They find ways, as the critic Mark McGurl puts it, “ to speak back to and against” their own conditions of existence. Such novels speak of trolls and mobs, of identity and authenticity, in the same breath with which they whisper about the overproduction of personal “data,” “the information of existence” (Lin), or how corporations command “the thrill of the new” to create demand for their products (Tillman). The lasting achievement of these strange, excellent novels is to represent not only the relentlessness with which the internet intrudes on our perceptions, our consciousness, but also the larger and more distant forces that allow it to do so. “I Hate the Internet” falls into the latter category, as do Dennis Cooper’s “The Sluts” (2004), Tao Lin’s “ Taipei” (2013) and Lynne Tillman’s “ Men and Apparitions” (2018). Jarett Kobek wrote these self-ironizing words in his 2016 novel “ I Hate the Internet” now they could serve as a rubric for critics asked to review novels about the internet and to determine whether these novels are solemnly, unrepentantly bad or good in spite of themselves.
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