The best books about touching the reality of modern life

Patricia Lockwood’s novel catches the weird rhythms of our digital lives, exploring the ways our jokes and observations and obsessions swirl around in the collective mind of social media. She is brilliantly funny on the contortions and kinks of our online language. No writer is better at skewering the neuroses behind a meme, the irony of hashtags, and documenting the subtle ways our own realities get filtered through the profane and wonderful prism of the internet. This is an obscene and hilarious book with a tender, tragic heart.

I was stunned when I read Barthes’s book on photography! His primary question in this short work is why photographs affect him in ways different from other art forms. He finds a new language to describe how they hit his nervous system and provoke his emotions. While Barthes figures out the mysterious aura of old images, we begin to learn how they affect us as well. This is a beautiful, erotic work about suspended moments in time, as well as an elegy for loved ones preserved in this haunted medium. 

Andrew O’Hagan is a contemporary master of the literary essay, and in this book we have three long non-fiction pieces linked by his investigations into the online world. O’Hagan was the ghostwriter for Julian Assange’s doomed autobiography, and here he tells the story of this adventure – it’s a publisher’s nightmare but a dream for the psychoanalyst, as the line between Assange’s invented self and the reality of his life begins to collapse. The other two essays also explore mercurial identities online, with a portrait of the rumored, shadowy inventor of Bitcoin, and the brief life of a Frankensteinian amalgam of O’Hagan’s own making – a cyber-persona who has an address, a credit card, and who can buy drugs on the Dark Web. O’Hagan even manages to meet his creation’s mother.  

I go to Ben Lerner’s writing for the shimmering atmospheres of his fictional universes. 10:04 is set in contemporary New York City and follows the narrator-writer through his urban routines. But between his health scares, relationship worries, and professional commitments, the novel thrums with a strange, uneasy beat as the narrator questions the fabric of modern life in a large city. He feels the sublime abundance of the commodities that surround him, whose very abundance is precarious. The book meditates on the fragility of the global supply chains that bring cans of ground coffee onto supermarket shelves and into our baskets. There is also a superstorm approaching, which threatens the city’s power. Lerner is wonderful on twenty-first-century, first-world malaise.

If you like thinking about moments when we’re able to touch the pulse of reality, Virginia Woolf is your friend. Her novels aim to “go deeper” into the submerged lives of her characters, to imagine what it felt like for them to sit in a room, thinking of someone they used to know, watching a tree’s branches through the window swaying in the storm, all while trying to hold on to a coherent sense of themselves as people in the world. To The Lighthouse is a masterpiece within this bigger project, set largely in just two days in the life of the Ramsay family, in their seaside house. Within this narrow plot, human experiences detonate with blazing beauty, leaving you with a feeling of exquisite sadness for the passing moment.