Two Novels About Social Withdrawal

Dear readers,

Recently, a lovely and well-meaning friend texted me one of those trending articles that make you want to trade your smartphone for an abacus and never speak of the internet again. The gist of the piece was that in order to survive in a terminally online world, people hoping to advance in their chosen field — painter, novelist, late-middle-aged accountant — should, like some kind of manic TikTok David Mamet, Always Be Closing: flogging their wares, their souls, their “story” on whatever platforms manifest success in likes and view counts.

In the face of so much frenzied curation and compulsory personal branding, how might a modern human maintain some iota of unshared selfhood, a soupçon of Greta Garbo mystique? (Even that legend is faulty; Garbo later insisted that she said not “I want to be alone” but “I want to be let alone,” a small but somehow critical distinction.)

The power of absence and refusal is perhaps more edifying in literature — see “The Stranger,” “The Quiet Man,” the brick-wall calm of I-would-prefer-not-to Bartleby — than in real life. Even within the two titles featured in this week’s newsletter, withdrawal can be confusing and cruel, sometimes quite literally maddening. But that tension is also what makes these narratives pulse and shimmer on the page.

I found both novels one late-winter evening in the English-language stacks of a pleasingly musty secondhand bookshop in Paris that looked like it wouldn’t know a branding opportunity if it kicked it in the cobblestones. Parfait.

—Leah