REBOOT, by Justin Taylor
There are two kinds of novels about American life in the digital age: panoramas and selfies. The former are surveys of a wired world’s structures and networks, like Dave Eggers’s fictionalization of Big Tech in “The Circle” and Jennifer Egan’s interconnected New York in “The Candy House.” The latter, like Patricia Lockwood’s “No One Is Talking About This” and Lauren Oyler’s “Fake Accounts,” are intimate portraits of the experience of being very online.
“Reboot,” Justin Taylor’s second novel (after a fine memoir about his father), splits the screen in an ambitious attempt to accommodate both, while also considering gamers, trolls, stans, chuds*, the mania of online fandom and that beloved, increasingly baroque, bloody American pastime, the conspiracy theory.
The reboot in question is of a TV show called “Rev Beach.” The narrator, David Crader; his best friend, Shayne Glade; and his ex-wife, Grace Travis, starred in this fictional amalgam of “The O.C.” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” some 20 years earlier. Now, lockdown-era streaming has renewed the world’s interest.
Crader, adrift in Portland, Ore., and keen to deny his alcoholism, texts Grace, a Goop-like guru whose media-mogul father has died and left her a fortune, to propose a reboot. He has money troubles and amends to make. She texts back with a long article speculating on a “Rev Beach” revival and recapping the show for the uninitiated. Crader is traveling to Los Angeles the following day for a fan convention, one of the last remaining gigs of his fast-fading celebrity, and the two agree to meet. Like that, the reboot is afoot.
But the plot is no more the point of Taylor’s book than were the exploding vampires of Sunnydale or the beach-town brawls of Orange County. The point, as always, is to get the gang back together, which Crader tries to do — only times have changed. When “Rev Beach” premiered, there was no social media, no steady drumbeat of ecological disaster, no truthers, birthers, Infowars, deep-state boogeymen or near-daily mass shootings on the nightly news. Now, a legion of online fans has made the show its own, with alternative plotlines and character arcs that any reboot would immediately render moot, and Crader fears one of those fans may crawl out of a basement with a gun in hand.
That prospect allows Crader (and Taylor) to ruminate not only on the fate of “Rev Beach” and his castmates but on America and its post-9/11 decline, while introducing a few wrinkles unique to the world of the novel, like a hollow-earth conspiracy theory full of antisemitic tropes. A berserk Amerika lurches into view, in which Crader’s life is both threatened and redeemed, and climate change has jumped the shark.
“There were fires in the gorge outside of Portland,” the book begins, after a short prelude, “and there were fires in the hills in L.A.” Ash falls like rain. Flights are canceled on the regular. A permanent haze has settled over the West Coast. When Crader travels to New York to convince Shayne, the show’s true talent and now an indie darling, to sign on to the reboot, they become the playthings of a flood. When he travels to Florida to confront a third cast member, he is the victim of bad air, hellish heat and a nasty sinkhole. Dead animals are everywhere.
“Reboot” is an anxious book. Crader’s visits to both coasts prompt misgivings about open-carry laws, boorish (male) behavior, status anxiety, parental failure and fanaticisms of all stripes. Taylor’s gently comic tone and kinetic prose make this hard-going travel easier, as do his many clever reinventions.
MAGA, QAnon and other real-life delights serve the novel as springboards for a mania more contained and malleable. “Reboot,” then, works similarly to “Rev Beach” headcanon, dreamed up by the show’s most fervent stans. Both play around with the given — the stans using the show’s three seasons, Taylor using national politics and popular culture — and ultimately steer it in directions more agreeable to their respective authors. For “Rev Beach” fans, that means orgies with the “Dawson’s Creek” cast and a lot of queer shipping. For Taylor, it means taming the chaos of recent American history and offering the reader hope, forgiveness, charity, compassion and a sense of a (happy) ending.
A novelist chases reality. If our current one eludes easy capture, points are rewarded for remaining competitive with an alternate. Taylor earns lots of points. His book is, in part, a performance of culture, a mirror America complete with its own highly imagined myths, yet one still rooted in the Second Great Awakening and the country’s earliest literature. It’s a performance full of wit and rigor freed of the familiar polarizing semantics, making legible something the actual streaming-posting-retweeting world, with its relentless pace and all-too-real stakes, can easily obscure, which is just how much conspiracy theory and pop culture have fused. Not just QAnon and Russiagate, but Kate Middleton and Birds Aren’t Real.
Once upon a time, popular entertainment commented on conspiracy theory, pointing to evidence of wrongdoing and the possibility of actual conspiracy. Today’s conspiracy theories are the entertainment, absurdist narratives formally arranged around tribal grudges with no obligation to truth or accountability. This fusing eliminates any attempt to get at a theory of power and becomes just another operation of it, one more tool in the autocrat’s kit. It’s so much its own thing by now that we might call it by a new name: PopCon. PopCon distracts and amuses, scapegoats and sharpens knives while answering other ancient desires, like the communalism formerly provided by network television and the shoring up of the self with lifestyle branding. The truth is out there, for just $9.99 a month.
The PopCon in “Reboot” isn’t totalizing, as Crader is its observer and instrument more than its willing participant. This offers us some relief and Taylor room to maneuver, to riff movingly on the times and to further the plot, leading Crader to his redemption, his private reboot. But as the end approaches, the book’s two strands — violent PopCon mania and the private redemption tale — grow increasingly at odds. Taylor’s panorama of online rage and real-life disaster can’t fully accommodate the selfie that is Crader’s intimate path back to good health, and the book seems caught between an honest reckoning with dread and an impulse to reassure. There will be blood, but it’s not as devastating as it deserves to be.
Maybe you won’t be bummed out, as I was, by the happy ending. Who can blame Taylor for headcanon that makes bearable the mess we’re in? His book comes out just in time for the reboot of the 2020 election, and I for one enjoy imagining Trump’s articulate and generous concession speech. “Reboot” is not half as extravagant as that fantasy, and a lot more fun than the reality dead ahead.
*Editor’s Note: A brief glossary has been provided for readers who are squinting at some of the terms used in this review.
stan: an extremely devoted fan / chud: an undesirable person / hollow earth: the belief that Planet Earth is hollow and habitable within / headcanon: personal interpretations of a fictional work, or imagined scenarios that may depart from the established conventions of their source material / shipping: envisioning a romantic or sexual relationship between two or more characters in a work / Birds Aren’t Real: a satirical conspiracy theory that all birds are spy drones in disguise.
REBOOT | By Justin Taylor | Pantheon | 284 pp. | $28
