![]() ![]() The lovers in Sally Rooney’s novels pour out their feelings over email, but sense there is something missing. The digital medium makes the horror seem less acute and underlines Adam’s alienation from his own surroundings. Or not exactly squirrelly, more like a rat who can’t stop pushing a lever.” Adam, the protagonist of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), uses online chat, but it dulls even the most shocking experiences: His friend recounts the random tragedy of watching a woman drown while swimming in a river, telling the story through an instant-message conversation replete with interrupted messages and connection problems. The narrator of Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020) disdains social networks: “I don’t use any of them because they make me feel too squirrelly. Over the last decade, novelists have struggled with the feeling that the internet is the opposite of narrative. This problem-call it the falsity of the screen-has also posed a problem in fiction. ![]()
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