emily horne

"Precarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate. Now it seems that all of our lives are precarious - even when, for the moment, our pockets are lined."

It's hard to ignore the coincidence of reading this three years after the beginning of our own mild apocalypse, albeit one that is more explicable than this one was. I got a vague feeling of the past (2011!) being truly a different country here, apocalypse or no.

This riff on the It's a Wonderful Life concept never strays too far from the expected. There's a certain fun to seeing Nora's alternate lives, but it gets repetitive fast. The author's preoccupation with the relative flatness of her stomach strikes me as a particularly masculine way of gauging the levels of fitness of the versions of Nora. It is, naturally, the experience of motherhood that almost tips her in to an alternate existence.

I'm not qualified to speak to his treatment of her depression, but I was interested in the fact that the character seemed to stop noticing whether her versions were on antidepressants, only to pick that thread up again at the very end. Whether this is purposeful or shoddy editing, who is to say?

A balance of the bleak and the hopeful. The apartment of the name is by times terrifying and welcoming. I had a typical north american reaction to the protagonist leaving her child alone at home to go out drinking! To be clear this was presented as an anomaly and indication of something like a rock bottom for her.

People throw around the term "digital native" as if it's the province of particular generations (another fake idea), but Lockwood's character here is the ur-digital native, a person whose whole existence is mediated by the Portal's idiom.

As a person who considered herself terminally online for a period of time, and made her living from the vicissitudes of "content creation" before it was tagged with that name, there was a lot to identify with here. The push and pull between the Portal and the Real in the latter half of the book seems to come as a surprise to the protagonist but the rest of us saw it coming and, in my case, were filled with dread.