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Mapping void of the Internet with off-kilter precision
By Rachel Kushner |
February 24, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE Internet: from my vantage it's both arbitrary and sovereign, an open sewer and a global Yellow Pages - but what is it? It can't be reduced to its technical components, whatever they are. It's metaphysical, yet without fixed or transcendent meaning. It's a crystal ball, without any clairvoyance. Who hasn't arrived at the logically borne-out if senseless belief that in the oceanic swell of Google lies hidden the answer to one's most private problem?
In "Four New Messages," Joshua Cohen takes on the experiential properties of the "online" modality, its textures and tautologies, its effects on language and thus on humans and meaning. This seems at once a fundamental and ambitious place to begin mapping this void of a thing that we pretend, by not writing about it in literature, doesn't have much place in life, when the dirty truth is otherwise.
In "Emission," the first of the four long stories that make up the book, a character trying to scrub a damning blog post searches "for lawyers in his area by typing 'lawyers in my area.' The No. 1 result was a website called 'What Is a Good Web Site to Find Lawyers in My Area.'" The story is clever and occasionally hilarious, even if its premise - that the blog post in question can ruin the life of a guy who deals coke to Princeton undergrads - isn't quite believable; he's so marginalized already, there's little to protect.
"Sent," an elaborate hall of mirrors, begins with a folk tale of sorts featuring the desecration of a family heirloom, a carved wooden headboard, and then follows the carver's descendant straight online, to one of millions of porn clips.
In "McDonald's," a writer finds himself "searching search engines for 'whats wrong with my story'," and ruminating on the existential nullity of words, names, narrative causality, genre cliche and the form of the franchise. "McDonald's" is the weirdest, riskiest, most esoteric, reflexive and challenging of Cohen's four new messages, yet the strongest at showcasing his talents at digging around absurdity.
In terms of influence, trust that Cohen - the author of "Witz," an 800-page fantasy about the last Jew on earth - has read all the right people, the modernist ones, from Europe, and leave it at that unless you want a uselessly long list. The sentences here are unbridled, kitschified with rhyme, repetition and assonance (receptive receptionists, dangling digits, a lot of lot), puns and neologisms and homemade compounds.
It's a teeming tone, but the reward is an off-kilter precision, one that feels both untainted and unique. As one of his characters puts it: "When you are not wanted in, you want in, but maybe making you want in is the sense of a wall, its purpose."
In "Four New Messages," Joshua Cohen takes on the experiential properties of the "online" modality, its textures and tautologies, its effects on language and thus on humans and meaning. This seems at once a fundamental and ambitious place to begin mapping this void of a thing that we pretend, by not writing about it in literature, doesn't have much place in life, when the dirty truth is otherwise.
In "Emission," the first of the four long stories that make up the book, a character trying to scrub a damning blog post searches "for lawyers in his area by typing 'lawyers in my area.' The No. 1 result was a website called 'What Is a Good Web Site to Find Lawyers in My Area.'" The story is clever and occasionally hilarious, even if its premise - that the blog post in question can ruin the life of a guy who deals coke to Princeton undergrads - isn't quite believable; he's so marginalized already, there's little to protect.
"Sent," an elaborate hall of mirrors, begins with a folk tale of sorts featuring the desecration of a family heirloom, a carved wooden headboard, and then follows the carver's descendant straight online, to one of millions of porn clips.
In "McDonald's," a writer finds himself "searching search engines for 'whats wrong with my story'," and ruminating on the existential nullity of words, names, narrative causality, genre cliche and the form of the franchise. "McDonald's" is the weirdest, riskiest, most esoteric, reflexive and challenging of Cohen's four new messages, yet the strongest at showcasing his talents at digging around absurdity.
In terms of influence, trust that Cohen - the author of "Witz," an 800-page fantasy about the last Jew on earth - has read all the right people, the modernist ones, from Europe, and leave it at that unless you want a uselessly long list. The sentences here are unbridled, kitschified with rhyme, repetition and assonance (receptive receptionists, dangling digits, a lot of lot), puns and neologisms and homemade compounds.
It's a teeming tone, but the reward is an off-kilter precision, one that feels both untainted and unique. As one of his characters puts it: "When you are not wanted in, you want in, but maybe making you want in is the sense of a wall, its purpose."
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