What are we reading anyway?

My eternal gripe with the smartphone age is that collective humanity seems to have taken a secret vow to not read anything anymore. Tl;dr (too long; didn't read) increasingly looks like the motto of all of us smartphone-toting people. Publications are pivoting to video and it makes sense because studies say an average human being checks his phone at least 150 times a day. Binge-watching is a badge of honour, while binge-reading seems like an archaic practice these days, like having a Rediff mail account.

In such dire times, the incessant social media discourse and the flurry of think pieces on a New Yorker short story gives me immense hope for the world. The story titled “Cat Person” was a worldwide Twitter trend and that's definitely a first for a short story. For the ones untouched by its magic, the story is essentially about a teenage girl (Margot) indulging in awkward sex with a 30-something guy (Robert) whom she pursues initially only to ghost on him and the story ends with him texting her an obscenity.

Thanks to the way her story lit the internet on fire, writer Kristen Roupenian landed a seven-figure US book deal. Looking at the divided reactions to the story on social media, my conclusion is that people barely read any fiction and this must have been the only work of fiction most people read in 2017.

In her cerebral piece in The Atlantic, Olga Khazan wrote why the story is resonating hard with women and how it captures the zeitgeist like a genie in the bottle, “In this #MeToo moment, it went expectedly viral, by revealing the lengths women go to in order to manage men’s feelings, and the shaming they often suffer nonetheless.”

Photo: istock

Is the story worth the hype? Not completely. It has oodles of body shaming in it and it's hard to empathise with Margot because she's the typical millennial who wants validation of her life choices from her friends. The way the story was getting set up, it was made easy for Margot to let go of Robert. His belly fat is mentioned multiple times and his body weight is spoken about in unflattering terms as well.

The writing is less than dazzling. It's very paint-by-numbers and gets stupendously dull quite a few times. It's not even a very original story. Almost all of contemporary fiction coming out of Brooklyn has dollops of bad sex, something John Updike, Philip Roth and Joan Didion had set in motion back in the day, and it is only getting a Snapchat twist to it nowadays.

But there are delightful parts that seem filched from the journal of every girl who decided to have a one-night stand: “When she was on top, he slapped her thigh and said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you like that,’ with an intonation that made it impossible to tell whether he meant it as a question, an observation, or an order.”

There's a streak of nihilism that makes Cat Person indisputably powerful but confusing as well. Here's what happens after Robert finishes his business:

“What do you want to do now?” he asked her.

“We should probably just kill ourselves,” she imagined saying, and then she imagined that somewhere, out there in the universe, there was a boy who would think that this moment was just as awful yet hilarious as she did, and that sometime, far in the future, she would tell the boy this story.

You don't feel like investing in the characters because the primary character is not invested fully herself. The brouhaha over this story makes one hopeful that people will seek more such stories, albeit ones that are more humane and I have a list of writers for that express purpose: Garth Greenwell, Richard Price, Sheila Heti, Myriam Gurba, Lydia Davis, Adelle Waldman, Tao Lin, Ben Lerner, Jenny Offill, Marie Calloway.

Twitterati immediately drew life-imitating-art parallels with “Cat Person” the moment it came to light that actor-comedian Aziz Ansari had a near-consummation with someone he didn't even feel like asking for full consent. Roupenian deserves more power for making a synecdoche out of a short story that will outlast the currently oversexed world.