Drew Johnson reviews Made for Love

Questions for the author

That old-fashioned fish-wrapper, the Times Literary Supplement, sometimes asks its readers to try to find, say, the earliest telephone call in fiction. The earliest motorcar ride in a novel. The earliest excursion to the cinema. The first television. (As I write this, I half wonder: Did the old-fashioned TLS invent crowdsourcing?)

In that vein: Scully and Mulder always got great cell service out in 1990s forests near alien crash sites—and pioneered how television writers would use cell phones (24 would run headlong into the future with those tropes). But if television loved the streamlining the cell phone represented, fiction generally hasn’t.

This isn’t new. No one in novels has ever really watched as much TV as people do in real life. For most of the twentieth century and now the twenty-first, with few exceptions, our increased communion with technology—radio, television, the web, our phones-which-are-not- just-phones—has been relegated to the same dark part of fiction in which characters sleep and perform all other bodily functions, includ- ing sex. With notable and often humorous exceptions, fiction prefers to elide the physical act itself. People don’t even seem to eat much in fiction—which is strange, since the logistical challenges of chewing on film are not a problem on the page. When Mary McCarthy spends pages discussing the encrusted toilets of cheap Parisian hotels in Birds of America, it feels outside fiction’s average day, as do the physical exer- tions I’ve heard about in May Sinclair’s 1910 novel of gymnastics, The Combined Maze (which I badly want to get my hands on).

The TLS game is always fun—in part because the earliest people to scramble across some difficult, unexplored rock face of the fictional now never seem to fully climb the mountain. (Translation: If there is a great or famous novel that is the first to include [remarkable society- changing innovation], I can’t think of it.) Fiction seems to need time to process.

Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love—which tries to pull the tech industry off its pedestal and into a marital conflict with one not very accom-

plished Floridian—ought to be the book for me, right? I ought to thrill to Byron Gogol’s little surveillance devices and downloads and their incursions into our privacy. To the issues of consent and prior consent, not only between Byron and his wife, Hazel, but in the life of her father, in the corpse-disposer Liver, or in a man like Jasper, whose unexpected passion for marine mammals forms the novel’s B-plot.

Tampa, Nutting’s notorious bet with herself that she could write a novel inspired by her former high-school classmate’s pathological attraction to adolescent boys, may or may not have been clinically on target, but it fully dealt with the pathology in its narrator’s voice and thoughts. For a place-named novel, it put all its bets on the idea that minimal set-dressing would be repaid in the busy emptiness of the teacher-narrator’s elaborate plans, her deep desires, and the machina- tions required to keep fulfilling them. Mostly it won, I think. On its own terms and turf, Tampa is hard to argue with.

In Made for Love, that unity is traded for a small gallery of semi-comedic freaks. They shuffle in and out of the spotlight, parading their sex dolls and dolphin issues, and provide Nutting fodder for great insights that come across as improvised commentary on someone else’s novel rather than part of her own. Nutting is very, very funny and very, very smart, but the intelligence of authors and of their novels are not always the same thing, and while the novel is funny, it isn’t very smart. But nothing came back to me more than the sense that tech-monster and Silicon Valley overlord Byron Gogol is not an evil man for his own reasons and sake, but a daydream—no, a daymare—his estranged wife Hazel has conjured for her own reasons. Gogol is less a character than the negation of her will sprung to life in human form. There’s a long literary tradition there, but such a move isn’t good for depicting the very real place and culture of Silicon Valley that has made addicts of us all. Nutting writes a villain who uses his own products compulsively, even to his own detriment. But reportage from the tech industry suggests that it is a culture of pushers and that we normals are the users. We are not being relentlessly recruited for a utopia, but monetized—as they say—to subsidize theirs. In their utopia, their children are protected from devices, or at least overuse. And that’s a complication that renders potential fictional moguls less Orwellian and yet more sinister. But the kind of knowing that puts your most recent search into every banner ad on every website, though it used to be shocking and can still sometimes be embarrassing, has always been dull on the page. Know- ing is what novels do. Omniscience is their stock-in-trade. The author reaches for a . . . and so it appears, whatever it is.

The world created in a novel is always on the verge of being totally known by the writer writing it. The only thing that can prevent a novel- ist from knowing the answer to a question about her invented world is if it never occurs to her to ask that question. This, of course, happens constantly.

Which makes the evil mastermind what the evil mastermind has always been: a literary device, and one devoid of a social valence. While the serial killer or the conspiracy theory have been the trendy deus ex machina for some time, as writers seek to cope with the very real sci-fi revolution, the temptation will be to do what Made for Love has done. For Byron Gogol is a mirror posing as a portrait. And right now I do want the portrait. I want a novelist who doesn’t give me back myself— or herself—in lieu of the person I don’t know. I don’t want the junkie.

I want the dealer. And if they are the same, I want that question in the mix. They aren’t? I want to know why.

That is, is it easier to overstate the interest of Byron Gogol in Hazel, in order to avoid the indifference of Silicon Valley to anything except our addiction—and so, our money? Novelists tend to set themselves the problems they most want to deal with. How much should readers have to follow?

What Made for Love offers is wonderfully associative and seems ripped from the headlines: blow-up dolls and death; internet surveillance, marriage, and consent. With all these glittering riches, feeling that the associations in total are less than the sum of their parts can feel like a petty verdict—something not worth saying aloud. But if novels are part of the conversation, it seems to be a conversation that less and less often returns to the texts, which we all dote on for a week, before the publication calendar shifts the discussion.

So whenever I read a “novel of now” and don’t believe the author, I start to wonder what the novelist’s work is, exactly? I like enterprises where failure calls the whole undertaking into question, sure, but I actually do want an answer about why the novel is slow to grapple with now in a way large enough to see all of us at once.

Read more from Issue 15.1.