Portrait of the blogger as a no-longer-young man

"There were no impediments left to love, no restrictions or barriers or secrets, and thus love had lost its power."

Nick Laird's second novel GLOVER'S MISTAKE is a trap. It plays for your sympathy from the beginning as the protagonist, David, watches his former art professor Ruth (a very successful artist in her own right, when he has all but given it up) and his cheerily naïve roommate Glover fall in love and withdraw from his world into their own. The insult builds within him, not least because he had contemplated kindling a relationship with her himself before she confessed her feeling, but that he’s come to see her as a confidante and his intellectual champion -- only to have her prefer youth and sincerity untainted by ambition. (Neat bit of gender-switching, that.)

Laird coaxes you over to this side, to David’s incredulous view of the happy Ruth and Glover, until his voice seeps into your head, and it’s too late to remove it when David decides to save his friend and his roommate from what he views as their “real” selves. He doesn’t feel guilty, but you do, because what he does is not so outlandish that you can deny having the urge to ruin. His resolve strengthens and you recoil from his efforts to prove that the world is, in fact, as grim and fractured as he sees it. Can a novel in fact be too realistic?

But let’s get to the important part: How was the blogging in it? As a subplot, it doesn’t function the way it should. As a portrayal of Contemporary Internet Habits, it was all right.

That David takes to blogging on his site, “The Damp Review” (heh), to vent his frustration and lack of fulfillment in life is a cliché, but any habit he would have taken up would have functioned as such a vent. If he had stumbled into a knitting store, he would have been a bitter knitter. Because the novel takes place almost entirely from David’s perspective, we never truly get a sense for whether his writing is original or hackneyed, which is probably for the best.

It's clear that his mindset is toxic, not the entire Internet, which is good, but working the ramifications of a particularly nasty post on the Damp Review into the plot was laughable. Still, later there is a confrontation over it that I thought was very out of character for one of the characters involved -- the author brought over very well the complexity of having your relationships shaken up in a way that you hadn't expected, except when it came to this moment, which is violent and dramatic and unrealistic in a way nothing else in the novel is. It also creates a supporting character who seems to serve no purpose other than for us to hate and fear David a little bit more; I would have cut her out entirely.

That said, in the end The Damp Review is not a sufficient vent. (This isn’t a moral, Laird is too skilled for that.) After he has already started to act, David is toying with a post against romantic love called "Wanking Ourselves Senseless,” that will prove obliquely (since Glover doesn’t read his blog) that he’s doing the right thing and that his roommate is a silly fool enveloped in a damaging situation. If he had been able to restrain himself to the poison keyboard, well, GLOVER’S MISTAKE wouldn’t be much of a book. The technology is new, the faults all too old.