Giles Harvey writes in the New York Review of Books:
* Over the past decade, but especially since the epochal events of 2016, a growing number of writers have been running a sort of stress test on the form, stuffing their books to the point of bursting with headlines, social media posts, and other such glittering ephemera. I am thinking, among others, of Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018), Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020), Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021)—short, frenetic, highly praised books, from which, it can sometimes seem, almost all the standard novelistic furniture (scene, plot, character) has been removed in order to accommodate the surplus of up-to-the-minute information.
Like Twitter, whose influence is everywhere in these novels, the results can be engaging and often quite funny, at least for a time.
* A page of this writing—spare, kinetic, boisterously relentless—may be thrilling, but over the course of an entire novel, even quite a short one, the effect begins to pall, especially in the absence of an organizing principle beyond keeping pace with the headlines.
That is the problem with… rapid responders. They seem content merely to replicate the chaos and confusion, the interminable shapelessness, of our news-crazed lives—something readers might reasonably expect a novel to deliver them from.
* In most rapid-response novels, that circle is never drawn. There is simply a quick-fire accretion of harrowing data, together with the breathless, telegraphic commentary it inspires. For all its surface agitation, such fiction is actually founded on a complacent premise: that all that’s needed to achieve profundity is to write down what happens. How this material is shaped and ordered, by what geometry it is finessed into meaning, remains, at best, a secondary concern.
* [Ian McEwan’s new novel Lessons] provide[s] something lacking in most rapid-response novels: a sense of perspective. The everything-all-of-the-time quality of today’s online news coverage (“Twitter’s ABLAZE gurl”) can lead us into thinking we live in unprecedentedly awful times. Without downplaying the nightmare that is our current political situation, McEwan exposes this attitude as a form of historical narcissism. Far from being exceptional, the sense of looming annihilation, of going about our daily business on the edge of an abyss, has been the norm for quite some time.
* McEwan’s rejection, or partial revision, of his deterministic view of human character comes with a political corollary. Roland is an avid consumer of the news, but what does he do about any of it? The answer is not nothing. In the 1970s he befriends a couple in East Berlin (his girlfriend at the time has a diplomatic pass) to whom he smuggles banned books and records through Checkpoint Charlie. When they are arrested for a subversive remark, he tries to intervene on their behalf, though to little effect. Back home, he does some pamphleting for Labour but is generally less engaged. Later on, when he looks around him at the world his grandchildren will inherit, he is haunted by a sense of squandered opportunity, though (as in his private life) he finds a measure of bleak consolation in the idea that there is nothing he can do about it: “Who cared what an obscure Mr. Baines of Lloyd Square thought about the future of the open society or the planet’s fate? He was powerless.”
* Because of its formal fragmentation and ultra-contemporary subject matter, the rapid-response novel carries an aura of modernist innovation. Life itself has grown more manic and fractured (the implicit argument of these books seems to run), and novels ought to reflect this. Looked at another way, however, the genre could be seen as a capitulation. Working from the premise that readers today, conditioned by social media, have trouble focusing on anything for longer than thirty seconds at a time, the rapid-response novelist decides to cater to their ravaged attention spans by writing brief, topical books comprised of tweet-like fragments generously set off by quantities of white space.
* Roland’s inner life is as dense and vivid as the outer life bearing down on him. In contrast to the thinly drawn characters who populate the work of Laing et al., he isn’t buried beneath the weight of current events.
