It’s Not Delivery: Against Frictionless Fiction
Peter Mendelsund | The Delivery | FSG | February 2021 | 304 Pages
Sean Thor Conroe | Fuccboi | Little, Brown and Company | January 2022 | 303 Pages
In the realm of UX design, the phrase “frictionless experience” is more than an overused trope. It’s a minimalist ideal, North Star of the ascendant movement known as “flat design.” An optimal interface is one which users can navigate instinctively, without effort or forethought; to build friction into an interface is to risk hemorrhaging users to more hospitable competitors. Friction is tantamount to revenue loss, and in light of this common sense, the crusade against friction can be detected in all corners of the service economy. Netflix slayed Blockbuster by eliminating the friction of moving your body from your home to the video store; food delivery services like Grubhub and the aptly-named Seamless removed the friction of searching for individual restaurants offering takeout. Against this backdrop, it was only a matter of time before the gospel of flat design spread to the publishing industry. But what does “frictionless experience” look like in book form?
Two pandemic-era novels offer a clue: The Delivery by Peter Mendelsund and Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe. Incidentally, both novels feature bicycle couriers or “delivery boys” as protagonists, and both are written in a breezy shorthand, eschewing paragraphs in favor of line breaks, scenes in favor of vignettes, heft in favor of lightness. A most suggestive coincidence: Is this an intentional effect, form mirroring content? Is it a commentary on our friction-averse economy, with its predilection for efficiency over everything? What, in deconstructive terms, ought we to read between all these freestanding lines? What are the delivery boys made to carry, beyond pocket change, clamshelled Pad Thai, and outsourced impatience?
Could it be that the fragmentary style is pure expediency, delivering us from the burden of reading paragraphs (those bulky, outmoded contraptions, lines lined up like the bars of a cage)? We are all readers here, but we are also digital natives with attention deficits, tweety birds leery of entrapment; how often do we crack open an old book only to find ourselves repelled by its sheer density? By contrast, rhythmic line breaks and ample whitespace allow the eye to coast along breezily, as if boosted by the same sort of power-assist mechanism Mendelsund’s unnamed delivery boy relies on while biking his unnamed metropolis. The back half of that novel sees the power-assist sputter and fail, and this failure coincides with a shift to longer, more traditional paragraphs, dense with descriptive imagery. The shift is as jarring for the reader as it is for the hapless protagonist. A few pages in, my attention flagged; several times I caught myself putting the book down and picking up my phone. Upon returning (sheepishly) to the page, I felt as if Mendelsund were critiquing me, his would-be critic. All that whitespace had coddled me, swaddled me like a duvet, and now that it came time to buckle down and plow through actual paragraphs, I found myself fighting an uphill battle against my own lethargy. It seemed like the kind of trick the mischievous author of What We See When We Read might play on his reader.
Mendelsund, the creative director of The Atlantic, is best known for his dazzling book cover designs. Looking across the room at my bookshelf, I can spy his handiwork on handsome reissues of Kafka, Sebald, and Calvino. The highbrow influences are as evident in Mendelsund’s prose as they are in his designs; add in his training as a classical pianist, and we have ourselves a genuine homme de lettres. Conroe, by contrast, is a rising star whose slangy middlebrow style critics have alternately extolled and inveighed against, a recent MFA grad whose reputation has already been slimed by Sam Pink’s allegations of copycatting. As stylists, Conroe and Mendelsund couldn’t be more dissimilar, yet both undertake the same gambit. The question is: to what end? Is this eschewal of paragraphs anything more than a ploy to woo an increasingly aliterate public?
I’ll grant that the delivery boy is a generative archetype, an astute choice when seen from a historical materialist perspective, not so much protagonist as prole-tagonist, caught up in the proverbial capitalist gears. In the late nineteenth century, the bicycle emerged as bellwether of a new era of efficiency in American manufacturing. Bicycle factories were pre-Fordist innovators in the principles of the assembly line, and the bicycle courier represents a very rudimentary kind of cyborg, with cycle and cyclist forming “one combined mechanism,” as Maria E. Ward put it in her 1896 guide, Bicycling for Ladies. For the delivery boy, the bicycle is an ambivalent vehicle, carrier of contradictory meanings, for as much as it represents free motion, individuality, and autonomy, the two-wheeler’s more immediate “signified" is the hamster wheel of wage labor. Indeed, both novels do an adequate job evoking the drudgery of gig work, but if immersion in drudgery were the aim, why not go the way of Kafka in his story The Burrow, burying us up to our necks in pinched and airless passages?
Instead, Conroe and Mendelsund veer towards the opposite extreme. It seems we need a new word for these bitesize sections, which aren’t quite paragraphs (“The Supervisor had been away. She was looser. More relaxed.”) and sometimes aren’t sentences, either (“Customer ten.”). I like to think of them as minigraphs. They are the building blocks of a streamlined reading experience, one redolent less of poetry than of posts on LinkedIn, where paragraphs are increasingly seen as faux pas, excessively taxing on the reader and thus less effective at driving engagement. According to this mentality, reading is a necessary evil, an imperfect conduit of information to the brain—one prone, like overburdened food couriers, to aggravating delays.
At an office job in the late 2010s, I experimented with a speed-reading app called Spritz, which fed every word of a text through a single point onscreen, thereby obsolescing eye movement. Freed from the burden of panning my eyes back and forth across the page, I was able to scarf down imposing Atlantic articles in record time (as to whether my reading retention suffered: I’m afraid I can’t remember). Spritz is described on the Readsy website as a “tool to help you skim large amounts of text.” Skimming does seem the appropriate verb. Reading, after all, often entails doubling back or pausing to savor a particularly delicious morsel of text. Spritz, by contrast, recalls Netflix’s autoplay feature, which liberates the weary binger from the friction of lifting the remote off the couch to click “Next Episode.”
Minigraphs are not invitations to skim. On the contrary, they could be seen as hedges against inattentive reading. If bulky paragraphs are, for many readers, a form of hostile architecture, then minigraphs are like airport autowalks; a way of speeding the reader along. Yet this magnanimity on the part of the author could also be read as condescension, a form of coddling that does the reader no favors. Mendelsund himself, when asked by an interviewer to name one book everyone should read, touted Ulysses on account of its fabled difficulty. Set against that mountain of a novel, the Everest of twentieth-century modernism, The Delivery looks like a bunny slope. If each novel schools its reader in how it ought to be read, then Mendelsund seems to presuppose a reader who requires a fair bit of handholding. The “ideal reader” of yore is nowhere to be found, a tiny Waldo engulfed by a technicolor crowd.
Fuccboi and The Delivery seem to be premised on a cynical understanding of the twenty-first century experience of time. In place of an ideal reader, minigraphs posit an addled reader capable of reading only in quick spurts between subway stops, Zoom meetings, or key bumps of digital content. Of the two novels, Mendelsund’s is the more anxious about this sorry state of affairs. The Delivery’s minigraphs are separated by horizontal lines which, like the ticks of a clock, split time into intelligible subunits. Mendelsund's hero, in his constant race against the clock, has an adversarial relationship to time; he is most at ease when running ahead of it, as when he sits daydreaming on the curb above a storm drain glugging a stream of runoff. The novel’s metafictional denouement, with its sudden swell of paragraphs and Proustian run-ons, represents an attempt to escape from this lifeless, regimented time—yet it registers as a failed attempt, however heroic. No hope, in this book, of time regained in the Proustian sense.
Perhaps we should applaud these two novelists for giving form to the ambient time crunch we now inhabit. Everywhere we look, we see evidence of time’s scarcity. Getir, a Turkish delivery startup, recently launched a campaign in New York City promising grocery delivery in ten minutes or less. Quibi, the ill-fated shortform streaming service, sought to change the game with a mobile-centric, commuter-friendly alternative to Netflix and co. While Quibi fell far short of its lofty ambitions, the impulse towards shortform has its share of success stories. High Maintenance, the web series turned HBO mainstay, began as five to ten-minute webisodes. Each episode introduces new characters and new vignettes, with the sole connecting thread being a bicycle-riding weed guy known only as “The Guy,” who functions as a turnstile for the disparate dramas of his many clients. This brilliant central conceit allows the show to spin up a dioramic view of life in New York (or at least, certain segments of certain boroughs). Ben Sinclair’s Guy is no working-class everyman: he's a bearded, balding, hipster white dude with scant resemblance to the majority of couriers New Yorkers encounter on a daily basis—immigrant men sporting cuboid backpacks, pedaling at breakneck speed, dodging Ubers, traffic tickets, and dismal labor conditions. But he serves his purpose in persuading viewers to invest their attention, however briefly, in characters and narratives they might otherwise ignore. Like a well-tended community garden, the show has grown over the years, its episodes expanding in runtime. Here we see shortform as something other than expediency: shortform as courtship, invitation, a gateway drug to longer, more leisurely engagements.
The Delivery seems eager to effect a similar seduction, yet its contradictory motives defeat one another. The author cannot orchestrate the reader’s deliverance from all-consuming distraction; the reader must accomplish this on her own time. The “product” literature aims to deliver cannot be express-shipped; it thrives on slowness, on quiescence, on accidental cessations of time. Mendelsund’s book does achieve moments of sublimity, but only once he allows himself to lapse into longform, to string clauses and sentences together, to write rather than merely jot. I found myself wishing he’d written the whole book that way. As for Fuccboi, I’ll restrain myself to noting that it’s a book we can’t begin to imagine in paragraph form; here, form and content are as inextricable as beat and bar.
In an era when stories are increasingly captioned rather than written, flat design’s incursion into the literary realm can hardly come as a surprise. For publishers, it’s a godsend; for royals-turned-memoirists, it’s a hot new trend to jump on; and for consumers of audiobooks, the shift may not even be audible. But for most bibliophiles, the prospect of novels coming to resemble LinkedIn posts, or podcasts, or tweets, fosters a sense of dread. Friction is a point of pride for readers, after all. In its absence, we’re only streamers.