psychodrama

psychodrama is an overstuffed social-media apocalypse novel that begins as satire about surveillance culture, mutates into a cult novel, then into a nuclear-war road novel, then into a prison-camp horror story, then into alien-cosmic motherhood. It wants to be funny, obscene, philosophical, queer, apocalyptic, horny, spiritual, anti-internet, anti-capitalist, and formally wild. Mostly, it is a manic pile-up of bits that keeps mistaking escalation for depth.

The novel opens with Charles Reilly Putnam, an ordinary man who becomes the internet’s chosen victim. TikToks begin appearing of him doing completely ordinary things: walking into his cement factory, going to the DMV, eating lunch, watching television, separating eggs, standing in his bathroom. The joke is that the internet decides a random person’s mundanity is fascinating, then devours him. Charles becomes famous, appears on late-night television, then public opinion turns on him. He is criticized for everything: his diet, his wardrobe, his football-watching, his inherited cement factory, his behaviour at Disneyland. Eventually he disappears behind closed blinds and kills himself. Even his corpse falling off a stretcher is filmed. The book’s point is obvious from the start: viral attention is surveillance, worship, punishment, and murder all at once.

Then Simone Rosenthal becomes the next “Subject.” She is a Philadelphia retail worker at a picture-framing/card-and-gift shop, living with her terrifying performance-artist girlfriend Priya and wasting much of her life on TikTok. The first video is banal: Simone having lunch with her sister George and saying she does not like The Voice. Her neighbour JJ warns her that she is now being followed. Simone tells her therapist Arthur, who reacts with irritating therapeutic wonder and suggests that being watched might be “freeing.” This is one of the book’s first major problems: every character has a comic concept attached to them. Arthur is mindfulness therapy turned into a cartoon. Priya is art-world extremity turned into a cartoon. Gail, Simone’s coworker, is sexy queer chaos turned into a cartoon. The cartoons are sometimes funny, but they are still cartoons.