The storm, in typical literary fashion, is more than a storm it’s a harbinger: “the message Nature seemed to be sending us was that some order had been disturbed …” A more lasting and widespread sign that something’s rotten in Denmark soon follows: Occupy Wall Street–style protests, known as “Events,” coalesce in various cities around the world. It was another Sandy-type event, another one of the biblical disasters that seemed to strike this side of the American coastline every annum.” Old Testament cataclysms, it should be noted, can generally be counted upon to smite a good deal more than 44 souls (the toll Sandy exacted from New York). Kenning also has a penchant for the overblown: “It was 8:15 and I was writing the first draft of history. Kenning is a journalist of sorts, not a beat reporter or the voice-of-the-street columnist Jimmy Breslin was, but rather, one who composes “essays” “on literature, politics, or culture” (which invites the question: Why’s he writing up this storm on deadline?). No doubt that’s intentional, but a deliberate choice isn’t necessarily the right one. While it’s not a crime to be too preoccupied with plotting the course of future history to be present in the moment, it makes him detached, coldly aloof. The crisis Kenning is referring to is a storm that’s slammed into New York City, where the action of the novel takes place. For those actually caught up in calamity (think of Ukraine), it’s a struggle-often desperate-to salvage possessions, homes, lives. I had a problem with Jared Marcel Pollen’s Venus&Document from the first sentence, which I’ll quote because it’s emblematic of much of what was off-putting about the novel as a whole: “I find myself oddly contemplative in times of crisis.” The narrator, Paul Kenning, elaborates: “crises encourage us to see ourselves as participants in the great cultural drama, players living through hinge moments in history …” Only someone not affected by crisis, who is not a participant, has the luxury of daydreaming over how historians will remember it. There are certain writers “-often among the academic avant-garde-who seem expert /interested in neither plot nor character, whose books’ movement and appeal depend entirely on rarefied meta-aesthetic agendas.” –David Foster Wallace

This novel of ideas reads like an essay narrated in the first-person by a self-absorbed automaton.

Fallout 4 automaton review