I put Anthropica on my Amazon List a bit ago, due to my previous interest in the Dead Rabbits/Animal Riot podcast and publishing house. I received it for Christmas this past year.

David Hollander is a skilled writer, and he has a literary style which paradoxically produces long, Faulknerian sentences, yet the chapters seem short. This is because, despite the careening quality of the prose, very little seems to happen in a given chapter. A woman rides a train. A young man is dropped off at a house. A guy crunches numbers on a project after a long day at work while his wife screws some hot young stud in the bedroom.

Interspersed with this, computers/sentient AI have conversations with each other. They seem to have, within the context of being computers, personalities.

I know all this is going somewhere, yet reading further feels like a chore.

It’s a shame to recognize artistry and yet find oneself unable to enjoy it. The effect somehow misses the mark. I’m not sure if it’s the style, which aims at sucking the viewer in to the characters’ stream of consciousness, or if it’s the fact that the characters all kind of mesh together, despite their surface-level diversity. Sure, there’s a frustrated novelist/aging adjunct professor with a father in an iron-lung, and there’s a grad student who plays Ultimate Frisbee and is working on a formula for what he calls the God Fractal in between egotistical collapses, and there’s a Hungarian who wants everyone in the world to kill themselves, because reasons, and there’s the guy whose wife taunts him with her lovers (she only cuckolds him when he’s around) who’s orca-fat from a steady diet of junk food and who’s crunched the numbers and determined that the world runs out of resources every eight days yet somehow there’s always more. Oh, and the guy who’s dying. He’s… dying.

These people are all drawn with specific details and emotional flows that feel very real, yet despite this there’s a through line running through all of it: Post-Modern Middle-Class Anxiety. Everything is going wrong and trending towards death. Everyone is miserable and lost and the machine rolls on maddeningly defiant of physical objectivity. It doesn’t take very long for the novelty to wear off, and the plot doesn’t move fast enough to overcome this. In fact, at this point, somewhere north of 150 pages in, I’m not really sure what the plot really is. Something about humanity and the planet.

It’s a slog. Which may be the intended effect. I hope it is. And maybe when I finish it I’ll be glad I did. Maybe the torrents of details converge together like a literary tornado and my mind will be blown away. If it does, I’ll admit it.

But right now, I’ve been fighting to read this thing for chapters. I don’t know if I’m going to continue.