Folksinger John Gorka has a slyly wonderful line about New Jersey: “It’s like Ohio — only more so.”
That’s how some people have come to think of e-mail: It’s like old-fashioned communication — only more so. It’s faster and cooler but at bottom, it’s still just discourse, still just people writing to each other, minus the occasional irritation of paper cuts.
Naturally, e-mail has begun to insinuate itself into fiction, for what self-respecting author could depict modern life without referencing those suddenly ubiquitous cyber-exchanges?
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When it comes to rendering e-mail, however, novelists seem split into two camps: those who present it as just another way for characters to exchange information, like the choice between light-blue or dove-gray stationery, and those who see it as a radically different, still-evolving entity. A look at “The Diagnosis,” “Disobedience” and “Disclosure,” three novels utilizing e-mail as a plot device (apparently “D” words in the title are de rigueur for the genre), is revealing.
In “The Diagnosis” (Pantheon), Alan Lightman’s startlingly plausible novel about the effects of runaway technology on the soul, e-mails between the characters are not just substitutes for ordinary missives. Lightman includes the data that accompanies even the briefest e-mail, the fussy little kite-tail of symbols that hangs off every message: ” MAIL 50.02.04
From: ACHALM at AOL.COM == Received: from RING.AOL.COM by AOL.COM with GOTP id AQO6498.”
I don’t believe that Lightman, whose novel was a finalist for last year’s National Book Award, was just trying to fatten his pages when he included those informational strings, or when he had his characters e-mail each other even when they were sitting in the same house, within hailing distance. Clearly, there is something comforting about e-mail, about swaddling feelings in a pulsating sea of symbols instead of dealing with a human face — and maybe it’s a comfort we should occasionally resist.
No such enticing ambiguity haunts Jane Hamilton’s drab new novel, “Disobedience” (Doubleday), set in Chicago and narrated by a man looking back on his adolescence, when he secretly read his mother’s e-mail and discovered her affair with a fellow musician. Despite an opening that evokes the sensory experience of accessing e-mail (“the melody of the dial-up . . . and the sweet nihilistic measure of static”), the novel treats e-mails as if they were letters stacked on the hall table.
But they’re not. E-mail could drastically alter a love affair in ways Hamilton never considers; with its squashing of time, e-mail yanks the rug out from under a process that normally involves a gradual unfolding, a series of patient revelations. E-mail may confer only the illusion of intimacy. It’s anti-romance.
Michael Crichton similarly failed in his 1993 novel “Disclosure,” a thriller about sexual politics and corporate espionage. Aside from e-mails printed in all capital letters (making it seem as if sentences inexplicably were being shouted from rooftops), Crichton’s treatment didn’t distinguish e-mails from regular office memos.
I don’t mean to get hung up on a novel’s e-mail typography, which could be dismissed as a mere gimmick. But some novelists seem to throw in references to e-mail for the same reason they throw in the names of fast-food restaurants and makes of cars: to lend last-minute verisimilitude.
We started out with a folksinger so let’s end with one too: In Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” he sings, “You can’t jump a jet plane like you can a freight train.” That poignant image suggests how much the world has changed. E-mail isn’t the whole story of that change, of course, but it’s a big part of it, and our novelists need to figure out ways of showing us that.
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