Contemporary novels fabricate form to emulate social media idioms

Evidence

It is no wonder, then, that so many contemporary novels not only braid themes of self-manifestation via networked technology but also fabricate their form in emulation of these now-unavoidable idioms of expression. We find in twenty-first-century fiction successful works of email epistolarity such as Richard Yates by Tao Lin or e by Matthew Beaumont (followed by a novel-in-SMS, Squared), successful works that mimic ubiquitous online genres like the customer review (Rick Moody’s Hotels of North America) and acclaimed works that stitch together a novel out of fictional Yelp reviews (Gregg Gethard’s Karl G). There are novelty apps, like Hooked, for consuming fiction in the form of text messages, following the patterns established in Japan for offering seventy-word installments of novels on mobile phones. Each of these social network forms has fed more traditional publishing, with app novels and Yelp-review novels being optioned for print and screenplay. And, perhaps most importantly, we find traditional novels that are born digital, structured as twitfic (Jennifer Egan’s Black Box), Instagram posts (Olivia Sudjic’s Sympathy), Facebook shares (Jeff VanderMeer’s Komodo) or autofictions of the stream of all apps (Olivia Laing’s Crudo). — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 161

Categorization

• XREF: Jennifer Egan’s Black Box being called ‘twitfic’ directly connects to A Visit From The Goon Squad in the reader’s BMF library, where Egan experiments with PowerPoint form.
• SHARE: The catalog of social-media-form novels (Yelp-review novels, app novels, twitfic) is a narrow list a specific fiction-interested person would enjoy.