Plastic
Ratings1
Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
For fans of Interior Chinatown and American War, a surreal, hilarious, and sneakily profound debut novel that casts our current climate of gun violence and environmental destruction in a surprising new mold. "A stunningly brilliant novel. One of those books that will follow you around, into your dreams and your daily life. You have never read anything like it." —Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book Erin is a plastic girl living in a plastic world. Every day she eats a breakfast of boiled chicken, then conveys her articulated body to Tablet Town, where she sells other figurines Smartbodies: wearable tech that allows full, physical immersion in a virtual world, a refuge from real life’s brutal wars, oppressive governmental monitoring, and omnipresent eco-terrorist insurgency. If you cut her, she will not bleed—but she and her fellow figurines can still be cracked or blown apart by gunfire or bombs, or crumble away from nuclear fallout. Erin, who's lost her father, sister, and the love of her life, certainly knows plenty about death. An attack at her place of work brings Erin another too-intimate experience, but it also brings her Jacob: a blind figurine whom she comforts in the aftermath, and with whom she feels an almost instant connection. For the first time in years, Erin begins to experience hope—hope that until now she's only gleaned from watching her favorite TV show, the surrealist retro sitcom “Nuclear Family.” Exploring the wild wonders of the virtual reality landscape together, it seems that possibly, slowly, Erin and Jacob may have a chance at healing from their trauma. But then secrets from Erin's family's past begin to invade her carefully constructed reality, and cracks in the facade she's constructed around her life threaten to reveal everything vulnerable beneath. Both a crypto-comedic dystopian fantasy and a deadly serious dissection of our own farcical pre-apocalypse, Scott Guild’s debut novel is an achingly beautiful, disarmingly welcoming, and fabulously inventive look at the hollow core of modern American society—and a guide to how we might reanimate all its broken plastic pieces.
Reviews with the most likes.
I've been excited about Plastic for a long time and checked it out at the library as soon as it was released, but for whatever reason (aka I'm dumb), I didn't start it right away. In fact, I even had to renew the borrow once before I got to it. I'm kicking myself now because once I started it, I could not stop. I devoured this book and I loved it.
Plastic takes a futuristic, dystopian look at climate change and gun violence through an extremely surreal lens with plenty of dark humor.
This book is extremely unique. The chapters are structured as if they are episodes of a TV show, but it makes sense in the context of the book. The figurines talk in what feels at first like a sort of dumbed-down way. If you've ever seen that episode of the American version of The Office where Kevin starts talking strangely and he says “Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick,” it's very much like that. It's strange at first, but easy to get used to as it's really just faster communication. Our way of speaking is even referred to as “old-fashioned dialect,” indicating that this is just the way english has evolved over time.
Sometimes you're reminded that the figurines are made of plastic in the silliest ways, for example when two of them kissed and “their hard lips graze each other's, a scratchy sound of plastic brushing plastic,” a line that pulled me back to my childhood, smushing Barbie faces together to make them kiss. Honestly, the fact that they're plastic and the ways in which they live their plastic lives is a huge reason to read the book because the way Scott Guild translates everything from human body to plastic body is so interesting and fun. But it's just one of many deep themes to consider. While the world within the book was plastic, it mirrored our own possible future so well that it gives the reader a lot to think about.
There's also Plastic: The Album, which tells the story of Plastic through song, like a musical. I listened to a couple songs and they're perfect, so full of emotion. I'm definitely looking forward to the album's release on May 31.
I thoroughly enjoyed Plastic and I hope Scott Guild has something else in store for us!
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
