A man and a woman meet in a bar and attempt conversation while music and flirting blur their exchange. Their ages are established as 23 and 35, and the interaction is rendered with dry, factual prose. The story centers on a familiar arc: boy meets girl, hopes form, a drink problem appears, and happiness lasts briefly before breaking down. What feels new is the careful depiction of contemporary surroundings and habits, including rental e-bikes, vapes, protein shakes, Slack channels, and push notifications. Communication is shaped by texting pace and tone, with light cyberstalking and anxiety over response timing. Age differences are reflected in texting style, such as punctuation and capitalization.
"After a while, the twenty-three-year-old woman raised her voice and, referring to the thirty-five-year-old man, asked her short-haired friend: How old do you think he is?' The short-haired friend surveyed the thirty-five-year-old man's face; thought for a moment. Forty?' The twenty-three-year-old woman snort-laughed. He's thirty-five.'"
"Not much happens. Boy meets girl. Girl has hopes. Boy has drink problem. Boy and girl are happy for a bit, then they aren't. Tale as old as time. But what's fresh about it is the book's precise attention to the environment in which such a story now takes place. It's all rental ebikes, vapes, meal-replacement protein shakes, Slack channels and push notifications."
"The characters lightly cyberstalk each other, they agonise over whether they've responded to texts too quickly or too slowly, and their difference in age is even calibrated by their texting style (the older Chuck uses capital letters and punctuation; the younger Joey generally doesn't)."
"Jem Calder, like his protagonists, is bang on trend. His 2022 short story collection, Reward System, was widely admired; this debut novel employs a factual and affectless prose of the sort you'd find in Sally Rooney or Vincenzo Latronico, with a fastidious attention to the surfaces of the world that suggests Nicholson Baker or Bret Easton Ellis or even early Don DeLillo humming in the background."
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]