Where Are You Going (In A Robotaxi), Where Have You Been (In A Robotaxi)?
On Joanne McNeil's "Wrong Way" (and book clubs)
Hi all,
Today at The New Yorker I have a review of Joanne McNeil's "Wrong Way," by my count the first serious novel of this new era in which driverless cars aren't just imaginary objects, but instead real vehicles you can hail on American city streets. (How well these vehicles work is, as I note, an open question. But they're here.)
McNeil, a great writer of criticism about the Internet and the world it has made, plays cleverly with the fact that, even as these vehicles have arrived (become “real") they're still also in large part illusions/fictions. Here's the piece.
I've been interested in and writing about self-driving cars for several years now, but this is the first time I've been able to touch on the long and influential history of self-driving cars in fiction and movies.
Later today I’m Zooming into a meeting of a book club that read Planes. I love Zooming into book clubs meetings. Getting reviewed is extremely gratifying, but reviews—by their nature and for good reason—tend to be written mostly from a few miles up: the plot, the themes, the overall approach. In books club meetings, people are free to be a few miles up one second, and right down in the dirt the next, making observations and asking questions about very specific moments: this line of dialogue, that description of a meal, the scene narrated on page 111, the scene implied-but-not-narrated between page 200 and 201.
For me, getting looped into those conversations has the wonderful effect of making the book feel alive and interesting again—but without creating any need for me to work on it anymore. That’s a very sweet sweet spot.
Invite me to your book club! Recommend me to your book-club-participant friends!
Bye,
—Peter