Why Can't Novelists Get the Internet Right?

Contemporary novelists must grapple with the fact that these days, many of our emotional encounters happen virtually. Whether it’s connecting via e-mail or social networking sites, our days are spent in front of the computer rather than talking in person. For writers of fiction, particularly those most interested in reflecting today’s social realities, it is impossible not to consider the impact this remote brand of socializing will have on both character and story.

During the past 10 years, fiction writers have begun to experiment with the potential role of technology in narrative. Take, for instance, the acrobatic fiction of the late David Foster Wallace. His footnote- and marginalia-studded style of writing captures what he described to his editor as “the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence.” More recently, the third section of Ed Park’s novel Personal Days [2] features a digital aria of sorts in which a remorseful office worker types away a rambling e-mail from the darkened floor of a busted elevator; the message never reaches its intended recipient. Zadie Smith begins On Beauty [3] with extended e-mails rather than formal letters (which open E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End [4], the 1910 novel to which Smith’s story pays homage).

Dan Chaon’s most ambitious novel to date, Await Your Reply [5], integrates technology even more fully. He uses multiple forms of computer communication—among them instant messages, e-mail, social networking, and search engines. As a result, his novel offers up a more realistic portrayal of our new patterns of socializing and how they figure so largely into our daily lives. His admirable aim is to explore how we invent and reinvent ourselves in a computer-driven world. But the book winds up showing how novelists haven’t quite cracked this code yet. Throughout the narrative, the computer screen ultimately gets in the way of writing convincingly about intimate human experience. The characters tend to come back to life only when they are actually interacting with each other.

I’ve admired Chaon’s writing ever since 2001, when his second story collection, Among the Missing [6] (a nominee for the National Book Award) was published. These well-crafted stories are dense with grief, heartbreak, and wry humor. One of my favorites is “Safety Man,” about a widow who begins to rely on an inflatable life-size doll as she attempts to retain the former rhythm of her life as well as her sanity. After her husband’s unexpected death, Sandi returns to work as an IRS claims adjuster and cares for her two young daughters. Midway through the story, Chaon writes from Sandi’s perspective:

When she begins to feel a wave of grief or terror washing over her, she likes to visualize a line of cheerleaders in her mind’s eye. They jump and do splits and wave their pom-poms: "Push it back! Push it back! Push it wa-a-ay back!" they chant, and it seems to work. She thinks of how much Allen would like these mental cheerleaders. How he would laugh.

The surprise here is how effectively Chaon’s brings authentic emotion to Sandi’s relationship with a lifeless object. But this skill fails him when he writes about the virtual world.

As the title implies, Await Your Reply examines the vast canvas of disconnection and connection. The title is lifted directly from the subject line of a fraudulent e-mail requesting assistance for securing mysterious international funds. The story revolves around estranged brothers—twins Miles and Hayden Cheshire, who haven’t seen each other in years due to Hayden’s schizophrenia and his compulsive urge to fabricate new identities. Identities are invented and dissolved with the click of a button, giving the narrative an evasive, house-of-mirrors quality. The reader follows the seemingly disparate narrative threads told by Miles, Lucy Lattimore (a high-school dropout and orphan who flees town with her history teacher), and Ryan (a college student who leaves everything behind to join up with his newly discovered biological father in a series of identity-theft scams). Like Chaon’s first novel, You Remind Me of Me [7], the story deftly alternates among the narratives, which are arranged nonlinearly, as if the chapters had been shuffled like a deck of cards. Await Your Reply is dazzling at times, yet some of the heart of the author’s earlier work is missing.

The novel’s weaknesses seem directly related to the challenges of incorporating the Internet into a compelling narrative. Chaon’s protagonists are still rudderless and disconnected, but a dimension of their characters has been flattened. This is particularly true of Ryan, who frequently appears in front of a computer. As we all know, going online is largely a passive activity. Here, Chaon writes about Ryan beginning to understand that his former life no longer exists:

He sat down at one of the computers with his can of beer beside the keyboard and logged on to the Internet and typed his name to see if anyone else had written about his death on their blog or whatever. But there was nothing new. Soon, he thought, his name would call forth fewer and fewer results.

Compared to Chaon’s early writings, this moment of recognition doesn’t offer up the same degree of emotional poignancy or loss. Instead, the pivotal scene is diluted.

Conversely, in scenes free of technology, Chaon returns to his rich, crystalline style, and provides his characters more depth. When Lucy and her teacher-turned-lover, George Orson, stand at the edge of a boat ramp that overlooks a parched basin and she begins to realize that George might not be all the things that he appears to be, Chaon writes from Lucy’s perspective:

And she was aware of that wavering shadow passing over her once again, all the different people she herself had wanted to become, all the sadness and anxiety that she had been trying not to think about now shifting above her like an iceberg. Were they merely bantering again? Or were they in the midst of a serious conversation?

Here, the theme of mutable identity takes on weight when it’s put in a specific context we can see and feel.

With Await Your Reply, Chaon runs up against the same cliché of the Internet as a nameless source of menace and wrongdoing, the way we’ve seen in so many movies—The Matrix [8] or The Terminator [9], for example. Halfway through the novel, the author writes from Ryan’s point of view:

The message arrived on his computer his first night in Las Vegas, and once again Ryan couldn’t help but feel antsy. This was the third or fourth time a stranger had contacted him out of the blue, writing to him in Russian or some other Eastern European language.

These cryptic instant messages do little to animate the threat. As the novel progresses, more enigmatic messages arrive. Files are mysteriously contaminated. Dicey relationships are formed in chat rooms. All of these virtual events are used to propel the story further, but they don’t make it any more emotionally intense.

E-mails could serve as engines for the updated forms of the epistolary novels that were first published in the 19th century. For example, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk [10] (1846), features an ongoing letter exchange between two cousins*. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice [11] (1813) makes partial use of letters in its captivating narrative. And later, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple [12] (1982) is told in diary entries and letters. Unfortunately, unlike letters, e-mails and other digital iterations emphasize short—often abbreviated—forms of self-expression, leaving little room for thoughtful reflection on emotions and daily life. As a result, it may prove to be challenging for writers to create in-depth, intricate narratives out of these new modes of communication.

During an interview in the Believer, Paul Auster was asked about the challenge of embedding certain technologies into literary narrative: “I think the glory of the novel is that you’re open to everything and anything that exists and has existed in the world,” he said. During the coming years, we will see more published works penned by writers who grew up with the Internet from day one. As a result, the interplay of form and content will become more intrinsic and, I hope, effective. And the deep narrative of contemporary literature—and all of its inherent intimacy and humanity—will not get lost.

*Correction, Aug. 26, 2009: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the letter exchange in Poor Folk is between two brothers.