, even though Bret Easton Ellis predated the explosion of internet writing; even more impressively, he "foresaw" it as a narrative style. Marchia references one of Ellis's novels "The Rules of Attraction" (I think) and he references Tao Lin, too, who is a writer I think of as someone who just got lucky enough to come around at a time when traditional publishers/editors were beginning to officially recognize "internet writing" as a genuine genre or style of writing, not that he was the first or the only or the best, not by far) of ironic objective reportage. By that I mean, the pretense of objective reportage (which post-Derrida everyone knows is just a myth, a pose; paradoxically nothing is more subjective than the pretense of being objective, so, without even trying, see 3 and 12, problem solved), where you say the most personal things in a flat affectless way as if you aren't personally involved. So you talk about getting fucked by a stranger who might be a serial killer like it wasn't even you doing it, like you were an observer watching the whole thing on television, while eating potato sticks. "Oh Jen?, I think she's still hanging in the shower stall where Ted left her earlier to bleed out. Can you get me another Tab?" You're too cool to be anything but ironic, even when you're crying your eyes out or bleeding to death. "And look at me there, squirming around on the floor like a big dumb fish in it's own blood, the knife going in and out of me, etc. omg! lol! ttyl…like maybe!…i mean if i'm not totally dead by then and/or this guy hasn't gut off all my fingers and toes for trophies, etc..."
10. There's something addictive about reading internet writing that's akin to reading someone's diary. It's immediate, it's real, it's personal. Most importantly of all: you aren't supposed to be reading it. Even if there isn't anything particular juicy or even interesting being written, it becomes interesting by virtue (strange word to use here) of it's illicitness. Sure, in the case of internet writing, the text is online, open for all to see, meant to be read, but it's kind of like undressing in front of an open window. You want someone to be watching while you're pretending you think you're alone. Even if you're both in on the game—exhibitionist and voyeur—you're pretending otherwise. The pretense is that someone is being violated and someone is doing the violating. That's what gives the game—in this case, the text—its zing.
11. Shortly after the internet really took off and people were reveling in the anonymity it offered, drunk on the consequence-free disclosures they could make about their darkest and most personal secrets, I remember formulating the idea that there was nothing left to say about human beings except what it was actually like to be one. I foresaw a time (this was the time before the rebuilding of the monolith and the re-institution of its warden: I mean, the prison of single-payer identity that is Facebook and sites like it) when people, disembodied, could at least be free to be not just what they really are, but all the things they really are. Though many social media sites are attempting (ever more successfully) to re-herd us back into the corral, re-habituate us to the notion that we are one person with one name one address one (credit card) number all the better to control and market crap to us, the original radical freedom of the internet remains, the prison door of so-called "self" (or selfie) is still unlocked and we can still pass through it to the disembodied freedom once imagined to be the sole property of the angelic order. What was my point again?
12. I think the best thing about Joe Marchia's novel or novella or novelette is that it represents a post-postmodern attempt to claw our way back to a writing that means something and isn't afraid/ashamed to do so. The dilemma that literature faces after postmodernism (see 3) at it's plainest is how to re-embody ourselves, how to care when caring is considered unhip and naive and just plain dumb, something one's great grandparents did. Remember Shelley? "I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed!" He was serious. Can you imagine!? Could anyone fall upon the thorns of life nowadays without being drunk or stoned or laughing their ass off or shitting their pants and making some sarcastic comment about it, snapping a selfie and posting it on their Facebook page ironically captioned? Does anyone really bleed anymore, or cry? Does anyone even have any actual real blood, any real tears in them, or are they all simulated, mediated by displaced observation, by being captioned, commented upon? How many novels, novellas, novelettes, memoirs, poems blogposts, Twitter bytes can we read by people who don't feel anything, or at best, people complaining about the impossibility of actually feeling anything, or (even more likely) pretending not to feel anything? Somehow we need to feel something again. I think, in the end, that's what Joe Marchia's book is about. It's about the future in which we can feel things again. It's a dreaming into, a groping after that place (<—and, of course, I'm resisting making an ironic comment here) when things matter, when they become flesh and blood.
13. I got forwarded a link to "This is the Future" but as far as I can tell anyone can it read for free. What's better than free? If they paid you to read it, it would be a job. So click on the link above—way above—and give it a try. It's only 62 pages long (see 1.).
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