The Ginhouse Madrigals

I remember the day Amy first told me she wanted to be a novelist. We were in the Inner Richmond with Lev, trying out a new sushi spot, the kind with the boats and the rotary moat. Lev and I were surprised by her announcement, to put it lightly. Amy wasn’t much of a reader (she owned maybe a dozen books, all strictly ornamental), which seemed to disqualify her outright. If there’s one thing novelists invariably do, it’s read novels, whether or not they manage to write any. But Amy seemed intent on flipping the script: she would write without having read. In doing so, she would preserve a certain stylistic greenness or aboriginality, an unprocessed quality that readers would surely find refreshing. No “ecstasy of influence” here. Amy’s writing would be pure, involuntary, one of a kind.

I’m the type to tiptoe around this sort of thing (life crushes dreams easily enough without my help); Lev is not. He set his chopsticks aside, freeing up both hands for the impending reality check. But Amy preempted his admonitions, informing us that she had already written the thing.

At this I broke out laughing and, in doing so, inhaled a ramen noodle into my upper nasal cavity, where it remained for several hours thereafter. I know that sounds like swift comeuppance, and perhaps it was, but I wasn’t simply being an asshole. As someone who has started (and just as soon abandoned) some half-dozen novels, I am painfully aware that the damned things just don’t want to be written. The minimum amount of time in which even a prodigious talent can hope to write a novel is, what, six weeks or so? The median time probably closer to two years. So for our, frankly, least literary friend to abruptly announce that she wanted to write novels, and then mere moments later announce that she had already written one, was a bit hard to credit. Yet Amy insisted she really had done so.

“Alright, let’s see it then,” said Lev, plucking a plate of tuna sashimi from the moat.

“I don’t have it on me.”

“You don’t have a copy in your email or something? Haven’t you sent it to your editor?”

“I don’t have an editor yet. It’s on my computer at home.”

“Well, send it to me. I’d be happy to look it over. I’ve been meaning to read more contemporary fiction.”

“Sure, you can read it. It’s not really fiction, though.”

We had another good laugh at that one, which resulted in the (3-stars spicy) noodle worming a few centimeters deeper into my cranium. Tearing profusely, I excused myself and made for the men’s room, where I remained for a span of nearly ten minutes, attempting unsuccessfully to hawk the loogie noodle (a fellow customer, seeing me bent double over one of the two sinks, opted against washing his hands). Presently, I gave up and returned to our seats, only to find Lev sitting all alone, entranced by the sight of the laden boats bobbing past, nearly sinking under the weight of the mayonnaise.

“Where’d Amy go?”

“She left.”

“Why?”

“It seems I offended her.”

“What did you say?”

“I asked if her novel had emojis in it.”

We sat in silence for a spell. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that we were too smart for our own good, yet far too stupid to be of use to anyone else.

“What’d you think of the ramen?” Lev asked.

“Eh. C-plus. I never like it when they have the pink things…”

“Oh. The narutomaki.”

This was a good three years ago. At the time, Amy ran social for a boutique women’s shapewear company. She was, no question, our most plugged-in friend, in the sense that she partook in all the latest Internet fixations, was fluent in meme, owned streetwear, used TikTok, and saw life through the wireframe of her Insta profile. As might be expected of a social media manager (a position Lev, strangely enough, had also occupied for a few months before being laid off), Amy was hyper-active on Twitter, in a personal as well as professional capacity. She devoted many of her so-called workdays toward cultivating her private feed, @amyginhouse, at least until she was nearly fired after a lewd, body-negative observation about a celebrity briefly materialized on the shapewear company’s account. I myself had a Twitter at the time (2 followers, around 80 following) and must admit Amy had a knack for it. She had perfected a certain world-weary, metrosexual tone that then (as now) seemed to resonate deeply with fellow Internet people. She had grown a decent following, around 600 heads, and had set herself the ambitious goal of doubling said following every year henceforth.

To her credit, Amy was not simply on a quest to get “verified.” Her Everest was not so baldly conventional as that (in truth I think she would have preferred to remain “unverified,” a cult figure, a tweeter’s tweeter). It seemed her utmost ambition in life was to become a sort of Twitter aphorist — one of those relentlessly ironic, fork-tongued fashionistas dispensing nuggets of sass to be gobbled up (liked and retweeted) by tens of thousands of followers at a time, whilst also attracting the ire of certain lowly trolls, ugly anonymous men who in flaming her witticisms would only further ignite them, counterpointing the acclaim to a sufficient degree to produce that rarefied commodity, polarity, pure controversy (the kind of controversy that only sketchily and equivocally points back to any referents, which derives its power from an occult system of knowledge, not unlike numerology), so that in her heart of hearts the aphorist cannot pretend to hate the trolls or even pity them, but secretly loves them, as a king loves his concubines.

There’s a reason I’m bringing this up. As it turned out, Amy really had written a novel, after a fashion, which she emailed to us a few weeks after that fateful lunch (though only after Lev had apologized for disrespecting her, mansplaining, &c). When I sat down to read it one night, I was immediately taken in by its boldness of form. It was written in a fragmentary style, one jagged sentence or bite-size paragraph after another. The language was dry, unembellished, dislocated. I had no clear sense of where the story was taking place, and yet I felt compelled to keep scrolling downward. And it was in this compulsion, I think, that I felt the first inkling of déjà vu. Of having read this before.

Initially I pushed the feeling aside. Then, when it returned unbidden, I formulated a plausible explanation for it: Amy’s writing simply reminded me of another novel I’d read recently, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, which had a similarly shard-like structure (or lack thereof). But then I came to a sentence that I knew for a fact I’d read before. The sentence referenced me, albeit not by name. It quoted something I’d said at a party many moons ago, a comment Amy had found so amusing she’d later tweeted it. I’d then gone and retweeted it (strange feeling, retweeting oneself). That had been months ago, but since I hardly ever tweeted, it only took me a few seconds’ scrolling to locate it on my own feed. There it was, word for word. The tweet and the sentence were identical.

That was when it all came together. I went to Amy’s profile and started scrolling. Sure enough, I began seeing more and more sentences I’d read in the so-called novel. I began highlighting them in the PDF, and before long, the entire document was painted yellow. Not every tweet was in the novel, but every last bit of the novel was a tweet.

In a fit of journalistic glee, I FaceTimed Lev to share my findings.

Lev was lying shirtless in bed, wearing an expression that suggested he’d just undergone an appendectomy sans anesthesia. When I told him of my discovery, he only grunted. He was not surprised. He’d read the first three pages and had found it so depressing he’d lost all motor function. Hoping to revive him, I propped the phone against the baseboard and launched into my “silly dance,” a morning warmup routine I’d been working on. After about ten seconds he stirred and begged me to stop. I picked up the phone and sat back down.

“I saw this coming,” said Lev.

“Saw what coming?”

“This, this phenomenon. It’s the Twitterization of the novel. Or the novelization of Twitter, I’m not sure which.”

“The latter, I think. I mean that’s literally what she’s done, she’s turned her Twitter feed into a novel. It’s a copy-and-paste job. For all we know the order might be randomized.”

“It’s incredible. They’ll probably love it, too.”

“They already do. Her followers, at least. It’s crowd-tested, optimized. I bet she only used the best of them, likes-wise.”

“The craziest part is it’s actually somewhat coherent, isn’t it? I mean what little I read. There’s characters, there’s a setting of sorts. A narrative thread.”

A few months later, she group-texted us announcing in all caps that she’d landed an agent; then, a few weeks later, a book deal. We congratulated her, haltingly. In this age of self-publishing, all good news must be taken with a grain of salt. I assumed, at best, she’d been picked up by some obscure Medium-hosted “literary magazine” no one reads or has ever heard of, one that had decided for whatever reason to venture into the disprofitable realm of physical printing. Until one night she name-dropped the publisher. And pulled up an email to show me. After that I went back and reread the whole thing. And though it wasn’t my cup of tea, by any means, I had to admit she had that telltale quality: a voice all her own.

Lev remained convinced, right up to the very end, that she was trolling us. He refused to accept the evidence, claimed she’d doctored the emails, lauded her commitment to the practical joke she’d cooked up for his benefit. But presently the book found its way into his hands. Amy mailed him an advance copy. It was entitled The Ginhouse Madrigals, in apparent (nonsensical) homage to a poetry collection of Bukowski’s which I suppose Amy could, in theory, have read. Not long after, it showed up in bookshops, its jacket that unmissable Twitter-blue. Even the used bookstores stocked it. We couldn’t avoid it, much as we wanted to.

The sequel came out a year and a half later. By this point Amy was hitting it big: she had a Wikipedia page and interviews all over the Internet, and she’d been invited to speak at myriad campuses and city halls and literary festivals. Her debut’s reissue bore in its ‘Praise for’ section an effusive blurb from none other than Zadie Smith. It was surreal. Lev quietly maintained that she was a con artist who had managed to dupe Literature itself, and I must admit to resenting her success as well, now and then, especially given its predictable failure to trickle-down to Lev or myself or frankly any of the other writers in Amy’s coterie.

“Amy’s coterie” — it pains me to put it that way, but she’s the somebody with the forty-two-thousand Twitter followers and I’m the nobody who mothballed my own account last year, having maxed out at seventy. When recently I heard she’d landed a gig teaching creative writing at a reputable private college in Brooklyn, I think I actually screamed, in a sort of half-joking way. Amy, of course, would have a meme for that: the one from Arthur, the furry clenched fist.

Still, true literature is not about Twitter. True literature is not about Twitter. It has nothing to do with Twitter, or Twitter followers, or the cleverness of certain tweets, or the fact that so-and-so retweeted something, or the fact that tweets, being fragmentary and displaced and rootless, so accurately capture the essence (or lack thereof) of our moment. While Amy’s off “writing” her next bestseller which, from what I’ve heard, will include color photographs (probably taken from her Instagram) and thus will presumably sell for $34.99 a pop, I will continue reading great books and allowing them to enrich my life here in the world, the phenomenal world of real actual things and real actual people.

I will take solace in the fact that I, at least, know what literature is. I’ve seen it, I’ve felt it, I’ve cuddled it to my breast. I know that The Ginhouse Madrigals is not literature. It’s merely content. I would be embarrassed to have written it, so I can’t exactly be envious of its author, now can I? No, I can’t. I’m not. I’m actually happy for her. I love Amy.

I should give her a call.