The Information Coming In Is Too Great: Baby Alex by The Book Club – Manuel Marrero
July 15, 2024
2020 was a dark year, a year zero, a kind of fumbled Edenic return. Many didn’t make it and many more are still struggling survivors of a generation-defining cataclysm that left us more maladjusted, flattened, dumber. I don’t know Quentin Scobie or Roz Counelis (or the eponymous Alex credited as the cover and TBC logo designer, whose autofictive self-insert occupies a load-bearing role, or James Cooper, the irate frenemy who interposes to antagonize Quentin), but others I know have corresponded with the latter and spent time on the former’s schizo shitpost YouTube channel. This is a generation-defining book, though its authors may shrink at the claim, disowning it or having no intention of keeping it in circulation, making it a curio which turns up on Amazon etc. occasionally. If you’re a mark for OOP miraculous artifacts, you should spring on that inclination alone. Though if you take time to read, you can’t miss how special it is that three-four people narrativized their email correspondences during a global bat flu that had us locked in our homes, poised in a trench between the information age and whatever comes after, and managed to capture so much historical essence in real time, from a year that’s effectively a collective amnesiac lapse. It is both an end to itself and a footnote in these real peoples’ lives and British history. These are young people, most formatively affected demographic perhaps, and there are inklings of memory and nostalgia for the before times, 2019 serving as a kind of anchor. Flashes of New Year’s Eve parties shatter into the present day solitary infernos of their minds. It is vibe-heavy. It is voyeuristic. The unknowable apperceptions of parasocial intimacy mined here chart new depths of alogic interiority, while iceberg espionage conceits are treated as opportunities to capitalize on their shared gallows humor and predilections for the absurd. These narrative modules range from conspiratorial intrigue, unabashed internet dating testimonies, tender sexual hang-ups, a love triangle, a messianic reality tv show (in the sense that all smart machines are just tvs), all in an episodic novel of cryptographic, fragmentary beauty. The temporal elasticity of the year is a character, and you can feel the ideas become relevant, and by the time it’s over it’s dated, but you re-experienced it on trend. The voices are overeducatedly literate, in a sprawling elliptical style, and there’s a warts and all, saying nothing with a lot swag that is simply undeniably poetic. This thing leaves trammels in its wake.