Over the course of a year working for a legal news publication, I wrote over 700 stories covering employment litigation, which meant I professionally eavesdropped on hundreds of peoples’ work lives. I wrote news updates on deadline with headlines like “Rush Medical Center Inks $2.95M Deal To End ERISA Suit” and “Auto Co. Must Face Most Of Worker’s Leave Bias Case.” My conversations with workers at the center of these lawsuits were mostly non-existent, and my conversations with their lawyers were primarily information-seeking—evading corrections, ensuring accuracy, requesting perspective on the filing’s newsworthiness.
I wasn’t a natural fit for this job, which required a speed and desire to break news that I didn’t have, and I found it difficult to stop thinking about certain plaintiffs after I filed my stories. When reporting, I found myself most concerned with the gap between the information I had access to, which was always strange and specific, and what exigent details wound up in my online clips. No one cared about exactly how many employees worked at a McDonald’s franchise in western Michigan, how many hours a week a plaintiff billed for the law firm they were suing, or what nickname they went by in the office, but this was all information I could have. Where would all of that be catalogued if I didn’t record it? And how different would my stories be had I been able to write something that encompassed all of it?
Cora Lewis’s novella Information Age might be that answer—a portrait of American life on the precipice of a paradigm-shifting election, of the particular ethos of digital media when the apparatus seemed unstoppable, and of life in New York City, told through a series of vignettes relayed by a digital news reporter in her 20s.
“What’s the difference between public and private information?” someone asks a reporter at a journalism event in the book. “Private information is harder to transmit,” the reporter answers. “It’s what’s said between people in rooms.” The unnamed protagonist of Lewis’s novel is our conduit through both public and private information, eavesdropping in its many rooms. She reports for a website that sounds a lot like BuzzFeed News (where Lewis wrote before her current job at the Associated Press), and works as both a general assignment reporter and on the campaign trail during an election that sounds a lot like Donald Trump’s first.
“I’m a half-decade in now, at the online outlet,” our narrator says at the outset of the book. “I can summarize in no-time-flat the day’s virtual controversy or substantive outrage. When I do it just right, hundreds of thousands of people click.” From there, the book unfolds in a series of fragments like this that could easily be daily news updates or stanzas written by the narrator’s poet roommate. “This morning I know the speed of the winds in Texas and the direction the California Santa Ana’s are driving the fires—134 MPH, SW,” our narrator notes. “From my New York desk, I monitor whorl and flames, tuning in to pressers.”
Our narrator reports these missives from cross-country stops on the campaign trail as often as from her Brooklyn apartment. Her job has, comically, made her attuned to hearing everything as a quote: When her roommate tells a friend’s parent their son is “a good egg,” the narrator notes that the stately “European academic” father responded: “my son is not an egg.” In Arizona to cover a campaign stump speech, she sees a snake and scorpion; twin omens, poison lurking. “Sounds right,” a photographer tells her. “Anything alive in Arizona doesn’t want you to be.”
Throughout this novella, we watch our narrator watching other people. We follow her on work assignments, on deli runs and family trips, through the heady beginning of a situationship, and as she wrestles with what it might mean to have a child in the future. It’s a pleasure to listen along; often, Lewis sounds like Alice Notley or Joanne Kyger, whose poetry of daily life was just as likely to incorporate pedestrian, particular details—for example, name-checking the Krystal Oxygen Company or the Philadelphia Flower Show— as they might invoke the air or the ocean. Through the accrual of these observations and blog-like vignettes, a loose story takes shape: of a young woman attempting to figure out how to live and work in a shifting world, as it becomes clear that the structures that defined previous generations no longer exist, and might not be replaced. Slowly, we realize this is a book about this sense of structurelessness. For most of the characters of Information Age, the defining characteristic of their world is that no part of their lives has a definite outline.
As such, the relationships in the novella are boundaryless and prone to slippages; friends turn into lovers, roommates turn into friends, co-workers turn into lovers, and roommates turn into co-workers. The narrator’s situationship ends, begins again, then ends again; she dates around, finding most relationships lacking a recognizable timeline. “We’re aiming, both of us, at idiosyncrasy,” she says of one lover. “We circle verbally, inventing, haphazardly, devil-may-care attitudes to match. Some rejection of trajectories expected.”
Occasionally, this boundarylessness is made literal. In a classic arrangement of urban millennial transience, the apartment the protagonist shares with an old friend is home to a “revolving-door series of third roommates,” filing in and out to take the spare room. To each other, the roommates are amorphous beings: “gestures and remnants between subway rides and nights out and all our 9-to-5’s, plus overtime, always extending.” The newest roommate, a poet named Susannah, has an amorphous work life of her own—she’s supplementing her poetry by working in e-commerce support, a job that requires odd hours and for her workplace to double as her apartment. For her too, art and work blur into each other. She reads poems to the narrator “between consumer complaints about late orders, shoe sizes, and bunions,” which seem just as surreal as her poetry. The narrator’s reporting job is not immune from this blurriness either. Unlike a gig in traditional news media, her job reporting for the internet allows her to write on everything from mudslides in the Midwest to wildfires in Glacier Park. It’s exhilarating, but also alienating: She feels far from people on the ground, she notes; calling local authorities every day doesn’t make her feel any closer.
Towards the end of the novella, Susannah tells the narrator that “our future selves will remember our current selves as ‘free,’” —unbeholden, she says, without children or partners. This freedom seems to strike the narrator in different moments in the book as both generative and daunting, fitting for a novella about digital journalism set a few years before BuzzFeed News shuttered and mass layoffs became the norm, and before the 2016 election threw the country’s image of itself into sharp relief.
There are two shifts that mark the end of Information Age: a layoff, and an election. In this novel, as in life, the “celebrity candidate” will win the election, and the not-BuzzFeed News will cull significant portion of its workforce before shutting down.
When the narrator is let go from her reporting job, her untethered lifestyle starts to feel unpleasantly unhinged. She describes herself as being “thrown back on the structureless present,” suddenly required to find new healthcare on the marketplace and grasp back some stability. “Between healthcare and rent, my savings will be knocked out in weeks,” she notes.
In its meditation on daily life in the middle of the last decade, Information Age delineates the qualities and quirks of this time period, and reflects their shifts. While it’s difficult to distinguish exactly how much of the United States’ current authoritarian hellscape can be attributed to Trump (or the Overton window his election widened), what is certain is that, for the milieu described in Information Age, Trump’s first term marked a period of disenchantment with the ethos of possibility and progress that marked the early 2010s. Those of us who were young at the same time as the characters in Lewis’s novella started to question, if we hadn’t already: what parts of our delirious, hazy freedom—from a corporate 9-5, from a house, from expectations around matrimony and children, from a pre-planned future—were actually freedom, and what parts were just examples of our powerlessness that we imbued with undue nostalgia?
We can’t know quite yet, and might not for some time. But there’s something to be said for resisting the imposition of repressive structures on principle—and for literature that creates new patterns of organizing information, and that opens the door for new ways to think and new ways to live.
Rachel Stone
Rachel Stone works as a fact checker at New York Magazine. She is a recent graduate of the NYU MFA Program in Creative Writing, where she received a Goldwater Fellowship to study and teach poetry. Her work can be found online in The New Republic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, and other publications.