The modern discourse novel

Novelists who allow the internet to set limits on how they think

Housekeeping

Second Act was mentioned in David Brooks’ Atlantic essay about late bloomers (an excellent piece) and featured in Business Insider. I wrote about Keir Starmer as a late bloomer.

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The Dandy School and the Discourse Novel

In ‘The Dandy School’, written in 1827, William Hazlitt complained about the trend for society novels, which were written merely to inform the public about how to be a gentleman. If you came into money, Hazlitt wrote, these novels could tell you how to get your tailoring done or that “the quality eat fish with silver forks”. But they didn’t tell you anything about the thoughts, feelings, behaviours of these upper class people. Instead of writing about people, fashionable novelists were writing about merely that: fashion. As a result,

You have no new inlet to thought or feeling opened to you; but the passing object, the topic of the day (however insipid or repulsive) is served up to you with a self-sufficient air.

Today we have not a Dandy School, but a Discourse Novel. This is a fiction that, much as it may want to provide us with a way of seeing another person’s perspective—to place us in the situations of others and enable us to feel an interest in all that strikes them, as Hazlitt said—cannot get beyond repeating the platitudes of modern discourse. Discourse novels are all about “the topic of the day”.

Instead of telling you what to wear or whether to use a silver fork, discourse fiction replicates the acceptable ideas of intellectual bubbles or online echo chambers. The modern fashionable novel is not about the fashion of class, clothes, or cutlery, but of the limits of what you can and cannot say.

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Discourse and disinterested characters

“Discourse” means conversation: it is shorthand for what everyone is talking about publicly. But it also refers to the limits of that conversation. The discourse refers to the things we do and don’t say, the things we can and cannot think, about a topic. Sometimes whole classes of people are excluded from a discourse, sometimes whole sets of ideas. Public discourse in the nineteenth century was very male, both in terms of who was allowed to express an opinion and in terms of what those opinions would be. Writers like John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor were engaged in trying to expand the discourse, both in terms of who was allowed to participate and what they felt capable of discussing. 

We are familiar with the response to people stepping outside of the normal discourse boundary: to suggest, in the nineteenth century, that women should be equal with men, that humans descended from apes, or that slaves should be freed was, for many, beyond the intellectual pale. In our own times, we see a similar dynamic. Public intellectuals and writers often belong to public groups that are aligned around sets of moral and political values: you aren’t supposed to break ranks with the other people of your ideological group. Say the wrong thing, and you’re outré. 

Novels are supposed to be beyond such niceties. In literature, ideas are dramatised, opposed, made human. The great novels often embody moral perspectives, but they also express the opposing ideas. They are pictures of life, not polemics.

Discussing the novels of Tolstoy, the critic John Bayley once distinguished between novelists who present their characters “in a spirit of complete intimacy, but also of complete equivocation” and those who “can only repeat, by shuffling the cards of fiction, what he personally feels to be the case.” The distinction he was drawing was that between characters who are drawn from life and presented as part of a mimetic patterns and those who are drawn from the author and are presented as part of a personal expression. 

Discourse fiction so often belongs to the second category. Often, these works are fused with the modes and styles of autofiction, so that there is a semblance that the novel is telling us what the characters are really like as people. But it is only a semblance. They are not telling us, disinterestedly, about all sorts of people who currently exist, they are presenting those people as the novelist sees them, entirely characterised within the writer’s own discourse boundaries. Rather than taking the imaginative leap into the perspective of another person, discourse fiction folds that person up inside its own point of view. 

In discourse fiction, the limits of what the writing will say—and often, how it will say it—are set by the (mostly) online discourse the writer belongs to or identifies with. Many of these writers are (lightly) ironic, but that either reads shallowly or deadpan. We live in ersatz times. 

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Memeified fiction

We can see this trend quite clearly in streaming shows. In the opening scene of the sit-com Loudermilk, recently added to Netflix, a middle-aged man holds open a coffee shop door for a young woman. She begins ordering a long list of complicated drinks, reading off her phone. Angered, he rants that she ought to be polite and let him make his simple order first. She retorts that he needs to be on medication. He is! It’s called coffee! And he can’t get it because of everyone in her “millennial clown car”! Let’s face it, she retorts, he only held the door for her because she’s young and “frankly, a bit hot”—but when she wasn’t interested, chivalry died. The barista who couldn’t make herself heard above all this calls out “Asshole! Coffee for asshole!” Yeah, he says, that’s me.

It’s about as funny as it sounds. But it sums up discourse fiction. These are not real characters or a real situation. This is a meme acted out, made up of “millennial women vs boomer man” tropes. It’s a very familiar discourse, depending on your corner of the internet. 

Ever since Sally Rooney’s 2017 novel Conversations with Friends, writers have been transporting online discourse into novels, most obviously in direct messages, which means large parts of what the characters say have what Helen Lewis called “the numbing quality of irony—if only we could just feel, instead of simultaneously feeling and reflecting on that feeling.” More recently, this has happened in novels like No-One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, Yellowface by Rebecca Kuang, Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, Day by Michael Cunningham, Real Americans by Rachel Khong, The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor, and Rooney’s Beautiful World Where Are You.

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Discourse and determinism

Not all of these novels are trapped or defined by discourse though. What distinguishes writers like Sally Rooney and Brandon Taylor is that they are able to depict a broader world that their own personal discourse allows for. Think of the scene in Normal People when Connell’s emails are said to be better written than his short stories. Rooney is always finding moments when her characters can be outside, or resistant to, the accepted discourse limits of their peers.

In the Late Americans Brandon Taylor satirises an MFA seminar where some of the writers cannot write about anything that has not happened to them, and they find literary merit in work that is authentic rather than well-crafted. Taylor has written that the “the Sebaldian turn in modern literature” was not caused by, as claimed, writers losing faith in the idea of fiction, in the credibility of invention, but instead “reflects the feeling that their lives have been determined by forces outside their scope.”

The effort of imagining a person sufficiently free to exercise agency within a traditional plot is beyond their powers to such an extent that they’ve resorted to dramatising the act of imagination itself. How does one write about race, class, gender, sexuality, or any of the large forces that affect a life, without giving them totalising authority over one’s self?

Once you find yourself trapped, artistically, inside your own perspective, your novels will more and more reflect the limits of your own discourse bubble. Ironically, the response to the fear of determinism is to allow the modes of speech and thought of your network to determine the mode, perspective, and content of your novels. As Taylor said elsewhere, many modern novels “are by and large about how we cannot escape racism and sexism and homophobia and the limitations of our class.” By taking that, however intentionally, as their philosophical position, these works also cannot escape the discourse limits of the writer’s own social and intellectual group. 

Sometimes, the effect is satirical. More often, though, these novels are little more than a continuation of online clichés about left-liberal politics, intergenerational culture wars, the struggle of being a millennial, the problems of living under capitalism, and so on. Discourse fiction is too often an online bubble in the guise of a novel.

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Fake Accounts and the origins of Discourse Fiction

As an example, let’s look at In Fake Accounts. For this novel, Lauren Oyler borrowed the detached, analytic narrative voice of Mating, Norman Rush’s 1991 novel of ideas. Fake Accounts is more associative than Mating, and less able to get outside the boundary of its discourse. The narrator slips into weird comparisons. When she finds out that her boyfriend is a conspiracy theorist, she says “I discovered a sense of purpose unlike anything I could recreate in a workplace environment.” No-one would say that when they discovered their boyfriend ran an anti-semitic Instagram account; it’s internet snark, capitalism discourse, what Oyler calls, in her new collection of essays No Judgement, “memeified language”. Similarly, the narrator describes iPhones as having “the pleasant rounded corners that have recently been at the centre of a (punted) Supreme Court judgment.” “Punted” is pure discourse.  At other times, such as the rally after the election of Trump, the novel is a dissection of political discourse: too much pink is a sign of an “unrigorous” feminism, the protagonist “takes too long” to realise she is being hit on at a feminist rally, she objects to the sudden careless proliferation of words like autocracy, strongman, kleptocracy.

If everyone in the world could take Introduction to Political Philosophy then I’m medium certain we would have been in a better situation than we were.

A whole paragraph is given over to discussion of the speaker line-up at the rally, an editorial later written about that line-up in a conservative magazine, and the gap between editorial assumptions on the left and the real-life causes of the march. In this way, Fake Accounts frequently sounds like an op-ed, blurring the line between fiction and political discourse.

Taken out of context, that statement about Political Philosophy could be a tweet. That’s no coincidence. Before Conversations with Friends started the new genre of millennial novels replicating millennial modes and mediums of speech, discourse fiction can find its roots in the late nineties and the early response literature had to the internet, which then morphed into the AltLit scene of a few years ago.

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The rise of the “unoriginal genius”

The internet created several new types of fiction: 253, a  novel about every person travelling in an underground train, was written, coded, and uploaded to the internet by Geoff Ryman in 1998; @smallplaces was a Twitter novel, posted between 2008-2010; at the same time @goodcaptain, another Twitter novel, was based on Benito Cereno by Melville. Japan has a whole genre known as the “cell phone novel”. These are all examples of writers using modern technology and the internet as a new medium, often for old forms of writing. 253 is experimental, and works differently when you can click links rather than flick between pages, but it’s content doesn’t feel like a necessary product of being online. Discourse fiction, by contrast, is the inevitable result of being on Twitter. 

This is because the internet represents the end of the Gutenberg Parenthesis—the five-hundred-year blip in history when books, and individual authors, dominated the culture, as explained in a recent book by Jeff Jarvis. In the sixteenth century, new printing technology meant that the works of one author could be bound, identified, and replicated. The idea of an autonomous, original creator became central to our culture. Gone were the collaborative days of monks accreting their manuscripts collectively. A century or more of audio-visual technology has slowly eroded that idea. Ever since radio, we have become increasingly less bound to books, and created a more multifaceted oral culture. Wikipedia is our new monkish collaboration. And this means, as Jarvis says, that what had once been public conversations in print now became radio programmes, talk shows, and Twitter. “Conversation became content.”

Some think the internet means the end of the writer as an individual with original thoughts. Instead, writers now work by copying and pasting, citing and quoting, gathering and rearranging their material. Conversations become content, quite literally. The critic and scholar Marjorie Perloff has called this the rise of the “Unoriginal Genius” and traces the origin of this sort of writing to The Waste Land a poem that contains as much borrowed material as original. 

As Alec Wilkinson said in a profile of Kenneth Goldsmith, one of the founders of “Uncreative Writing”, a modern poetry movement based on these ideas, 

… the new writer transports information. He or she retypes and recasts, archives, assembles, and cuts and pastes, passing along pieces of writing and blocks of text, the way people do on social media.

“Uncreative writing” emerged from a group of poets, including Goldsmith, in the late 1990s. Perhaps the most well known work of this group is Eunoia by Christian Bok, a book of five sections, each containing words with only one vowel. Bok has said language has been so deconstructed there is nothing left to do. Literature has to become conceptual. Goldsmith’s reaction to the internet was to become performative. (This emphasis on literary performance is seen in what poet, memoirist, and novelist Patricia Lockwood described as her need to show-off online. “I’m a clown,” she once told an interviewer. That performative stance is at the root of both her online and literary writing.)

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Writing that is only possible on the internet

Social media is perfect for this view of literature as a performative, conceptual, uncreative art. Writing virally funny tweets is the work of the writer in this conception: literature as posting. Most famously, this is associated with AltLit, an early twenty-first century movement of largely online writing. In 2011, writing in the New Yorker, Goldsmith described AltLit as “a body of distinctive literature marked by direct speech, expressions of aching desire, and wide-eyed sincerity.” 

AltLit was not just writing about the internet, it was writing that was only possible on the internet, such as Patricia Lockwood’s poem from the AltLit anthology YoLo: “I’m selling my body on Craigslist — not for sex, but because it’s haunted.” There are many such examples quoted by Goldsmith: “holding your newborn for the first time thinking about how he’ll just be another anonymous employee for the rest of his life someday,” or “we didn’t crawl out of the ocean to punch the clock.” These witticisms lack the mark of authorship. They are discourse statements. Before they are the obvious result of a particular literary voice, they are a political expression, a contribution to capitalism discourse, work discourse, like Oyler’s quip about a sense of purpose. A thin line of style is all that separates this sort of literature from every other tweeter. 

Goldsmith traced the lineage of this writing back to Blake, via Surrealism and Dada, the Beats and the dense wordplay of Finnegan’s Wake. That’s generous. AltLit was online discourse, nicely written. If there is a literary inheritance, it is Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines, which brought the careful craft of modernist prose to the writing of short news stories in the daily paper. Fénéon’s work was inspired by the precision of writers like Mallarmé and Flaubert. But it is still journalism, just as AltLit was still Twitter.

Goldsmith was right about the influence of Joyce though. Picking up on a point made by Virginia Woolf, John Bayley once wrote,

In modernism and postmodernism the writing is everything; that comfortable, verbally unself-conscious world created by Victorian writers soaked in Scott has disappeared, replaced by the mechanisms of writers who have been equally soaked in Joyce. 

There is nothing “verbally un-self conscious” about these writers. But with the rise of autofiction, and the belief that the internet renders artistic originality void, this Joycean trend has transmogrified into the anonymous writing we live with online. The Victorians were soaked in Scott; the moderns were soaked in Joyce; discourse novelists are soaked in Twitter.

Modern writers are less liable to make a work entirely out of quotations (as Goldsmith has done) or to put binding constraints on their forms (as per Bok), but instead they are so online that the difference between social media accounts and literature is almost non-existent. They have moved from experimental and conceptual poetry to poetry as posting. In both cases, a performative, post-deconstruction, idea of what literature has to be now is at the root of the movement. As Alec Wilkinson said,

The Internet, with its cataract of words, made obsolete the figure of the writer as an isolated man or woman endeavoring to produce an original work. Instead of depending mainly on his or her capacity for invention, the new writer transports information. He or she retypes and recasts, archives, assembles, and cuts and pastes, passing along pieces of writing and blocks of text, the way people do on social media.

AltLit did pay attention to how it wrote—using what Goldsmith called “emo-heavy, homespun language, bearing the urgency and candor of a status update”—but in a way that was more interested in being Very Online, rather than representing reality as experienced with the internet. Ginsberg’s dictum “first thought, best thought” might be their motto. As Goldsmith said, this means that “no sentiment is too trite to be repurposed as poetry.” We didn’t crawl out of the ocean to punch the clock, but we did crawl out of it so that we could write funny tweets.

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The continuation of Twitter by other means

Lockwood’s 2021 Booker Prize nominated novel No-One Is Talking About This is the high point of making novels into a continuation of Twitter by other means.

No-One Is Talking About This, is formally inventive, written in short, tweet-like paragraphs, like an online stream of consciousness. It reproduces the exclamations of the internet: discussions of why it is funnier to spell sneezing as sneazing; the idea that it is philosophical to “hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores”; her dog called Dr. Butthole; the constant googling of bizarre, paranoid health questions; that fact that “white people, who had the political education of potatoes—“lumpy, unseasoned, and biased towards the Irish”—were suddenly compelled to talk out about injustice”; the idea that “sex ended in America on November 8, 2016”; the male character who feels like “as a man I can’t say anything”. Although Lockwood’s novel is about the addictive, trivialising effects of the internet, the book itself is so in thrall to these things that the irony wears thin.

She had become famous for a post that said simply, Can a dog be twins? That was it. Can a dog be twins? It had recently reached the stage where teens post the cryface emoji at her. They were in high school. They were going to remember “Can a dog be twins?” Instead of the date of the Treaty of Versailles, which, let’s face it, she didn’t know either.

Lockwood introduces internet talk to many offline scenes, right down to the left-wing-daughter-yelling-at-right-wing-father-about-gun-control trope. No doubt conversations like this happen in real life, but Lockwood never quite achieves a meaningful distance from the material.

A conversation with a future grandchild. She lifts her eyes, as blue as willow ware. The tips of her braids twitch with innocence. “So you were all calling each other bitch, and that was funny, and then you were all calling each other bunch, and that was even funnier??

How could you explain it? Which words, and in which order, cud you possibly utter that would make her understand?

“…yes binch”

This is the jokey, disingenuous, bantering that so many online take for cultural commentary. Lockwood asks whether “the new sense of humour is just a little bit random?” and satirises the way people replicate William Carlos Williams’ poem ‘This is Just to Say’ replacing plum with their own jokey word, but ultimately only has mockery to offer, only has more of the content she is ironizing. 

In one fragment, Lockwood’s narrator posts a picture of herself crouched over a “tree of liberty” and “having her period”. She tells her husband not to quibble when he asks if this makes her the tyrant: it’s a response to the election. Lockwood is a confessional writer (she said of her writing process, “I was just following the thread of my life”). Before this novel, she was known both as a confessional poet and a Twitter comedian. That uneasy marriage of the dark side of life and a lightly ironic humour is what Lockwood represents as the internet. But she is careful to be politically liberal enough to meet the expectations of her online discourse. So long as she is opposing the election, her inconsistencies are fine; the irony of that passage serves to make her tweet acceptable.

Lockwood is replicating her discourse bubble, in which the ersatz irony of the confusing tree image is simply part of the authentic expression of opposition. The novel isn’t ironising her mistake as a form of moral commentary, but as a banal, self-accepting joke. There’s a line in Normal People that could stand motto for a whole swathe of writing in this mode: “She tried to roll her eyes at herself but it felt ugly and self-pitying rather than funny.” When your main mode is ironic deconstruction, that’s all you end up having: the novel can never gesture to anything bigger or more meaningful.

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The limits of deconstruction

So much of Conversations with Friends was about deconstructing modern life that the characters had a private joke: “What is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?”In Rooney, though, deconstruction isn’t enough. Her characters mature past their obsession with discourse. While Rooney’s characters talk discourse, they don’t read like they are trapped in the literary modes of the internet. In Beautiful World, Rooney’s description of Felix working in an Amazon warehouse owes a lot to “Amazon discourse”, but she doesn’t spend pages detailing all the elements of what makes Amazon objectionable, whereas Oyler gives so much space to the deconstructing the images and signs and language of the Trump rally (analysing the discourse of the rally, of modern leftism, of feminism) that Fake Accounts becomes a personal-political essay. Ditto Lockwood, whose documenting of the pseudo-ironic pose of her online life lacks enough distance and becomes a replication of the internet, rather than a response to it. Oyler sounds editorial even when trying to be satirical:

A woman I worked with used a photo of a pink neon sign that read “FEELINGS” in all capital letters as the background to one of her social media accounts. FEELINGS were popular at the time—expressing them was seen as a kind of feminist statement, the reclamation of an “inappropriate” femininity previously dismissed as frivolous or hysterical, and as a result people were constantly declaring (on social media) the intensity of their emotions: about celebrities, about television, about heavy-handedly alluded-to romantic feelings, about pizza, about cute animals, about deadlines… Now that I had actual feelings…I could say for certain that the whole trend was absurd. Feelings are nothing like a pink neon sign at all.

Oyler’s protagonist says that her boyfriend’s statements about culture and politics and behavioural trends defined him in outline, a “clear negative space.” Something similar is true of Oyler’s and Lockwood’s novels. In this way, discourse fiction’s characters necessarily become stereotypes.

Oyler and Lockwood’s Sebaldian determinism prevents any surprises, collapsing their characters into discourse clichés. 

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The ghetto of acceptable fake politics

In a discussion of Fake Accounts and No-One Is Talking About This, internet journalist Katherine Dee talked about the oddity of these books of being over concerned with political attitudes, as with Lockwood’s image of the tree. In Fake Accounts, the narrator wants to break up with Felix not because he is a pathological liar, but because he has bad politics. No interest is shown in why he was running that conspiracy theory account. What matters is not life, people, or events, but not stepping outside the acceptable discourse. This is very online behaviour where, as Dee put it, everyone is stuck in “a ghetto of fake politics”, where the only concern you would have about your boyfriend is not his massive habit of lying to you, but the fact that he has the wrong politics.

In his new novel Day, Michael Cunningham stays within discourse boundaries by writing his characters as tropes. Day shows the same people living in a Brooklyn house on the same day over three years, before, during, and after the pandemic. It is a catalogue of tropes about tired working mothers who pretend to love their jobs, teachers who have lost their passion for the subject and take adderall, and friendly house husbands whose music careers are flatlining. These stereotypes are all acceptable to a modern liberal. To make this work, the mother must be in endurance mode, the teacher must be sympathetic. 

The mother worries about not having enough space for her children in their Brooklyn home. The teacher worries about the potential asbestos in his under-funded school. His pupils write essays about Columbus, which is a good opportunity for a page or two of Columbus discourse. One of them says “every child should have a hippie teacher” another celebrates their niece wanting to know facts age five. The fake account is there to remind us of the inherent unreality of other people’s Instagram, but what is the point of these little vignettes about hippie teachers and girls who want facts if not to present a series of acceptable pictures from an acceptable place? In this novel, we encourage girls to ask about facts and teachers to be friendly hippies.

There is a fake account in this book too, this time a harmless fantasy of a handsome young paediatrician working at a community clinic, itself a discourse cliché. We are back in the ghetto of acceptable politics: fake accounts are fine, so long as they hold true to our best ideals.

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Netflix realism

Cunningham writes what I have come to think of as “Netflix realism,” a style of fiction that doesn’t attempt realism in the sense of making a lifelike illusion with words, but a realism that we are all used to from television.

She isn’t sure when she ceased to be the central figure in her own story and became, instead, the greedy and embittered sister, the shadowy twin, the one who’s given everything and yet keeps on grumbling, Not Enough.

Still, she hadn’t expected to be weeping on the subway.

This is written in the third person, and some work has been done to put it all in a literary register: a combination of familiar clichés—being the central figure in their own story, having their shadow side—balanced with pseudo-literary language, the greedy and embittered sister, the shadowy twin. It’s like a set of fairy-tale tropes for modern folk psychology. Rather than drawing from the discourse limits of Twitter, as Oyler and Lockwood did, Cunningham uses the tropes of Netflix to create a novel of entirely acceptable opinions.

For minor characters, the treatment is more compressed. 

Marta is a nineteen year old who speaks in full sentences, who says “outwardly” and “however.” She thinks she and Chess are an academic comedy team of sorts.

This is a character type, written for a sitcom treatment, not a person in a novel. She’s the popular one, he’s the neurotic one, and these two are the academic comedy team. (Cunningham did the same thing in the extract above: “the one who’s given everything and yet keeps on grumbling.”) Cunningham is combining the sort of clichés you hear in every parenting conversation—a nineteen year old who speaks in full sentences!—with television thinking. Whereas the clichés of Oyler and Lockwood’s discourse thinking owe more to social media, his are seemingly drawn more from streaming. Even his character’s appearances are typical TV tropes. “Isabel, who has not slept, stands at her bedroom window, wearing an XXL T-shirt that comes down to the middle of her thighs.”

The same sort of character clichés, guided by progressive discourse, appear in Rachel Khong’s novel Real Americans. It is in three sections, each from the perspective of a different character, and set at a different time.  Each section reveals, slowly, more of the backstory of Lily and Mathew’s parents and their experiment on the children.

The protagonist, Lily, is a young woman living in Manhattan in the early noughties, broke and struggling to make her career work (she’s an intern at an online magazine). Lily complains so much about living in New York it becomes wearisome. Her radiator is either too hot or too cold, everyone who dresses smartly in New York pulls their fancy clothes out of a pile on a chair because they can’t afford rent for apartments with wardrobes on their underpaid jobs, her student debt is so high it’s laughable, her credit cards are maxed out, she got her jacket from a thrift store, she hates her job, and so on. The struggle is no doubt real, but it’s also very familiar. It’s classic millennial discourse.

Lily gets involved with Matthew, a nice guy who works in finance, and who is eventually pressured into working for the family foundation, while Lily resists the pressure from her parents to conform to their ideals. Lily and Mathew break up (after having a child, Nick) when they discover that their parents knew each other, years ago, and used them in a secret experiment. Using cutting-edge genetic research, the parents Otto and May, manipulated Lily and Matthew’s DNA: in his case to prevent him succumbing to a hereditary disease, in hers to fulfil her immigrant mother’s ambition of being “a real American.” 

Lily cuts off her mother and takes Nick to the other side of America. (There is a long section about his life in the middle that doesn’t really advance the plot.) In the final chapters, Nick, now grown up, realises the genetic modification firm he is working for is not only interested in preventing heritable diseases, but in allowing people to genetically select demographic traits in their foetuses. The company is for sale and the lead bidder is a biotech CEO who makes racist comments about his own wife. Nick realises he has to save the company from becoming the tool of an evil billionaire who says things like, “Birth rates are higher among people of colour. From a voting perspective it’s just not equitable.” 

Several of the characters have to deal with casual racism throughout the book, but for such a big plot point this is treated swiftly and concisely in the final few dozen pages: we are so primed to recognise the evil billionaire type when he appears, little more is needed than the tech billionaire capitalist plot against equality trope. 

As in Lockwood and Cunningham, these characters are acceptable stereotypes, the ideas are drawn from acceptable discourse—billionaires are dangerous, oligarchs are inescapable, wealth means exploitation. Otto and Matthew, who run the foundation that developed the genetic manipulation technology, “intended to reorder the world—have the power and wealth to do so—and yet, along the way, have lost their compassion.” And obviously “the world would be better off without its oligarchs. And yet here is their company needing money again.” 

The rather impotent conclusion is that Nick has his rich father Matthew buy up and dissolve the company before the racist billionaire. Nick “was aware it wasn’t a real solution” and that people trying to control each other’s fate was inevitable, but he felt he had to put up “this small protest.” As with Lockwood saying “she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores” Real Americans is mostly a contribution to a set of worries about the disorder and immorality of the modern world. It’s more deeply imagined than Day, and full of absorbing detail, especially about May’s backstory leaving Maoist China, but the gravity of the discourse is too strong, and the book ends as it started: Nick has stopped the wicked billionaire and May and Lily are reunited.

In contrast, in Yellowface, the satire is largely leveraged off the fact that the main character is so trapped in the conventions of the discourse, about what she can and cannot say about herself, about who can and cannot get published, that she becomes morally corrupted by it, twisting her identity and personality to succeed in the discourse, however immoral that makes her: she steps, willingly, into the mirror world and Kuang satirises the acceptance that her duplicity is met with at the end of the novel. Yellowface isn’t merely replicating the discourse or partaking in it but satirising the way online discourse distorts our personalities. All the characters in Yellowface make their decisions based on what it is acceptable to talk about, the irony being that their actions are, nonetheless, deeply racist. That is Kuang’s opportunity for satire, which entwines her protagonist further and further into layers of self-deception. Unlike Real Americans it’s not editorial, but ironic fiction in which the action of the plot reveals the moral. In contrast, Khong’s novel has the dynamics of a progressive fairytale.

It has all the subtlety of a ready-made Netflix drama that never challenges the audience to think about the characters, merely presents them with the modern clichéd equivalents of eating fish with a silver fork. Online streaming provides Cunningham with just as boring a stock of discourse-acceptable clichés as Twitter does for Oyler and Lockwood.

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Moving away from discourse

The most successful modern novel that gets beyond the limits of discourse is Beautiful World Where are You. Unlike Oyler, Lockwood, Cunningham, and Khong, Beautiful World is Rooney’s attempt to show a set of characters moving beyond their bubbles, moving beyond the limits of what they will say to each other in their emails, and seeing the real world for what it is, undefined by their social and political discourse boundaries. Rooney moves her characters away from internet discourse tropes back to fictional realism, in an ending resonant of Jane Austen.

The plot of Beautiful World involves the characters becoming less obsessed with email opinion swapping and slowly realising that the “beautiful world” they constantly lament in their American-obsessed progressive political discussions is right in front of them. They stop sending each other opinions about the culture wars and instead they get married, have children: they find love and religion. Their emails begin as discourse rants and end as serious discussions of what makes a good life, more like an Iris Murdoch novel than something Lauren Oyler would write.

In a revealing exchange between Lockwood and Rooney in the Guardian, Lockwood says the emails in Rooney’s novel Beautiful World Where Are You? are more like letters, because they are missing “the links, the ahahas, the raccoon videos. They’re doing the online equivalent of writing with quill pens.” Rooney replied that emails don’t need those things to be emails: they autosave, they arrive instantly, you can search them: the email is a technical thing, not to be defined by its content.

Writing about the internet, in other words, doesn’t have to mean incorporating its glibness.