REWARD SYSTEM

In six interwoven stories, young millennials navigate the gap between their overconnected digital identities and the yawning loneliness of their real lives.

In the first story, “A Restaurant Somewhere Else,” Julia has started a new job as a sous chef at an upscale restaurant. She likes the work, particularly the way focusing on a single repetitive task, or “deep monotasking," makes the “hours [pass] easily, like minutes…her body all but detached from the experience of time.” She also likes her boss, the enigmatic ex-junkie Ellery, whose No. 1 rule is “no smartphones in the kitchen” but whose online activities betray a reality both triter and more disturbing than Julia had imagined. Meanwhile, in “Better Off Alone,” aspiring novelist Nick—Julia’s ex-boyfriend—has a drinking problem that is really a living problem. At a party, he spends much of his time in the bathroom scrolling through his friends’ social media feeds in search of identities that feel more authentic when displayed on the phone than they do when encountered in real time. Some months later, in the highly sympathetic “Search Engine Optimisation,” a freshly sober Nick is working as a copywriter at a marketing firm where every employee’s internal monologue reveals the same frustrated disenfranchisement from the stakes of their own lives. The stories work best when they're performing their own deep monotasking, exploring the lexicons of their various workplaces in compelling detail. In each, however, space is taken away from the relatable banality of the characters' struggles with careers, sex, and paying the rent to critique the anonymizing effect of their various apps and algorithms. While this social commentary rings true, the insistence with which it is centered as the stories' guiding philosophy and the relative lack of character development outside this central tenet render the book’s grim loneliness as something more like a trope about millennials than a truth about humanity in its multifaceted and surprising whole.

Relatable and entertaining but ultimately too preoccupied by its message.