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There's nothing quite like finding a book that takes a formless anxiety in your gut and give gives it a shape. Something to point at as you exclaim to anyone who'll listen, "this is exactly what I've been feeling." These experiences, rare as rubies, sometimes happen for me when a book climbs out of the chaos of madcap reality, steps away from it, and creates a work of living art from the flying debris, art that provides clarity. Truth, if you'll allow.
Scott Spires's new book is aptly named. Social Distancing, published by Alternative Book Press, takes aim at a particularly widespread anxiety in the contemporary now: that the world is unraveling. This is a daunting task for an artist, as the effort can sometimes lead to hackneyed art.
In less-skilled hands, a story like Social Distancing might be helplessly mired in the particulars of our apocalypse: Covid, climate change, the internet, political division, democracy etc... But here, Spires is able to step away from the details of our maddening reality, acquiring his own social distance from it, in order to cast a glimmer of light on the true nature of our civilization's problems.
The novel follows Fred Traubert, former academic, as he attempts to build a new life, away from the encroaching collapse. Fred, a professor of Germanic languages in Philadelphia, is overcome with dread about the future and he becomes something of a prophet of doom. His anxiety has many roots: climate change, political unrest, and the increasingly obvious signs that his vocation in the academic humanities lacks any value in the world (his work has become laughably irrelevant both to students and administrators).
The novel opens some time after Fred's big decision to quit his job and move to the Great Lakes town of Roverton, Wisconsin. His son, Ethan joins him, seizing the opportunity to brew craft beer for Roverton's growing climate refugee population. However, Fred's wife, Amanda, declines to take part in Fred's new life, and she goes off to Europe, in search of her own vocation, leaving the future of their marriage in deep doubt.
The novel's great achievement is the way Spires uses the fictional Roverton as a tiny stage to work out the social and epistemological problems that face the collapsing world. Inevitably, the tribalism of our actually-existing world reproduces itself in Roverton. The traditional Rovertonians (the old-timers) are neatly and irrevocably divided from the "nukes," the people with Zoom jobs busily gentrifying the town, trying to remake it in an image comfortable to overproduced elites. Fred finds himself caught in the middle, as he admires the traditional life of the Rovertonians, but is undeniably a nuke. He is a man without a country in Roverton.
The care Spires put in the character of Ethan Traubert is particularly remarkable to me. Ethan falls neatly into certain "type-of-guy" discourses. He is a young man, radicalized by various right wing lunatics on the internet (think of a Curtis Yarvin devotee). In short, he represents the very kind of person that liberal-leaning people would like to blame all the problems of the modern world on. And in contemporary storytelling, he is the kind of character who would be easily reduced to parody and cliche (think of how sickeningly one-dimensional Rian Johnson rendered his strawmen in Glass Onion).
But in Spires's gracious hands, Ethan is a sympathetic character, despite the ridiculousness of his politics. Fred understands that his son is simply flailing for meaning and is another a victim of the internet's incentive structures. Throughout the novel, Fred exercises extreme patience with Ethan's ideological fascinations, being careful not to radicalize him further, letting him find his way into increasingly mature ideas. The relationship serves as a thoughtful model for those of us stuck in the real world to consider as we fight online demons.
Ethan is just one of the characters that Spires uses to explore the social and political dynamics of our world, and each similarly avoids falling into banal caricature, allowing Spires to reflect on the culture wars honestly, and not allowing the book to fall into the trap of "sanctimony literature."
In addition, Fred's first-person narration allows Spires to focus his observations, moral perspectives, and philosophical musings about our world through the character of poor, hopeless, idealistic, lapsed academic. Ultimately, it is Fred's own search for meaning and purpose that makes the book inspiring as well as thought-provoking. As Fred figures out how to live a new life in his world, I was inspired to do the same in my own.
Once again, the novel is clearly about our world as it actually exists, but the moral distance it assumes is the key to its artistic success. This is no didactic novel that settles for pandering to dedicated Bluesky users.
The novel's title, along with its chapters (feature names like "Sheltering in Place," and "The Toilet Paper Situation Is Critical") are obvious references to the Covid era, yet the pandemic is never mentioned. That creative choice is but one of the ways that Social Distancing accomplishes its artistic feat. It's a prime example of working from sociological reality without being bogged down in it. Scott Spires has written a truly great "Covid-era novel," without ever mentioning Covid in the book's pages. It is a book stuffed full of wisdom about our world, but from a "socially distant" perspective. It's conclusions are therefore never breezy or simplistic.
The effect is to allow the reader to step out of our world, briefly, so we can see it more clearly and do what we might with that clarity.
Links:
Alternative Book Press Page for Social Distancing
Adam Pearson’s Review for The Metropolitan Review
Lakefront Review of Books: Scott Spires’s Substack
Abandon All Hope: Scott’s first novel, published by Auctus Press
