Crushing Banalities
In search of the true internet novel
We’re crossposting a recent essay we published on The Point website by Sophie Kemp—a review of Leif Randt’s Allegro Pastel, which asks: Is there a good internet novel? And why not? (The topic has recently been passionately taken up again on Twitter and on Substack, including a salvo by Blake Butler and Stephen Piccarella’s surrealist take on the proliferation of the discourse.)
2018, Germany. A bungalow, with anthracite walls and a flat roof. Jerome Daimler’s parents purchased it. They’re divorced now. He lives there alone. The light outside is always muted, gray with little pockets of soft blue. He is constantly renting Teslas, and driving them down the A66. He plays Discover Weekly Spotify playlists via Bluetooth technology. He was born in 1982 and designs websites, which he considers an art form. He lives outside of Frankfurt, in Maintal, where he grew up. He is proud to have never lived in Berlin. His life is a long list of perfectly curated banalities. He likes the music of Bladee. He doesn’t do molly anymore, but he does do ketamine. He is politically left-wing, often thinking to himself, “More people should do various things.” And when we read this, we laugh. Or we’re supposed to. Jerome is one of the two protagonists in Leif Randt’s Allegro Pastel, first published in German in 2020, translated this year into English by Peter Kuras. It is a book that marvels at frictionlessness. A love story and a satire that seems to simulate what it is like to fall in love when you have never experienced resistance, when your consciousness is fully formatted by the internet. Does this make your life seamless, perfect?
The apple of Jerome’s eye is Tanja Arnheim. Tanja was born in 1988. She’s a novelist, author of the ridiculously named PanoptikumNeu. Tanja is meant to be a kind of generational visionary, and her book is “about a virtual reality experience shared by four male friends in an abandoned rural boarding school.” The four male friends are all gay. Due to the fact that Tanja is a young woman (29) and has written a book about something topical (VR), she becomes a favorite on the festival circuit. She is flown around the world as a Delphic oracle of youth culture. She is described as simultaneously ruthless, arrogant and somehow self-deprecating. Tanja is from Kiel. Her mother is a therapist. Her father is a neurologist. She has a younger sister, Sarah, who is a depressive and is in and out of the hospital, but is able to maintain friendships and (mostly) stay medicated. Tanja meets Jerome because Jerome attends the premiere of the “web series adaptation” of PanoptikumNeu “filmed using Samsung Galaxy S7s.” They have a one-night stand and realize there is something more there. Jerome realizes this because “it felt normal to send [Tanja] multiple short messages, one after the other,” and have it still be exciting.
In the first half of the novel, Tanja and Jerome go back and forth between Maintal and Berlin. When they’re together, they argue about whether or not Call Me by Your Name is a good movie and have “slightly melodramatic sex on the couch,” none of which we see in any detail. They get Chinese takeout and cuddle. When they’re not together, they text each other emojis and photos. Jerome sends Tanja a photo of him jogging and follows it with the caption “300% Joy.” Tanja does molly at a day rave and texts Jerome “Miss U 😍. Miss U 😍 Miss U 👻…” Then she says that Jerome should have a drink “in solidarity with your high girlfriend.” Then Jerome texts back, “You only ever use the word solidarity when you’re on xtc. And then you use it all the time 😂.” This is supposed to be funny. In a meta way. When we read these text messages, and hear about what this couple does together, we’re supposed to think, Technology, man, doesn’t it make people so boring?
And it does. It does make people boring. Here are a few sweeping statements. Social media has made everyone dumb as shit. Millennials were the first cohort it really ruined. People born in the mid-Eighties are the original iPad babies but in a different, secret way. This has put them in crisis: a sex crisis, a crisis of creativity, a crisis of self. Is this the reason contemporary art is so bad? Is the internet the reason why millennials are so downwardly mobile? Is it why the so-called creative class is peopled by “brand consultants” and “content creators”?
Allegro Pastel is in conversation with all of these ideas, and what Randt does with them is not new. His is a millennial novel about sex and the internet, pro forma. It checks all the boxes. Here is the brilliant young woman and her hipster web-designer boyfriend. Here she is debasing herself and her intelligence by saying that she “missed the Snapchat of 2015,” because back then the “story function was so new and exciting.” Here they are wasting their lives, scrolling on their phones, snorting ketamine and renting Teslas and self-optimizing via psychotherapy and scrolling on their phones and talking about Airbnb and vacation and new shoes and fucking but not going into any detail about the fucking and shrinking attention spans and scrolling on their phones and scrolling on their phones and scrolling on their phones.
Randt is not the first millennial to write a novel about the effect of the internet on the psyche, but he is hopefully the last to subject us to page after page of emails like this one from Tanja’s estranged best friend, Amelie:
i think it would be good if we saw each other again. i read an article about menopause yesterday. that’s coming for us too, in like twenty years 😱😱😱 i thought if anyone had something to say about that, it would be you. the future is on 🔥🔥🔥
you’ll find me in the same old places: threema, telegram, and now i’m back on snapchat. 🤦🤦🤦 . . . i also have a posteo email address now ✅, but gmail is better.
What Randt is doing might have felt slightly more fresh when Allegro Pastel was first published five years ago, even fresher in his native German, some of which has surely been lost in translation. But this genre, the internet novel, has already existed in some form for almost the entire 21st century. Cf: Tao Lin’s gchat history. Also: Tao Lin’s Taipei, Megan Boyle’s sinister and sometimes brilliant Liveblog, Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts. When I was first introduced to Allegro Pastel, it was described to me as Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, but written by a German man. Or perhaps the Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, another millennial Internetroman set in Berlin and translated into English this year, and bafflingly nominated for the International Booker Prize. In all of these works, we are in on the joke the entire time. We are meant to read all of this and feel like we are hovering over them. Like a computer is a two-way mirror.
Allow me, for a moment, to talk about David Foster Wallace. In 1993, Wallace wrote an essay, “E Unibus Pluram,” about the effects of television’s presence in contemporary literature. He argues that television, when written about in a postmodern context, often feels hackneyed. This fiction, he writes, “is not just a use or mention of televisual culture but a response to it, an effort to impose some sort of accountability on a state of affairs in which more Americans get their news from television than from newspapers.” But in trying to satirize television, he argues, these literary works just end up feeling like a pale imitation of the thing itself. Bland, forgettable, dated. The satire has no teeth.
Replace the word “television” with “internet” in “E Unibus Pluram,” and you will find that Wallace’s essay more or less holds up, 32 years later. That everything kind of falls apart, when you satirize the thing you’re also trying to imitate. That perhaps instead of writing a novel that, say, defamiliarizes the sensation of being on X, you could go on X and have it all defamiliarized for you. We are now in the very first wave of Zoomer literature, and these writers, like their predecessors, are still trying to shape the internet into prose. Perhaps they shouldn’t. Honor Levy’s My First Book is dazzling and frightening at times, but it also falls into a Look At Me trap. Which is to say it is just what it says it is, and, despite the irony, nothing more: a story collection by a very young person who lives on the internet.
The formal conceit of these novels is to represent the feeling of being online. But a novel that truly said something new about being online probably wouldn’t mention the internet at all. This hypothetical True Internet Novel would not use the words Instagram or meme, or even based. It wouldn’t be self-conscious. You would just be able to tell by the nature of the sentences that the writer of said novel had only ever known life on the internet, and nothing else. It would try to make us feel something being online could never make us feel. It would be alive, feral, scary, ruthlessly in dialogue with its digital circumstances and compulsively trying to break free of them at the very same time. I’m not sure that book exists yet. (When talking to a friend about this he said: What about Gaddis’s JR? Not a bad thought.)
So here we are. Allegro Pastel is an internet novel that is a response to the internet. It tells us how to feel. It tells us how to laugh. The internet remains a novelty. The novel is constantly directing our attention to the Internet as a proper noun; it is, for the most part, simply a long list of reasons why the internet makes us stupid and boring. We nod our heads and think about the times that we have also “missed the Snapchat of 2015,” and how that was pretty darn embarrassing. As we read, we engage with a carefully instructed thesis about how “life online” really comes for us all. Even really smart female novelists.
All that said—there is something like a pulse beating beneath all of this in Allegro Pastel. And that is that Randt writes about Tanja and Jerome with love. Like how Sally Rooney looks at her characters: compulsively, brutally, lovingly, all cast in the soft blue glow of someone’s phone screen. The way in which Jerome and Tanja love each other is also compulsive, brutal. In the second half of the book, they split up. They get back together. Tanja asks for space from Jerome, essentially because she finds him boring and needy. During this time, Tanja sleeps with Janis, her friend Amelie’s crush, leading to their estrangement. Jerome, meanwhile, stays mostly celibate, pining for Tanja, his ruthless, arrogant and somehow self-deprecating girlfriend. But then he reconnects with Marlene, an old classmate, and the book, up until this point tedious and formulaic, starts to destabilize. Tanja, a character who for the first two hundred pages acted like someone in complete control of her life and world, starts to weaken, becomes pathetic. All of the banalities about the internet wash away. In its second half, Allegro Pastel becomes a novel about a power struggle.
At its best, Allegro Pastel’s realism is frighteningly real. And this is because it is so banal—because it is, forgive me, relatable. (Nabokov once said of this phenomenon, “this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book,” but I digress.) What is interesting about it has nothing to do with the internet, with life online. Instead, it’s something very old. It is the novel’s ability to make us feel something. To tell a story that has existed as long as the novel has existed. To tell a story about love and how it often does not work out. Like what happens in Madame Bovary, when Emma goes to the ball and then spends the rest of her sad, pathetic life wishing she was back at the ball. Like what happens when Jerome starts to fall for Marlene in Allegro Pastel.
What Jerome likes about Marlene is that she is easy to be with. She represents the kind of frictionless life Jerome already has. Time spent with her is as comfortable as looking at your phone. They go on vacation to Lake Como and stay in a “relatively cheap Airbnb.” Jerome wears a summer leisure suit. They have sex together six times. “Jerome found the flow of their sex easy and natural,” Randt writes, “She looked good, she knew what she wanted, and on the shores of Lake Como she laughed with real character.” Eventually, Jerome gets Marlene pregnant. Jerome makes a PowerPoint they go through together about whether or not to keep the baby, and some of the slides address the topic of “social responsibility,” given that their child will “certainly produce CO2.” They decide to have the baby anyway, and we can feel Jerome getting smothered by the choice because it is so easy to make. It is the path of least resistance. Tanja is crushed.
Reading it, I felt crushed, too. It is crushing to read a novel that forces you to watch two people, young and in love, succumb to the banalities of everyday life: The comfort of making a safe decision when it comes to a partner. The comfort of spending all day on your phone. Of thinking that making art and building a website that looks like a lava lamp are the same thing. Of making money and getting comfortable making money. Allegro Pastel isn’t at all ambitious about the way it reckons with these ideas. It favors prose that is flat and chilly, self-consciously cool while also wanting you to feel like the point is that it is self-consciously cool!!! It wants you to laugh at the characters but doesn’t quite give you enough distance to do it.
In the final moments of the novel, Tanja breaks down. She sends Jerome a long and manic email about how she fucked up, how she shouldn’t have let him go, how they should be together. It felt gut-wrenching to read, to watch Tanja unspool so easily, after watching her execute such control over her life in every way. For a brief moment, when I finished the novel, I felt queasy for Tanja. I felt it in my neck and in my wrists. I thought to myself: I have been this woman before. I, too, have let the sand slip so violently through my fingers due to my own bad behavior. Then I got up and put the book down. And then I felt nothing at all.
Image credit: Thu Le (Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
From the archive
“Alt Lit” by
Everything that’s published now is shaped by the forms and concerns of online, whether it’s explicitly about the internet or not. Our bestselling poets write what are essentially Instagram captions. Publishers live or die at the mercy of BookTok. The recent glut of normie novels about trying to be a good person, or minor racial contretemps between professional-class narcissists, or hot girlies who don’t really do anything in particular—all of these are attuned to the sensibilities of an implicitly online public, whose sense of what might be an interesting topic for literature is downloaded directly from Twitter. The most mainstream Obama-endorsed fiction is now more like a feed than anything else: a series of sharp little lines, minute observations, quips, for you to quote on social media. The whole culture industry is just the internet’s auto-coprophagy, feeding its own waste back into the system. You are not radical or cutting-edge because you remember Neopets.
“No One Is Talking About This” by Michelle Taylor
As a novel about the internet, No One is obligated to show us some things we already know—the way that the internet has changed our thinking, our perception, our way of being in the off- and online world. Yes, the novel admits, the portal has shattered our attention to pieces; yes, its style is infectious and homogenizing; and yes, it tends to render our politics shallow and fragile. The novel transcribes these truths, universally acknowledged, with great perspicacity; it organizes them into poetry: “Each day to turn to a single eye that scanned a single piece of writing. The hot reading did not just pour from her but flowed all around her; her concreteness almost impeded it, as if she were a mote in the communal sight.” The prose itself imitates “the communal mind,” merging, splintering and reassembling disparate images in its tenuous web. But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen modern life, depicted through a fragmented consciousness, represented with a nearly liturgical level of lyricism. At one point, the novel even nods at its modernist lineage when Lockwood’s heroine, beholding a bust of James Joyce, calls the portal “the new book, the communal stream-of-consciousness.”
“Who Needs Fiction After the Internet?” by
“When I think about the internet (which is impossible),” Natasha Stagg writes, “I feel similar to when I have a crush. I feel crushed.” The line comes from an essay, first published in her 2019 collection Sleeveless, titled “To Be Fucked,” and here in miniature are the thematic and stylistic signatures of Stagg’s writing. The title suggests at once a discourse on sex and an anatomy of despair, a punk aggression and a passive subject. If the internet is impossible to think about, what are we doing when we write and read about it—and on it? You try to think but are left with only a feeling: a mixture of desire and hopelessness, a sense of excitement and power that is also an emptiness and inertia. Something you thought that you were doing, that was under your control (your crush, your browsing) becomes something that is being done to you (you’re crushed). Everything is at once manifest and obscure, right there on the surface for the world to see and somehow enigmatic, unresolved and unresolvable: a link, only, to something else. This internet affect is, despite its novelty, now probably as universal a feeling as that of romantic desire, but like the latter, it is also private and hard to pin down. To catch this mood one can’t try too hard.
“Girls Online” by Noelle Bodick
Cyborgians, cyberfeminists, latter-day “glitch feminists”—none of them had it quite right. Thwarting the optimists, the internet did not open users up to a bouquet of identities that elude gender. Rather, it reduced it to one. A girl online, Walsh cheekily writes, “is an avatar for everyone.”
This was so good; I read it loud two boyfriend and best friend.
This was such a wonderful read!