"David Trent, a struggling writer whose behavior steers this blackly comic thriller, exults upon learning that his new neighbor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the Pulitzer-winning novelist Silas Hale-"an echo," he initially thinks, of "Henry David Thoreau living in Ralph Waldo Emerson's backyard!" When it becomes clear that Silas has no interest in mentorship, though, David contrives to shore up his writerly status in other, increasingly reprehensible ways."
"In this diaristic novella by a prolific translator of the Norwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse, a narrator records several weeks in the summer of 2016 spent exchanging stories with friends in New York, travelling to San Francisco, and nursing foot injuries. To chronicle their days, Searls's characters use methods that the internet is gradually rendering obsolete-one friend starts a print-only blog, and another uses archival white pages to track down a shuttered recording studio."
David Trent is a struggling writer whose envy and ambition propel him into increasingly reprehensible schemes to secure literary status, reveling in wickedness while navigating a world where successful writers' haughtiness is rewarded. A central existential dilemma confronts David: whether to choose happiness or to persist as a writer. A separate diaristic novella records several weeks in summer 2016 of a narrator exchanging stories, traveling, and nursing injuries, while adopting obsolete methods like print-only blogs and white pages searches. That narrator confronts mass shootings, police brutality, and Donald Trump's political rise, examining contemporary horrors alongside emergent technologies.
Read at The New Yorker
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