Reality Hunger

Chris Killen, In Real Life

Canongate, 368pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781847672629

reviewed by James Pulford

Behind the bluster and the speculative sightings of literature’s own four horsemen, the suggestion that the internet could be the death of the novel – an idea seriously entertained by some – is underpinned by an interesting question: how do novelists writing today acknowledge the presence of the internet and digital media in their fiction? Much has been made of the power of social media in particular and its influence on human behaviour and relationships, and fiction writers, always keen to capture the zeitgeist, are responding. Dave Eggers, Thomas Pynchon, Tao Lin and Alina Simone are among the authors who have tried to make sense of the digital world on paper recently. Last year saw the release of Nikesh Shukla’s Meatspace, a novel that dramatises the disconnect between who we say we are online and who we are offline, and now there’s Chris Killen’s second novel In Real Life. The problem with fiction of this kind, particularly when it turns its attention to social media, is that it can assume the novel, simply by virtue of being a novel, possesses a kind of special power or dignity that allows it to access certain truths about our online lives. Too often, however, these novels end up merely repeating the banality of such things.

In Real Life is the story of three university friends, Ian, Paul and Lauren, who grow up online. The narrative, staggered over a 2004/5 timeline and later a 2014/5 timeline, opens with Lauren breaking up with her boyfriend Paul, a pretentious self-styled writer who eventually goes on to publish the appallingly named Human Animus before landing a job teaching at the University of Manchester. 'Somehow Paul finds himself teaching creative writing. He is thirty-one years old. He is going bald. He is wearing black skinny jeans and a pale blue shirt and a pair of smart, real-leather shoes. He is standing in a large room on the first floor of a university building, holding a marker pen, about to write something on a whiteboard.' After the breakup Lauren moves to Canada to start afresh only to hear from Paul’s old flatmate Ian, an aspiring musician whose dreams later die when he ends up working in a call centre. The correspondence between Ian and Lauren binds the three narratives together, the two of them gradually finding comfort in each other only when they’re thousands of miles apart.

Killen uses social media to map the day-to-day activities and interactions of the characters, and it’s interesting to be reminded of how these platforms and the way they’re used have changed over time. The innocent Myspace profiles that show off a taste for obscure films, books and music in the 2004 timeline have been ushered out by Facebook and Twitter by 2014. Paul uses Facebook to foster an abusive relationship with one of his students, and when word of this gets round he’s harassed on Twitter. The shifting purpose of social media develops in line with the main characters’ movements from innocence to experience: it goes from being a tool for forging connections to a way of perving on people anonymously. The emails, tweets and Facebook chat messages produced wholesale on the page are used well insofar as they reveal the thoughts and feelings of the characters without the heavy-handedness often found in traditional first and third-person narration. The inclusion of certain memorable internet memes and trends, meanwhile, is amusing, but their presence is also questionable – do we need a novel to satirise the jokes and idioms of social media when social media does that already?

Perhaps In Real Life’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t go far enough: it acknowledges the presence of social media in everyday life without truly interrogating its influence or significance. The novel relies on the idea that these platforms are less a tool for connecting people than a hotbed of ennui, but it never fully explores why this is so. At one point Ian acknowledges, 'If I go back online, I’ll just make myself even more miserable than I am at the moment.' The truth of what he says is never in doubt, but the fact that he avoids the real reason why renders In Real Life ancillary to the very aspects of the internet it seems to critique.

There’s also an unwitting tendency throughout the novel to evoke the #firstworldproblems meme, like when Ian finds himself fretting over having to buy budget chopped tomatoes. At one point Lauren reflects on the offline stoicism of her mum as she slowly succumbs to cancer, 'so quiet and dignified about everything. She hadn't complained, at all, while all that was going on inside her. And yet every time I used the internet, there seemed to be this chorus of voices, this sort of deafening waterfall of misery.' It’s a neat counterpoint to the online indignity of generation Y, always unsatisfied and always wanting more, but again it’s only half-felt, the topic of cancer bundled away in just a couple of paragraphs. Elsewhere, the relationship between Ian and Lauren – the kernel of the whole book – feels unjustified. Their correspondence during the time Lauren is in Canada and Ian is in England weighs in at a total of eight slightly awkward emails each, making the ending, and the extent to which they’ve been pining for each other in the intervening ten years, hard to believe.

In each narrative, Killen’s writing is pared back to the bone, the cadences and rhythms evoking the humdrum lives of the characters as well as the monosyllabic idiom of instant messaging. This, from Ian’s first day at the call centre:

I want to squirm out from Martin’s grip.
I want to run back along the corridor and down the stairs and out through the lobby and away into the city.
I want to buy my guitar back.
I want to drop myself over the stairwell.

While it can feel like reading a shopping list at times, Killen introduces light relief when it’s needed. One aspect of this is Paul’s erratic obsession with Jonathan Franzen, a manifestation of the insecurities he feels about writing his second novel. Elsewhere, Killen deftly contrasts speech with interior monologue in a way that recalls Peep Show at its best. After Ian has given up on his dream of playing in a successful indie band, he is taken in by his sister:

She pushes open the door to a box room at the far end of the corridor.
“Wow,” I say. “It’s perfect.”
It looks like the kind of room you might decide to end your life in.

In the way it shows the characters’ growing reliance on social media, In Real Life is interesting, but it doesn’t go far enough in exploring the full significance of this. The way we use these mediums to control how we’re perceived and, by extension, the narrative arc our lives take is hinted at but never fully realised. It would have been interesting to see Paul, the writer, question the extent to which his personality only exists on social media, or how his internet identity could be marketed as a fiction. Too often the novel feels like it’s just regurgitating the inane clamour of voices online.

Another unsettling aspect of In Real Life lies in the passages devoted to Paul’s creative writing workshops. This meta conceit seems to be a growing trend, from the latest season of the HBO series Girls to Rachel Cusk’s 2014 novel Outline to Ben Marcus’s recent story I Can Say Many Nice Things. It’s a less interesting and less original trick than many writers seem to think it is, and it points to little more than a bleak future in which authors can only create their fictions via a self-referential re-imagining of the writing process. Ultimately, though, the biggest problem with In Real Life is that it never gets down to what’s really real.
James Pulford is an editor and publisher based in London.