FICTION IN REVIEW

1 6 3 R F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W D A V I D G A L E F Anna Krestler, age thirty-seven, ex–graduate student, e-mail junkie, and slightly lost (or mislaid) soul, has recently been downsized from her menial job at the law firm of Pinter, Chinski and Harms. Now she must confront her Internet addiction (including her spam collection) and think about what to do with the rest of her life. As the hapless but likable heroine of Alina Simone’s debut novel, Note to Self, Anna may be smarter than some of the people she encounters, yet she’s also burdened by an acute sense of justice in an unfair society. Determined to join the art world, she notices many suspect creations but can’t do much about them: a filmmaker whose first work featured her ‘‘wearing nothing but kneesocks as she cavorted around a dorm room reciting the Duino Elegies,’’ a Japanese sculptor who’s constructed a giant outdoor installation from the dung of macaque monkeys, and a large percentage of the clips on YouTube. This kind of setup is the territory of Sam Lipsyte, whose characters observe our society’s successes and excesses with impotent N o t e t o S e l f , by Alina Simone (Faber and Faber, 256 pp., $25.00 cloth) 1 6 4 G A L E F Y disdain. Simone’s sensibility also bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Gary Shteyngart, with his eloquent dissection of absurdity, from products to institutions. Like Shteyngart, Simone escaped the Soviet Union at an early age, a subject she wrote about in her 2011 essay collection, You Must Go and Win. But Simone is her own creation, just as Anna is Simone’s. The impressions Anna registers have an idiosyncratic but sharp angle of accuracy: a 99cent store that smells ‘‘like naphthalene and Febreze’’; a trendy bar with ‘‘illuminated rows of Stoli, Maker’s Mark, and curaçao glowing behind the bar like the Manhattan skyline rendered in liquor.’’ And of certain poetry readings: ‘‘No matter how dismal the attendance , a dude with a safari-grade lens on his camera would always be on hand, circling whatever scru√y trust-fund kid happened to be on stage, intent on documenting every itch-inducing minute of this nonevent.’’ Despite all the casual randomness, the plot is traditional enough: girl meets boy who’s maddeningly evasive. Through a notice on Craigslist, Anna contacts a mysterious filmmaker named Taj, who includes her in a new project he’s directing. She is sucked into his netherworld, jolted from the comfort of her cyberspace. For all the virtual activity in the novel, real life intrudes; in fact, it continually trips Anna up. Human contact is not her métier, and her trust is often misplaced: another way to describe the novel would be ‘‘semi-naïf encounters a gallery of weirdos as she becomes ensnared in someone’s twisted scheme.’’ This pattern, come to think of it, is not that uncommon in novels. But our society and its social media no longer permit simple entanglements. Simone’s narrative uses anomie as a cohering structure, which is to say that this novel deals in what’s out there nowadays: our handheld devices, our fragmented attention spans, our universal desire to go public. The Internet has changed everything : witness Anna’s lust for quality e-mail, or her preference for her laptop over urban life, even though she lives in New York City. A few cavils: Anna acts more like a woman in her twenties than her late thirties; texting has supplanted e-mailing in the set that Anna moves in; and Anna’s cluelessness at times strains credibility. But most of the details strike the plangent note of today’s struggles. Simone’s satiric and precise language is what makes the novel so enjoyable. Of a discussion between Anna and her friend and F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W 1 6 5 R adviser Leslie: ‘‘Last time they had talked about what to...