Plastic

For fans of "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." 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....

Auteur
SCOTT GUILD received his​ MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin, and his PhD in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He served for years as assistant director of Pen City Writers, a prison writing initiative for incarcerated students. He is currently an assistant professor at Marian University in Indianapolis, where he teaches literature and creative writing. Before his degrees, Scott was the songwriter and lead guitarist for the new wave band New Collisions, which toured with the B-52s and opened for Blondie.

Texte du rabat

*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.

Échantillon de lecture
1    A DOLL’S HOUSE
 
The episode opens on a plastic woman driving home from work.
 
The camera follows her from outside the car, filming her through the window, showing her hard, glossy face inside the dim sedan. She is in her twenties, a pale figurine, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, nylon hair cut short above her ears. Houses whisper past on the street beside her, the sun setting over their rooftops, their shadows long in the last hour of twilight. Her sur­face, smooth and specular, reflects the fading light; her fingers, bent at their hinges, grip the upper rim of the wheel. The name tag pinned to her polo shirt reads, Erin: Ask Me Anything!
 
She rolls to a stop at an empty crosswalk, drums two finger­tips idly against the wheel. A single drone is swimming through the smog above her suburb, like a fish seen from the bottom of a frozen lake. Then, as she glides through the intersection, Erin’s voice begins to narrate on the soundtrack. It is a quiet but expressive voice, just louder than the hum of the tires on the pavement.

A year ago, she narrates, I was a very different person. On a night like this, a Friday, I’d be hurrying home from Tablet Town, dying to hang up my uniform and start the weekend. Patrick was in my life back then, a reason to get through the hours on the sales floor. I thought—no, knew—that nothing could ever take him away from me.
 
The street that scrolls beside her car is dusky and deserted, no vehicles in the driveways, no pedestrians on the sidewalks, no curtains open behind the barred windows. The houses slide past her in a continual sequence, like a succession of blurred photo­graphs, each different in their color scheme but not in their basic construction, shades of pastel siding on the same one-story frame. The backyards are also identical, save for an occasional razor wire fence that glistens above the hedges.
 
The camera leaves the street, cuts to a close-up of the plastic woman. Shadows drift across her molded face.

Last year, if someone had asked me—that other, naive Erin—I would have told them my life was perfect. And it’s true: I was happy, in my own way. Each night I drove home to Pat­rick, hid from the world in his arms. I stayed in with him every weekend, barely went out except for groceries. Oh, Patrick. I lost him in the end, of course. Like I’d lost my father, my sister. Like I’ve lost almost everyone else.
 
Erin slows the car and steers onto the pitted slope of a drive­way. At the top sits a small blue house, its aluminum siding faded, its gable roof missing a few shingles. She stops at the garage, takes out her phone and taps a garage-shaped icon. The wobbly door rattles upward.
These days I spend my weekends alone, just trying to stay distracted. I sleep in as late as I can. I binge episodes of Nuclear Family. *I clean the entire house, room by room. And on Friday nights, when I miss Patrick the …