The Flea in the Amber: A Review of Nathan Robinson's 'Echoland'
In this review, Roberts reads the dreams of a well known editor, and finds them wanting
There are dinners, from time to time, that have the feel of a play--the cast is sparkling, the food high end, the conversation witty. They are the sort of meetings that rival Jesus' Last Supper. And, in 2002, one such dinner took place. This dinner, which one can find in Jay Parini's biography of Gore Vidal, Empire of Self, had a cast that could shed doubt on Oscar Wilde's quip that life is a badly cast play. This cast consisted of Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag. The setting? An Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. The conversation? Well, at first it was George Bernard Shaw--after all, our cast was going to take part in Norman Mailer's production of 'Don Juan in Hell'. Gore Vidal was to be the Devil, and Mailer was to be Don Juan, a real mirror to how Mailer saw himself; and therefore, quite foolish.
The play to come, and the talk of George Bernard Shaw, were buoyed by the immense intake of alcohol; Mailer drank himself upward towards delusions and Vidal drank Mailer downwards, under the table. As Parini notes, the conversation about Shaw is built on snark and biting responses between Mailer and Vidal, accompanied by 'nervous laughter followed by silences that take awhile to break'. When Sontag breaks in, mentioning she ought to read more of Mr. Shaw, Vidal responds by recommending Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, adding wryly, 'It could be your profession, too.'
After a number of empty bottles and full conversations (which Parini, the fool, left out of his recollection), Susan Sontag turns to Gore Vidal and asks him if he has read her most recent novel, The Volcano Lover. She tells him that this is her only venture into historical romance, and notes--as though holding a necklace of garlic to a vampire--that the book has been widely and well reviewed.
To this, Gore Vidal has (quoting Parini again) 'a pained expression' cross his face. He turns, reaches across the table, and takes Sontag's hands in his own, and then says:
"I've read it, Susan. But you must make a promise to me. That you will never, ever try your hand again at fiction."
One wonders what Sontag's response was--probably something brutal, and Parini wished to shield this from Vidal's fans and so left it out. She obviously did not take his advice, following it up with her book In America--lucky for us, and a bane for Willa Carter. But I like this story because, whatever Vidal's error of judgment, I find that a great swathe of writers on the scene today (and, I am sure, those of the past) could profit marvelously from a friend like Gore Vidal; that is, from a friend who could tell them, which such wit, not to write any more books.
After reading Nathan Robinson's newest contribution to deforestation, titled Echoland: A Comprehensive Guide to a Nonexistent Place, this story played out in my mind; after all, how else was I going to entertain myself? Reading this book was giving me no such joy, only the treacle feeling of walking through the thickest sort of self conscious subjectivity to ever be engraved on dead trees.
How I came across reviewing this book was due to boredom, and because Robinson offered it up to the populace for review--much in the way one might try to sell back scratchers at a flea market. And, as I was in the netizen agora (I was looking for a philosopher), I decided to take this on. I enjoy reviews more than I like writing polemics, but I do not do it nearly enough. I was happy to have the excuse, and so I asked the well dressed flea marketeer for a copy of his new book, which he generously sent me--via PDF. Not quite what I had hoped, but this is what happens when you get products from the flea market; you come away with an itch.
And so, I have an itch to scratch and cream to apply, as well as a bomb to drop into my apartment. No no, officer, I mean a bug bomb. And while I clean myself, let me tell you about this story--so long as its author never, ever again tries their hand at fiction.
Echoland seems to be a book that was meant to be a picture book; alas Current Affairs, unwilling just yet to stop its intellectual verisimilitude, asked that words be placed somewhere in the book. Of these words, many of them are quotes, often two at a time on a page preceding a chapter. From Charles Fourier to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to Carl Sagan, the diaries of every Redditor who are a part of r/DreamInterpretation were vigorously pillaged for ideas. But quotes, expanded to take up as much room as they could would not suffice.
And so, a story was dreamt up.
We begin with our protagonist: a suffering dreamer, whose dreams have left him feeling 'more exhausted than restored' and whose health, between the pieces of his dreams (which the author lets us know, proudly, he has named 'a kind of dust or residue'), deteriorates. He begins to do poorly in class. He screams himself awake. His professors 'fretted' (he means 'groaned'). Our protagonist tells us how the dreams gave him 'a constant tipsy feeling', and begins a stream of sophomoric questions, like: ' Was some part of my subconscious writing entire books without my knowledge, only to show them to me in dreams?', or 'Could the “dream” be the reality and my life be the dream?' (I think we have found Matthew McConaughey's next role).
In other words, we are introduced to our protagonist, Nathan J. Robinson; a nerd with an active imagination and an even more active ego; he believes his professors fret over him, his fellow students give his existence more than a passing thought, and that his dreaming is significant in its meaning. But that is the basis for heroism--a lot of delusion and very little doubt.
Following his dramatic entrance, our hero begins telling the reader about the way he coped with his dreams. He jotted them down, he tells us, to keep his sanity. This is accompanied by two and a half pages of what one might charitably call 'academic activities' where the hero tries to get a handle on his sanity through a dream journal, changing departments at his school, and his meeting with a professor, who has little more than arhythmic Dr. Seuss advice, like telling the hero "You can’t do an anthropology project…[t]his is the Sociology Department", and praising our hero's 'thick descriptions' in his dream journals. Given his professor's name, Harry Greengloves, one wonders if they have gone dreaming down Bumble-Tub Creek; is it that one night, every third or fourth week? Or…
The only irony in the book shows up on page 17, where the author writes that he "...will spare the reader a full account of the tedious bureaucratic rigamarole (should be rigmarole) that was necessary in order to secure the assistance of the machine." I chuckled at this, and then I trudged along, my humor getting one last breath in before it was asphyxiated. We are told that this 'volume' is a report on his dreams, and then we are launched into…more explaining. Between his use of the phrase 'non-Euclidian' and his attempted prose ('Every morning when I awoke, afterimages of them lingered before my eyes, as one gets after looking at a bright light or staring at an eclipse without official presidential eclipse glasses…' I am beginning to itch again…), one settles into their chair, only to pick an uncomfortable lean so they can stay awake. Luckily, this was only half a page; we finally enter his dreams and end up in a whole new, different, dreamlike world--one with a blackboard, a professor, and students. Did we enter a dream? The author says we have, but…
From here, we are given a slapstick account of our hero giving a presentation: naked and standing at a blackboard. He is Dickensian in all the worst ways, like saying 'I bid you all good day!' Unlike our author, I will spare you the tedious; this all leads to his run in with the only other major character in this story: he meets Leith (pronounced LEET, he tells us), who is 'an androgynous being dressed in a gold sequined morning coat, with baby blue silk gloves and a series of curious patches.' After this person tells our hero they would like to ask some questions, our hero refuses this call to action--or, really, a call to dégagé--only for Leith to insist, expressing their fervent interest in Nathan.
Ego sufficiently flattered, our hero goes along. The rest of the book is something between a mimicry of the New Yorker interview at the beginning of Tar and those 'walk arounds' done on Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing; and it never seems to end. A fantastical pseudo-history is given by Leith (LEET!), who tells our hero about 'the event' (don't worry, it is nothing creative--we nuked ourselves, folks) and follows from there to how our species eventually worked its way back to the current state of things in Leith's world--7,000 years later. This current state of things, it seems, was beyond Robinson's prose. I mean this quite literally. For example, the best he could do is tell us that 'everything appeared to be deliberate' (his italics) and that the cities were of different sizes with 'thousands of passageways' which looked '...as if M.C. Escher had been put in charge of a City Planning Department.' Who? No matter, as this bare description is so skeletal because the meat of the description is not the what but about how it was built; we are told that there is 'full automation of nearly every aspect of human labor' and that there was 'not a car to be seen, with only the delivery-robots purring from place to place.' Somebody call Doordash, they will want to hear about this.
From these cities, 'cities of glass and cities of mud', 'cities buried in forests, where everyone lived in treehouses', 'dark, gloomy cities and cities of bright pastels' (are you there Dr. Seuss? it's me, Margaret), we are led through stiff prose and over-large A.I. art toward an understanding that every city has a noun district, by which I mean that every city has a district dedicated to a particular need, desire, or activity; Sex District, Floral Quarter, Jazz Quarter, even for things like Monster District and Shady District and…ah, but let's not be tedious. From the understanding of these quarters, we learn the Transit of the city, and then its technology, its architecture (again?), its fashion…well, if you do unfortunately buy this book, you will realize that the chapters in the table of contents are a map of a tourist journey through 22 of the most boring attractions one can conceive of--and yes, I am insulting Robinson and his 'active imagination' as well as its dull subconscious.
The only part that caught my attention, that I found slightly interesting, was the chapter titled History's Ghosts, which is the eleventh chapter. After a long stroll through droll and A.I. moulds (oh no, the rhyming is contagious), coming across this chapter was quite an aesthetic experience. As one who is interested in the mutation that ideas take as they pass through history, seeing the way American history was twisted about as it came to be displayed in Echoland was inventive. Elvis Presley is confused as a senator who conquered the moon, the Delaware crossing being seen as a comical crossing by someone in a bird mask, Winston Churchill eating a baby--ah, yes. The hilarity of this chapter was refreshing, and the premise of the chapter was interesting to imagine and consider. We are told of trends, such as 'Post-Presley' and 'Post-Chaplin', and one thinks of the absolute seriousness that the 'post-X' signifier is used nowadays; post-left, post-truth, post-modern…the way this reveals the absurdity of this, intentional or no, is brilliant.
Perhaps our reverence of Caesar would be as ridiculous to the Romans as this false Elvis Presley is to the reader. If so, then how can we trust history? As Gore Vidal noted, and so has everyone since Voltaire, history is a set of agreed upon lies. If they were this twisted, this mixed up, this mismatched, then we would not need to encourage people to read history. Or are we being encouraged to look a little closer at our history? This is not made clear--this chapter is merely breathing in laughing gas while in a museum.
In spite of this bright smudge, Echoland otherwise fails--not only in prose and narrative, but in the ascribed meaning of this work of fiction. At the beginning of his book, Nathan Robinson has a page entitled "Note"--how laconic of him. On this page, which he leaves his name on at the bottom, he sets a few things straight. We get some pondering over the ethics of A.I. art; he assures that 'despite appearances' the pictures are not a real 'assemblage of vintage scraps' but A.I. generated images. They have been 'delicately Photoshopped'--as opposed to…recklessly?--and he assures that he has tried to use A.I. art 'as ethically as possible'. This pondering is followed by another assurance; that this book is, in fact, fiction. I am not sure who Robinson considers his audience to be, but it appears he thinks he writes for morons and so appeals to the lowest denomination of such a crowd.
But toward the end of the note, he writes the following:
"The overall message of this book is a simple one: Humanity’s future can be either miraculously wonderful or devastatingly horrible. Which path we choose is up to us. We do not need to fear the future. But we do need to face up to the responsibility we have to ensure that those who come after us inherit the best world we can make for them." (p. 9)
Echoland is meant to be a fictional representation of this theme, proasic as it is; that the future of humanity could be great (or terrible!) but we must face up to our responsibility for it. But there is no point, really, where this tourist attraction makes this theme part of its aesthetic. We get a walk through winding cities, populated by every gauche left wing or anarchist idea of what a perfect city might be, filled to the brim with the author's projections of what would be a wonderful world. This is never challenged, this is never questioned, the cities and quarters are never expressed with an ounce of realism or mere depth. Robinson constantly mentions that parts of his hero's dreams are 'terrifying' or 'dark', but we never see what he means--nothing beyond 'The Event' being a nuclear apocalypse.
This darkness is used, in the end, as the stick to go with Robinson's carrot; humanity could murder itself, unless they do what Robinson's hero tells them they ought to do. What is that? At the end, he writes:
"The people of Echoland had accomplished seeming miracles in medicine. They had cured depression (through providing good lives, not chemically), extended the reproductive age indefinitely, and virtually eliminated death. Nobody had too little food, not a single person on Earth lacked access to the highest quality healthcare. Impossible? No, it was not impossible. They just had their priorities straight. The work that we put into designing financial products and weapons systems they put into the pursuit of comfort and delight. They did not destroy one another. They built universities instead of prisons. They cared about the weakest among them. They didn’t act like a bunch of idiots, in other words." (p. 264-265)
This excerpt, of course, is missing one sentence: 'They were not humans'. In this book, the attempt to connect humans to history, and history to utopia, fails because Robinson never grasps what human nature is. His 'humanity' is ahistorical, a Micawberian creature whose dire straits are manufactured, and therefore can be manufactured away from (who manufactured such terrors? well it is mentioned but waved away by Leith and their superior society). Humanity is not under scrutiny here, even in a dream-like or futurist manner; humanity is not even considered. Nor is history under scrutiny, even in a fictional sense; the limn of the absurdity of recording the past aside, history is told in a fantastically panegyric tone to the utopia Robinson has dreamt up. History is a series of misunderstandings followed by a series of illusions of what a 'good society' is.
The trouble with Robinson's message is that, in the end, the object of history and humanity, of responsibility and tragedy, is washed away by a dream-like, blinding homiletic to utopia. The narrative is bent towards stating with conviction that Leith's civilization is a utopia. This is why the tour goes quarter by quarter, city by city, university building by university building. Robinson wants you to believe Echoland is a utopia, and he sells it so hard because his message is not a message or pontification, but an ultimatum; if we do not change, we will not get to live in (his) utopia. Like a preacher suffering delusion, Robinson states that if you want to get into Heaven, you must do as his hero says. Nevermind, of course, that how these great things were accomplished is (and is restated many times) by advanced technology in an advanced society; which he calls 'purposive technology'. A vague term for a vague technology that is more advanced than ours, and patently impossible--I brought up these technologies to Dwayne Monroe before being told to stop. He would laugh too hard to drink his Gimlet, and such tragedies are unacceptable for the Good Doctor. But when his chuckling was done, he asked me, sternly; where are the power generators?
Such a vagueness, such an abstraction would be excusable--if only it bore some aesthetic splendor and interesting prose--in our case, all the aesthetics this book holds can be found in its A.I. generated (and ethically used!) art. All else is a dimly lit projection of the fantasy that drives Nathan Robinson's politics.
In his essay Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With, the aforementioned Gore Vidal complained about the way people had turned away from focusing on the work of a writer to focusing on their life. Between the coverage of Hart Crane's suicide to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack Up to the many writers whose boozing and kinks became fodder for biographers (be it Edmund Wilson's gin-and-fairy kink or Ernest Hemmingway's kiss with a shotgun, or…or…) Gore Vidal wrote with some truth at the time:
"Today, the writer need not write his life. Others will do it for him. But he must provide him with material; and a gaudy descent into drink, drugs, sex, and terminal name dropping." (At Home: Essays 1982-1988, p. 45)
Written in 1985, Gore Vidal was onto something; writing now, in 2023, I must report that this has only gotten worse. The modern writer--or, really, typist--does in fact need to write about their lives. Not because no one else will, but because the writer of our times is relegated to autobiographical scribbling by the absolute tyranny of 'relatability'. If they cannot relate to it, they will not read it. One has seen their corrosion spread to other parts of the arts; movies, televisual media, and various other arts. Only video games and animated shows are not held to this standard, instead working on an escapist logic and power-trip joy rides; big guns, big breasts, and big heads.
The relatability logic that writing now struggles under has produced a prose I can only describe as 'diarist prose'; a prose that feels more like one is writing to their diary than to an audience--and a prose more concerned with the writer's subjective notions than the world or the subject under review. On any day, you can thumb through--or scroll through--any magazine or newspaper and you will see this epidemic has turned into a pandemic. One can also see this in the fiction we now write, where the "kiddult novel", as Will Self calls them, have risen out of the swamp of YA fiction to become the rule and standard of fiction. From Harry Potter to Percy Jackson and the Olympians to The Hunger Games and Twilight, we have been inundated with books that have myopic narratives in which, to quote Christopher Hitchens review of the aforementioned Boy who Lived, "...the novels have been attempting a kind of secular dramatization of the battle between good and evil." The characters, plots, and setting of these books are as plastic as the action figures and movie acting they are used to sell--good and evil be damned.
Where Hitchens had optimism, suggesting at the end of his review that '...there will still be millions of adults who recall their initiation to literature as a little touch of Harry in the night', the last sixteen years proves the ol' scribbler wrong. Rather than an initiation into literature, most people have found themselves trapped like Jurassic Parks' mosquito in amber; and so, they became the convenient props for an almost epic reconstruction of what 'reading' entailed. Fiction became a theme park, run by greed of Hammondian proportions.
Nathan Robinson's Echoland is another exhibit against that case for literature with 'a little touch of Harry'--be it Potter or Styles, Diana's brat, a little touch of Harry on anything seems to turn it to muck the way Midas's touch could turn anything gold. With the ambition of speaking of history, humanity, and responsibility, one only finds a catastrophic mix of roman-a-clef, science fiction, and utopian navel gazing in Echoland. The subjectivity and myopia of this book is treacle, almost suffocating--and, for its professed theme, paralyzing.
But that is just the flea in the amber. And I no longer itch.