Analog Days
Little personal anecdotes, coffee shop conversations—basic everyday bullshitting—reveal a matrix of personal-political-aesthetic anxieties, a millennial and melancholy what is to be done? ... Searls hopes to read the forces of contemporary life in the stresses and torsions they effect on narrative. The novella is thus useful as a kind of test sample or biopsy ... No surprise that Analog Days, much to its credit, feels cramped and sprawling at once: unfinished and overwrought, a claustrophobic snapshot and a vertiginous panorama ... Jennifer’s story is floatily allegorical ... Thankfully, Analog Days is much less concerned with liberal anxieties about the free exchange of ideas than with the ambient tensions they reveal and the way we attempt to rectify them ... Analog Days succeeds by rejecting Slope’s gimmick and his vague moralizing. Instead, it folds the anxieties and symptoms of its narrator and his friends into its structure and form ... Analog Days seeks out contradiction rather than compromise, the cleft coincidence of disappointment and desire, the deflation of seeing the world as it is and the conviction of demanding a better one not yet visible, which is all captured in a phrase like is that all there is?
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Rather than interrogating or lingering on these news items, the narrator describes them in a mostly matter-of-fact way, setting the scene as other writers might mention the weather to establish mood ... This is not to say that the events aren’t described with evocative language, or that we don’t get a sense of the narrator’s opinions, but they are allowed to recede into the background ... The novella works best when it rides the crest of these associations ... Searls’s writing is effective not only because of how insightful and playful it often is...but also in the way he maintains our attention as he shifts from one subject to another ... Books within books and stories within stories are par for the course in avant-garde texts that explore the limits of storytelling, but for me, this was when the novella felt least innovative ... Is a book that reflects this indecision back at you a wake-up call, or just another form of procrastination?
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A quixotic exploration of the recent past that reveals something far deeper about how we will remember the future ... As a cohesive book, this novella resists definition—both in terms of its construction and its central energy ... While some readers may search for a point among all this overlaid ephemera, Searls’ insistent return to the moments when analog experiences interrupt the forward momentum of events...show that the book’s real interest lies in the ordinary power of sensation, rather than the flashbulb sensationalism of event.
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