Elizabeth Gumport reviews Kate Christensen’s Trouble:
The Internet is a tricky topic, and one Ms. Christensen must be commended for confronting. Many authors elide its existence out of what seems defensive self-interest, timidly deferring to the tyranny of the transitive property: If writing emails and checking blogs are frivolous activities, then novels containing descriptions of these activities are themselves frivolous, and therefore writers of literary fiction ought to avoid such descriptions. But novelists, for whom no subject ought to be too base or banal, make the familiar world unfamiliar, asking us to think about what we do thoughtlessly. To send Josie to the Internet cafe, then, is a courageous move, and a necessary one: Novelists, if their ambition is realism, must engage with the endless, invisible world that floats aside our own.
INITIALLY, Ms. Christensen’s analysis of this world intrigues. “She has power,” Raquel says of a character named Mina Boriqua, who seems modeled after the gossip blogger Perez Hilton. “Whatever she writes, millions of people read. She serves us up to them, and they eat us like nothing, like we’re potato chips.” In changing how we speak about other human beings, the Internet has altered our ability to comprehend their very humanity, at once celebrating subjectivity—no thought is too tiny to be tweeted—and denying it. Famous people become personas: There is you, the human being, and there is you, the character created and crucified by commenters. You are not simply who we say you are, you are a who only because we say you are.
Raquel’s celebrity allows Ms. Christensen to contrast the anonymous scorn of millions with private judgment. When Indrani discourages her divorce, Josie complains to Raquel, who calls Indrani a narcissist. Josie is pleased: “I was happy to hear Raquel bad-mouth Indrani, because for the first time, I agreed with her. Now that Indrani had judged me, I was free to judge her right back. The floodgates were open. She could be a bit of a narcissist, come to think of it.” Our imaginations, always restless, invent even the people we know, and fantasies, Ms. Christensen suggests, are always fueled by contact with others. Whether two or two million in size, the group dreams the world. Yet because someone answers us when we cry out, and confirms our complaint, we never know we are talking in our sleep, and that the people we judge are but shadows of our own making. Neither Perez Hilton nor Gawker’s Nick Denton invented the concept of passing judgment on other people; what they did was make a private pleasure profitable.
