Reviewing James Nulick’s Plastic Soul – Forrest Muelrath
December 23, 2024
The ideal career path for a novelist goes as follows: The first three decades of life are spent studying. During the fourth and fifth decades, the novelist publishes four novels which some associates consider to be ‘masterful.’ Then, just as the work begins to draw international attention, the novelist drives a speeding vehicle into oncoming traffic and dies.
The model for this ideal novel writing career is W.G. Sebald. And despite whatever opinions you may have or may want to have about Sebald’s novels, I think there is an important lesson here for novelists of my generation and every generation for the foreseeable future. Novels exist in a unique timeline separate from all other media. There is no meaningful correlation to novel writing mastery and hype cycles, end-of-year lists, or even an author’s life. There is no history that suggests rushing to publish (shitty) writing on the (repugnant) internet—or with whatever putrid automated publishing service—will one day cause others to perceive your novel writing as so-called masterful.
James Nulick, age fifty-four, seems to be quietly amassing a career where he publishes four masterful novels. I am counting three novels so far: Plastic Soul (released this past October), The Moon Down to Earth (2019), and Valencia (2016). Consistency counts for a lot. There is a unique and recognizable style evident across the two most recent novels and a handful of short stories. With Plastic Soul, Nulick asserts himself as a brand we can trust. Novelists should not be trusted unless they have a strong, consistent style. Many young novelists attempt to publish before they have a strong, consistent style and then wither and die. A young person withering and dying is not something I want to invest my readerly attention in. Even if in the end this type of young, inconsistent novelist goes on to join the pantheon of masterly novelists with an unmistakable strong, consistent style, someone like me may still come along at some later date and end up resenting that novelist after having read an early uncharacteristic novel published before the novelist really had any novel thing about them. There are many examples of inconsistent novels in the 20th century but for novels written back in those days, we must make some allowances. Back when the economy of novel writing was a much different thing than it is today. Back before all the labor had been automated out of publishing novels, replaced by software. Back when Faulkner was falling off his stool in Hollywood, and the up-and-coming pantheon of boomer novelists were just beginning to experiment with their fresh take on whatever the heck could come after modernism. Back before we had a seemingly endless number of novels to choose from at any given moment. Back when there were hungry families who were financially dependent upon the printers, and the typesetters, and the copyboys, and the designers, and the editors, and the ad men, and the distributors, and the shopkeepers, and so on, who were all involved in producing and selling a constant stream of novels to satisfy the reading public, whether those novels be consistent to a one-of-a-kind style or not. Because back in those days, people did not have some idiot machine that could spit out a terrible, yet amusing little movie rendition of every harebrained idea for a novel any nitwit typed into a text box to entertain himself on winter evenings. Back in those days, people needed novels to blanket the void in their souls that was exposed by silence. Silence that no longer exists. Back then, there was an economy around novel writing that supported inconsistent novels. Today, however, there is very little reason to publish an uncharacteristic, inconsistent novel, so I must demand consistency from even my young novelists. I must say, no, I will not read your novel until you prove yourself of strong novel writing characteristics that I can rely on! So thank the heavens for Nulick. Thank the heavens that after Plastic Soul, I am confident I can return to Nulick expecting a certain readerly experience. A readerly experience that I will only expect to evolve in a way that Nulick alone could make it evolve. Thank the heavens there is a novelist who I can trust in Nulick! Consistency counts for a lot, but consistency is the easy part. There also must be some readerly thing that compels a return within that consistent style. Something that gives rise to a compulsion that can usurp the desire to cover up the big gaping hole in your soul with a phone.
Something about Nulick’s prose makes it feel like it is hovering around my body. It is prose that tickles my aura like static electricity. This hovering prose is a very pleasurable, perhaps addictive readerly thing. I’ve tried to figure out how he does it by counting beats and analyzing grammar. It’s not something I can explain in technical terms. The prose is patient with graceful commas separating dependent clauses that extend sentences with hypnotizing efficiency. It is prose that can lull, like the way some people can drive a car for several miles while lost in fantasy, and upon arriving at the destination, realize they remember their thoughts perfectly well but don’t remember anything about operating a speeding vehicle along winding roads. “I am in this world, I am part of this world, but I refuse to participate in it…” says Sylvie in the first part of Plastic Soul. Nulick’s prose gets intimate to a degree that can make me feel uncomfortable. Transitioning between a middle-aged female bureaucrat, a gay skater boy, and an old Jewish man who is seeking treatment for erectile dysfunction can have a dissociative effect, but only after Nulick has brought me deep inside each character in such an immersive and consistent way with his electrostatic prose.
Plastic Soul is science fiction, but its setting is not far from the world we live in today. Many of the sci-fi elements feel like the dull inevitability of something already in progress. The year is 2043 and Elon Musk still holds influence, cars have been banned, and cloning humans is legal. Like Delany or Rachel Pollack, technological progress never negates the importance of bodily misfortunes. “Three thousand years of Civilization and the best we can come up with is flying nail clippers. But human beings have always needed beautifully inane distractions. I am afraid to die…” In four sections spanning nearly 500 pages, we follow four main characters whose lives intersect at a cloning factory. The longest section follows Joey, a man born in 2005, who plays Mario Kart, reads James Joyce, discovers love, and struggles with the loneliness of middle age. Within a slightly different setting, Joey could be autofiction. Yet like the other main characters, Joey’s ordinary lifestyle evolves into a dark quest for liberation from technological confines.
I’ll describe one unusual effect of Nulick’s profoundly consistent storytelling style that I experienced while reading Plastic Soul. At the end of the second section, a transcription of NASA’s Space Shuttle Challenger disaster video is employed. I first read this scene at three in the morning during a bout of insomnia, and although the Challenger was not yet named in the text, and I have not seen the video since I was a small boy, I recognized the word for word transcription. “Three good engines running normal three good fuel cells three good APUs 2257 range distance three nautical miles…Challenger go to throttle up… flight controllers looking very carefully at the situation…” Searching the Challenger online at three in the morning, I realized I had been living with a false memory. I have spent the majority of my adult life believing I had witnessed the Challenger disaster on live TV in a classroom. It was a vivid memory of a teacher wheeling in a TV on a squeaky A/V cart, and then watching the space shuttle explode onscreen with the other elementary school children. I was so sure this had happened that I recently shared the anecdote with a coworker as if it were a historical fact. When I searched for the video after recognizing the transcription in Plastic Soul, I saw a date and realized the Challenger disaster occurred before I was old enough to be in school, while my family was living in a rural home without electricity. There’s no way I could have witnessed the Challenger disaster on live TV, never mind in a classroom. I discovered online that many people around my age have the same false memory, and that there is a good chance it comes from an episode of Punky Brewster. The Challenger transcription echoes throughout the second half of Plastic Soul. With each refrain, I had a distinct feeling that technology was failing on multiple levels. First in the familiar video of the space shuttle exploding midair, then in our media that have failed to record history for me in a factual way. The failures I experienced in my private life reverberated in Plastic Soul’s plot with a countdown to the moment technology is expected to either liberate us, or destroy us. “To perish in a tin can with two firecrackers attached to it, the hubris in believing enough velocity can be attained to escape who we are, the foolishness of believing beauty will allow us to escape death.”