A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man by Pierce Day – PART TWO OF FOUR

READ PART ONE OF THIS FOUR PART REVIEW HERE

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man (Screenshot Books, 2024) is available from Metalabel

PART TWO: LITERATURE DIDN’T DIE WITH JAMES JOYCE

On the 30th April 2022, I made a significant pilgrimage.

I visited the grave of Marcel Proust.

Approaching the fattest I will likely ever be in my life (due to a combination of too much psychiatric medication prescribed by the over-zealous Canadian healthcare industry and getting free food from an Italian restaurant five days a week), I had taken to wearing tracksuits a lot of the time.

My favourite was a velour Adidas set, which I loved so much (still do!) that I saved it for special occasions.

I wore this tracksuit when I got legally married during the pandemic, I (later) wore it when visiting the lying-in-state of the dead British monarch, Elizabeth 2, and I wore it when I visited Literature’s most revered shrine: the grave of Marcel Proust.

My then-partner (also my now-partner) took a photo of me, squatting beside the grave in my purple Velour with clip-on Ray Ban sunglasses and one hand reverentially slapped atop Marcel’s granite (marble?) grave.

2 yrs since I paid respects 2 a real one 🙏🙏🙏😭😭🎻 pic.twitter.com/4lRlmAwQ9h

— scott manley hadley (@Scott_Hadley) April 30, 2024

This photograph has become a definitive literary image of me online, which – in combination with the angry, horny, urgent, angry, picaresque prose and poetry I wrote until my work became more contemplative and focused – leaves people who haven’t done much background checking on the 30-something scott manley hadley presuming I am very much still the literary lad I once was.

But I’m not.

Now, I don’t see complexity in literature as an inherent virtue.

Now – if anything – I see it as often an act of emotional repression… Complexity less as awe-inspiring intellectual flexing than as sign that someone is choosing to obfuscate meaning…

Modernist texts – and I have described A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man as Gen Z modernism when people have asked me about it – sought to find a way to express human consciousness and selfhood and lived experience in a new, ground-breaking, way. But while writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce committed to their ideas that textual complexity was paramount and their novels, essentially, escalated as their careers went on, there is a reason why the mainstream literary world moved on (with occasional modernist texts of varying success published since (some of Mathias Enard’s work, for example, is arguably more modernist than postmodernist and I’d say (in translation, at least) he’s the most interesting writer working today)).

The other lasting legacy of 1920s literacy is Hemingway, whose minimalist approach was arguably the opposite of Joyce.

Hemingway also didn’t say what he meant, emotionally, but he implied it. And he, too, has also wielded a mighty influence. And his work resonates more widely for a very simple reason: Hemingway isn’t trying to distract his readers with displays of his linguistic inventiveness. (He was trying to distract himself.)

Big words and big sentences don’t mean big ideas. Big words and big sentences mean big words and big sentences.

That’s not a big idea. But big ideas are not why people come to TriumphOfTheNow.com.

People come here because I am happy to expose myself as ignorant, as opinionated, and – often – as a fool.

And maybe I’m about to do that once again. But you’ll see. You’ll judge.

Let’s talk about the literary contexts of A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man at length.

–///–

Let’s start (we’re about 2,500 words in) with some positives.

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is a Joycean-inspired exploration of contemporary cultures, communications, economics, sexualities and ideologies that are theoretically explored through the conceit of a long-form [text] screen grab of a day in the life of an individual’s phone. That individual is Warhol, a young New Zealand management consultant who mainly works on government contracts, who’s single but not over his ex, who’s online too much and who has an unsteady sense of self.

This sounds like a cracking idea.

The idea of cataloguing the various ways in which technology begins and ends all interactions throughout a day, through which it becomes both a barrier and a membrane, is a genuinely interesting idea that offers the potential to be a potent commentary on contemporary life.

Pierce Day seems to have been equally inspired by James Joyce and “The Internet”, meaning that what often is an engaging, incredibly entertaining and witty exploration of the gaps and overlaps created in contemporary social interactions due to the over-reliance on technologically mediated interactions, does in some places, alas, become a disappointingly run-of-the-mill “death of the novel” type treatise on the state of contemporary literature, in comparison to the halcyon literary past…

Unlike those broadsheet articles that appear every time a literary greybeard has a new hardback to flog, though, this novel seems to believe that – other than a handful of critically acclaimed yet jokingly(?) dismissed female writers – no one has written anything worth reading (or anything that has been read!) since James Joyce (with the possible exception of Samuel Beckett).

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is full of references to writers and to writing, but all from a long time ago.

And many of the ways in which this contemporary version of Modernism lands reminded me of writers from the second half of the twentieth century who (unless I missed a sentence or two while reading) didn’t get the name-checks that I would have expected.

There are three names in particular that kept recurring in my mind as I read through this novel, writers who would have considered themselves innovators (and (mostly) were considered so by critics), yet – again, unless I missed a small reference – don’t appear.

Certainly, the only one who is still alive would probably be very offended to find out he’d been missed out of this, as he is someone who has sought online notoriety and pushed boundaries of acceptability in his writing and public persona, too.

This is a text that feels like it owes heaps to David Foster Wallace, Bret Easton Ellis and England’s own Martin Amis, possibly even more than it does to James Joyce and his contemporaries that the novel intentionally cites itself as in conversation with.

The book is structured like Ulysses, yes, and it repeats themes and ideas from Ulysses (there’s a chapter that’s basically Shakespeare criticism through dialogue, there’s a masturbation scene, though if there’s a shitting scene in here it’s written it such a way that I missed it)…

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has so many sections, each with a different style, theme and tone, that it often feels disjointed…

It doesn’t necessarily cohere as a concrete piece. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t elements – some styles, some themes, some tones – that really fucking work!

But, I think this doesn’t connect enough within itself to feel like a novel. It also never feels like a screenshot of a phone.

It is a stream of consciousness text that sometimes takes a form of dialogue, sometimes takes the form of poetry interspersed with descriptive writing…

There’s a lot of literary variety in here, much like, for example, BS Johnson’s long out of print debut novel, Travelling People. But much more like DFW’s short fiction collections.

I think what was most frustrating to me as I read through A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man was that there is a posture within it that what this book is doing is unique, but what it felt like to me was that it is trying to do the same things that David Foster Wallace did with his short fiction, that Bret Easton Ellis did with his chunky novels (Glamorama, Lunar Park, American Psycho) and that Martin Amis did in London Fields, and Money, which is to use a combination of metatextuality, structural and narrative playfulness and late-text (insincere?) pivots to sincerity to self-consciously create a text that is seeking to be everything to everyone. And, let’s be honest, sometimes that does work! And the settings may change, but the questions raised by these “men’s literary fiction” proponents haven’t changed for decades and the sociopolitical critiques of them remain the same.

(You could posit these questions about all of those books/oeuvres and this one: “Is it about sexism, or is it sexist? Is it about racism, or is it racist? Is it about modernism or is it modernist? Is it about intentionally obfuscatingly-structured literature or is it intentionally obfuscatingly-structured literature?)

The penultimate chapter of A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man, for example, is structured as the narrator-protagonist in dialogue with ChatGPT as he attempts to formulate an apology to a former lover he wronged several years before. In this dialogue, Warhol attempts to find a way to explain and expand his most meaningful regrets and feelings, but is unable to do so without recourse to generative AI language modelling.

There is, in this section, a hefty emotional resonance…

The book seems to slide towards a meaningful revelation on the way in which people are unable to communicate and to function without their reliance on technology…

We see, clearly, then, how technology builds a wall between people’s true feelings and their ability to express them.

Unfortunately, however, this chapter comes 350 pages into a consciously insincere text that is frequently and sneeringly dismissive of emotionality. Not only in what it says, but how it says what it says.

The way in which A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is constructed feels like an attempt to deny and to denigrate any sense of humanity and empathy…

This is what I mean in comparing it to the works of Amis and Ellis, there is a narratorial contempt, a… a… a… a… a… hatefulness… there is a sense of being outside of the bounds of repressive controls of “what you can and cannot say” that has basically characterised right-wing and centre-right art for decades and decades.

Warhol “speaks truth to power”. But he speaks “truth” to the unfortunate women he dates and to strangers he meets on the internet, and his “truths” tend to, again, be ideas and talking points that have characterised right-wing and centre-right opinion for decades…

Warhol as a character perpetuates the idea that the young white man is the only person who can truly see things how they are, man…

But that’s because that’s what it does fucking feel like, when you’re young and you’re smart and you’re still, somehow, unhappy…

As I mentioned in the first part of this four part review, that’s probably the thing that yokes me to this book. Its ideas and its statements echo. Echo. Echo.

But, yes, that also contributes to the idea of this being another example of a type of literature that I’ve seen before.

And, without acknowledging and understanding the more recent literary lads writing (women can be literary lads), there forms a kinda gap between intention of originality and execution.

I don’t think it’s possible to be more Brief interviews with hideous men than Brief interviews with hideous men…

I don’t think it’s possible to be more Money than Money…

I don’t think it’s possible to be more American Psycho than American Psycho…

This isn’t New Zealand Psycho, and nor is it trying to be, there’s no meaningful violence being perpetrated by the narrator, but there is lots of talk about economic violence and misogyny and there’s lots of slurs within the text (it’s been a very long time since I’ve read a novel by a white writer that has typed out what is politely known as “the n word”), and it’s choices like this which emphasise the idea that it is the novel itself, rather than Warhol, that sees itself as being a sort of saviour of literature…

But – sorry to get all scott manley wokey – if you’re a writer and you are typing slurs broadly considered unacceptable to type, it’s your fingers that have done that, not your narrator-protagonist and there is some kind of responsibility that needs to be taken for that.

(ins counter arg “Free speech”… “nothing should be off the table”??? […]
Why????)

That said, I don’t think this novel is simply something to be dismissed as centre-right scribblings. (And I am aware I am at risk of sounding preachy, too…)

There are some great jokes in here, there are really great lines in here, and some of the chapters work incredibly well on their own.

There’s one piece in particular, which is a real standout, that feels like a piece of…

it’s difficult to describe, but it feels like – and I mean this as a compliment, I really do – top-level David Foster Wallace, or very interesting and good contemporary poetry, and it bounces between the dialogue of people playing a game of Fortnite and descriptions of images of atrocities that are frequently seen online…

This chapter works incredibly well as a standout and standalone piece about the finality and inevitability of violence, about the ways in which people are desensitised to horrors, and the ways in which multiple generations of internet users have normalised seeing depictions of violence as entertainment and have lost a little (or a lot) of their souls along the way…

This chapter is genuinely excellent, genuinely interesting and formally playful and would work as a piece of short fiction on its own.

It’s one of the most spectacular and successful pieces of writing about the internet I’ve ever read. That sounds hyperbolic, but honestly that chapter is fucking brilliant. Concise and direct and clear and meaningful. Yes.

Unfortunately, though, with every chapter trying to do something different in a different way, not all of them do succeed. Though, it has to be said, the failures are interesting to experience, though there were definitely chapters I was relieved to have hit the end of…

BUT – and this is where I have to concede my criticisms are maybe not so valid – this is ambitious writing, which one has to praise. Because if writers aren’t fucking trying, what are they fucking doing?

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is a big project with big goals and big influences and big intentions.

It’s a balls out, dick swinging, piss jizzing piece of literary lads’ fiction (or possibly literary lad’s fiction (those are two different things)) that is seeking to rewrite and revaluate and recontextualise “the novel”.

But it’s not in conversation with recent modernisms, or even recent literary lads texts – there’s no mention of Percival Everett or Colson Whitehead or Karl Ove Knausgaard or Teju Cole or Brandon Taylor or Salman Rushie (maybe a quick reference to him getting attacked is in there, but I don’t remember for certain) or Hanif Kureshi or Geoff Dyer or BS Johnson or the three names mentioned above or even Cormac McCarthy (maybe Blood Meridian is there in passing?).

The only writers younger than Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield (Pierce Day is from New Zealand/Aotearoa so seems to have accepted her entry into the canon) who are mentioned repeatedly – and sneeringly – are Eleanor Catton, Sally Rooney and Sylvia Plath.

Of course, these are writers who are popular online, and popular with the kind of young women that Warhol dates in middle class urban Wellington (it was my understanding the whole novel takes place in Wellington, but mostly it is streets/regions/districts that provide geographic colour, so maybe the action does switch to Auckland at points (which I’ve been told is a more interesting city)), but this leaves a conspicuous and extended gap in the idea of the continuation of literature.

The kind of writing that Day’s text exalts still exists (hell, Penguin Random House announced a new Thomas Pynchon novel on 9th April 2025!), yet A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man is written as if it doesn’t, as if there hasn’t been a continuation of young white men with nothing cataclysmic to worry about trying to tear literary forms asunder as if they’re the first person to ever think of doing it.

But usually there’s some sense of continuity… Jonathan Franzen wanted to better David Foster Wallace who wanted to better Saul Bellow who wanted to better Norman Mailer who wanted to better…

…floppy-haired young-dumb scott manley hadley wanted to better Will Self who wanted to better Martin Amis who wanted to better BS Johnson who wanted to better Beckett who wanted to better Joyce who wanted to better etc etc etc who wanted to better etc who wanted to better etc etc etc who wanted to better Laurence Sterne who wanted to etc etc etc etc

It’s all there, as far back as literature goes…

But this novel exists as if that isn’t the case. As if Joyce came out of nowhere and literature died with him, almost a century ago. But, simply, it didn’t.

This lack of generosity to the movements and histories of 20th and 21st century literature is this novel’s biggest flaw.

But is it an unsurpassable flaw? That’s not for me to say.

Find out for yourself by ordering the book through this link:

A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man (Screenshot Books, 2024) is available from Metalabel

THIS CONTINUES TOMORROW [link will be added once Part 3 is live]