SOCIAL MEDIA
MAKES US ALL OPEN BOOKS, SAYS AUTHOR AND STORY TWEETER ARJUN BASU.
“We’re all open books now. Literally.” Arjun Basu is talking about the brave new world of social media and the role it plays in his new novel, but the subject has a way of spreading in all directions. Waiting for the Man (ECW, 294 pp, $24.95) is the story of a 35-year-old New York advertising executive whose creeping dissatisfaction with his life leads him to surrender himself to a mysterious guru/conscience figure — the Man of the book’s title — and embark on a quixotic odyssey that ends up at a high-end ranch retreat in Montana, accruing a media circus and mass following along the way; the novel also functions as an eloquent inquiry and sharp critique into how the culture of compulsive sharing is affecting everyone.
“Our narratives are out there now,” Basu told me last week. “Everyone is on Facebook and Twitter and blogging and this and that, and people we don’t even know are reacting to those narratives. It’s a cliché maybe, but everyone is a publisher now.”
Basu, as his biography reveals, knows of what he speaks. The 46-year-old Mile End resident, born shortly after his parents immigrated from Calcutta (“I guess you could call me an Expo baby,” he said), grew up in N.D.G. and Côte St-Luc. After completing a degree in creative writing and film at Concordia, he worked as an editor at Tundra Books for five years, then for Air Canada’s inflight magazine enRoute as editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2007. He is now content director at the marketing agency Spafax.
Through all that time, he has written: His first book, the story collection Squishy, was published in 2008, and he is something of a phenomenon in the Twittersphere, where his 140-word Twisters stories have drawn a huge following.
“You don’t write just be- cause you want to,” he said of his literary vocation. “You sort of have to. But I never believed in the starving artist routine, so working for book publishers and magazines was a nice way to keep me happy career-wise without feeling like I was damaging my soul or something.”
The temptation to read the new novel’s media-savvy hero, Joe, as a stand-in for the media-savvy author should be resisted. Like Joe, Basu is the first-generation son of South Asian immigrants, but as it turns out, the similarity pretty much ends there. Where Joe’s parents buy fully into the American suburban dream and expect their son to do the same, Basu’s — his father is a semi-retired engineer, his mother a former professional dancer and dance tutor — weren’t the kind to force anything on their two kids. (Arjun’s brother, Arpon, is well known to local sports fans for his broadcasting work at CTV and is managing editor at NHL.com, where he writes about the Montreal Canadiens.)
“My parents were very easygoing and very supportive,” he said. “They were the types who would indulge your indulgences and your interests. If one year I was interested in one thing, my dad would start buying books about that. I was never pushed. If I did badly in school, which happened sometimes, I wasn’t punished for it. They never imposed anything. For them, it was about happiness.”
That last word is one that crops up a few times in our conversation. A kind of shadow theme in the novel is privilege: Joe’s existential crisis is something he can act upon at least partly because, as a well-rewarded urban professional, he’s got the luxury to. But Basu was thinking more of the self-fulfillment clause in the American constitution.
“A few people have already mentioned (privilege), which is interesting,” Basu said. “The character happens to come from a relatively good place — he’s successful, and everyone around him is relatively successful as well. But I didn’t set out to talk about privilege so much as the pursuit of happiness. There’s a sort of drifter malaise. Joe’s not satisfied with his life. That’s his conflict, that he’s not happy and he knows he should be. And then there’s the fact that he doesn’t really escape. He embarks on this journey toward a place that’s maybe not so different from the place he left.”
Another source of dramatic tension in the novel comes from Joe’s decidedly mixed feelings about what he does for a living. He’s a master at it, to the degree that he can market an Irish beer under the name Berlin, but his long list of marketing coups makes it no easier for him to negotiate the fine line between disdain for what he’s selling and respect — however grudging — for the people doing the buying.
“Joe’s an adman through and through,” Basu said, “and advertisers and marketers have to respect the consumer. For one thing, if they don’t, the consumer is going to smell it. For another, that’s who ultimately earns you your paycheque. And however you might feel
“Modern life in so many ways is about selling ourselves People have become salespeople for their own brand.” ARJUN BASU, AUTHOR OF WAITING FOR THE MAN
about (sales), you have to respect it because really, it’s what we all do. Modern life in so many ways is about selling ourselves, more so than we’ve ever had to. People have become salespeople for their own brand. It goes way beyond celebrities.”
For readers of a certain age, Waiting for the Man (the title was inspired by Lou Reed’s song on the first Velvet Underground album) might well bring to mind Jerzy Kosinski’s novel Being There, whose hero Chauncey Gardiner, immortalized on screen by Peter Sellers, had a blank but accommodating charisma that enabled him to be all things to all people. Joe is a far more worldly figure than the innocent Chauncey, but his willingness to surrender himself makes him a kindred spirit. As for the Man, he (it?) is part Beckett’s Godot and part quasi-Messiah figure, albeit one who is apparently only visible to one person. Read as allegory, I posit, the book is likely to inspire all kinds of interpretations.
“Oh, I’m prepared for responses and interpretations right across the spectrum. Some people might love it, some might hate it. I just hope not everybody hates it,” Basu said with a laugh. “But I think any writer would tell you that the minute this happens (he points to the book on the table between us), it’s not theirs anymore. You’ve done your job and now it’s the reader’s turn.”
While he waits for the reviews and responses to roll in, Basu can always distract himself with tweeting. He was an early adopter of the medium, drawn by its spontaneity and enforced brevity. “It allowed me the chance to sort of go away somewhere for a minute,” he recalled of his first forays. “As writers we get thousands of thoughts in our head every day, and most of them just vanish, but some of them stick around, and this is a way to record those.”
Does he find himself crafting his tweets? “No. I don’t want to sound flippant, but I don’t put a lot of work into it. If something doesn’t come quickly then I just leave it alone. What it has done for me is that now, if I get a (writing) idea in my head, I can tell pretty quickly if it’s going to work or not. So it’s a notebook, but it’s also a kind of idea factory, and that’s how I use it.”
As for charting possible future trends in social media, Basu has a handy case study right under his nose: his 14-year-old son. “He’s kind of post-email, and not much into Facebook,” Basu said. “What kids his age are into, I find, is the temporary stuff: Snap Chat, instant messaging, things that go away.”
So are all the doomsayers decrying an evermore atomized population perhaps mistaken? “I think so. You’ll notice that people who work in the digital content industry are always having meetings and conventions. It’s because they need and crave that contact. My son and his friends, they often will just go hang out in the park. We did that when we were kids, but then it stopped. But now it’s back. They’ll do it in any weather, just so they can meet. That basic need for real human contact will always be there.”
One of Canada’s most vital literary and cultural organs is bringing out an issue devoted to Montreal. Canadian Notes and Queries No. 89, guest-edited by Marko Sijan, gathers poems, essays and interviews from 14 emerging and established Montrealbased artists, including Norm Sibum, Elisabeth Gill, Asa Boxer, Donald McGrath, Robert Melançon, Trevor Ferguson and Robyn Sarah. All of the above will be reading at CNQ’s free-admission Biblioasis-presented launch, emceed by Sijan, at The Word Bookstore, 469 Milton St., Wednesday, at 7:30 p.m. Refreshments and snacks will be available.