There's a special place in hell for people who write a 487-page novel, one half of which is gleeful satire thinner than the paper it's written on, and the other half a description from some sort of deranged dreamlike... drug haze. And then, as icing on the cake: the most far-fetched "unexpected twist" I've ever heard of.
Yes, I am talking about the most talked about novel of recent times, the bestseller "Yesteryear" by Caro Claire Burke. It's about a Christian conservative tradwife who became internet famous by living a seemingly perfect life on a farm with her rich husband and their eight children. But then she wakes up one day and finds herself in the year 1855 - right?
This is a really stupid book.
And the stupidest thing, of course, is that I read it cover to cover myself, the last 150 pages angry as a bee because it was so bad. But I felt I had to - it's a chat ice cream (an inherently disgusting word). And you want to keep up with what everyone is talking about.
Some novels seem designed for this very purpose, to be bought by women with book clubs, who will discuss them over three glasses of wine and then post something about them on social media, where they will be noticed by other women, who in turn will buy them for their own book clubs.
Take Rebecca F Kuang's "Yellowface," for example, which also revolves around a contemporary phenomenonâin this case, cultural appropriation, cancellation culture, and the general toxicity of social media. Which is also a satire with stereotyped character portraits, whose narrator is also unreliable and unsympathetic, which also derails in a hallucinatory way.
You don't need to be a trained psychologist to understand where the pent-up need to read such things comes from: People are heartily tired of the influencers.
Nobody read "Yellowface" because it was well written, because it wasn't. No, we read it because everyone else read it. This is middle-aged women's answer to teenagers and their rapidly flaring Tiktok trends â one day trompe l'oeil pastries that look like little fruits, the next cloud-fluffy Japanese pancakes. Or by all means the hibernating hipster men who flock around some flashy food truck in Farsta, because according to the rumor it serves "perhaps Sweden's best smash burger right now".
At the beginning of August, DN (6/8) interviewed a group of 20-something New Yorkers about the new phenomenon of standing in hour-long circling queues for various events, and where this has become a new way of socializing: you take the opportunity to update yourself and your best friend on the latest news while you wait for the cronut/pizza/yogurt ice cream on everyone's lips.
Yes, think, in the future all bagel cafes became famous for 15 minutes. And they were all mediocre.
At the same time, on the Stockholm City Library's website, the number of reservations for the Swedish translation of "Yesteryear" now amounts to 391 copies, of the English edition to 332 copies. And what everyone is queuing for is a book about a self-righteous influencer who - hear and be amazed - is not at all as successful and happy and better-than-everyone else as she herself gives the impression of, but fake and disgusting. Who gets punished for it. Who must suffer.
You don't need to be a trained psychologist to understand where the pent-up need to read such things comes from: People are heartily tired of the influencers. In Therese Bohman's new novel, "Capital", the main character highlights what I myself suspect is part of the explanation: how dull they have become. That the secret and dark and enigmatic that used to be their attraction has been washed away. "Now there are no more shadows, no places for something obscure and borderline, now everything is well-ordered and out in the light. Everything is uncalled-for kitchen renovations and sponsored recipes for pasta sauce." Over and over again.
There has simply been inflation in influence, and fewer and fewer companies want to work with these people (DN 15/8). They move like birds in a flock - while pretending to be unique: Suddenly every single Instagram account has "always" advocated dove blue bedrooms, variegated patterns and oxblood door frames. Even literature is reduced to such an accessory: the same arranged bookshelf still life on the new, pretend flea market coffee table in a home where the only thing that remains is the unimaginative changeability.
The talkies books suffer from exactly the same weakness: that they are not something of their own. They are meant to provoke debate, but never ask a single question.
And if there is something the soul defends against more than the void, surely it is precisely the consumerist void, the one that pretends to be intimate and personal and cozy, but which only consists of selling people things they don't need? Because it makes you feel stupid, and cheated. A sheep that runs along with all the other sheep, but without experiencing the community of the flock. And that, I think, is the main reason for the increasingly vicious tone that has arisen around the influencers lately (New York Times, BBC, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vogue, The Cut).
The talkies books suffer from exactly the same weakness: that they are not something of their own. They are meant to provoke debate, but never ask a single question. But it is of course possible to write with substance even about the superficial.
"Capital", for example, is a rather touching and untimely call for a different kind of aesthetic way of life, for the protection of the beauty of things - "the happiness they provide is not interchangeable with any other happiness, no replacement for love or health, but perhaps a complement". But the novel also looks at the very concept of influencers, and above all at our own relationship to them: Who are we? And above all: Who are we now that we have actually seen through them, and started to get tired? So what should we do with our time?
Look there, something to think about. Maybe even discuss for real.
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