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First, I think we need to get Barbenheimer out of the way. I very much doubt that Scott Guild intended Plastic, his debut novel about life-sized plastic figurines and the nuclear Armageddon that threatens them, to come so close on the heels of Greta Gerwig’s and Christopher Nolan’s films. It’s a fascinating accident, though: while Plastic is a far more fantastic narrative, it’s drawing from some of the same cultural concerns that fueled the films and the discourse around them. Alongside the novel’s inventive and humorous imagery, Plastic is deeply invested in questions of authenticity in the face of commercialized social pressures, and in the burden of responsibility—at individual and planetary scales—within that society. Also, there are dance numbers.
Constructed with a televisual, even sitcom-esque framing—chapters are “episodes,” complete with camera movements and laugh tracks—Plastic tells the story of Erin, an isolated young woman in a near-future but dramatically transfigured world. Like everyone else, Erin is a plastic figurine—literally so: hollow, with hinges instead of joints, nylon instead of hair. After a terrorist attack at her workplace, she makes an unexpected connection with another survivor, Jacob. As she explores this new relationship, she must confront the disturbing realities of her family and her world. Along the way, the novel takes long detours into virtual reality, climate change, and totalitarian police states, with an increasingly emotional, surreal, and recursive understanding of its own histories.
This is an immensely fun, engaging novel, and if I started reading it as though it were a puzzle—how is this world like this, why is this world like this—I finished it just deeply impressed with it qua novel, without needing my questions answered. The way that reality shifts throughout the story is really interesting, and compelling in its specifics, without feeling subordinated to some larger explanation. There’s a seamless, level-jumping fluidity to the imagery here: a sense that its ultimate objects and concerns are solid, underneath a vibrant and multifarious symbolism.
Plastic’s exploration of Erin’s world is intensely mediated, and intriguingly multi-medial in how it navigates and negotiates its realities. Guild, a member of the band New Collisions, is also releasing Plastic: The Album, in collaboration with Cindertalk and other musicians—a dream-pop melodrama with surprising hooks, the album feels less like an aside or addition to the novel and more like its other half. Many of the novel’s pivotal scenes take place within virtual environments, and much of the backstory is delivered to us by a television show Erin’s obsessed with, the stop-motion sitcom Nuclear Family, featuring animated waffles and robots; by the end of the novel it’s clear that the show is a recounting of her two fathers’ experiences and trauma. People in this world weren’t always made of plastic; Erin remembers a time before, but doesn’t comment on it, and the end of the novel sees a fascinating (and possibly drug-fueled) confluence of its formerly distinct realities.
One particularly well-executed aspect of Plastic is how Guild handles language in Erin’s world. The figurines speak a dramatically abbreviated English, interspersed with long asides and flashbacks from Erin in “old-fashioned” (for her) diction. A strange and comic device when we first encounter this dialog, its continued use leads to deeper and stranger effects, as Guild deploys it to talk about ever heavier topics. Meeting Erin for the second time, at a funeral home after the attack, for example, Jacob inquires:
I hear lot employee die. Much sorry. They friend?
Erin considers this. Acquaintance more. But they feel like friend when gone, if that make sense.
Sure. Course.
I have relative work there, Owen. He still in hospital.
He be okay?
Lose right foot. But he live.
Jacob sighs. Yeah, that the main thing.
It’s something like Orwell’s newspeak, something like the caricatured simplicity of a Tarzan or a caveman, but a lot more like—the kind of shorthand we use in texting or online, taken to its logical endpoint, and not lacking in depth or complexity merely by virtue of its brevity. The dialog throughout could easily have come across as a quickly-tiring caricature, reactionary satire at the level of Idiocracy, but Guild manages it so deftly that, instead, it becomes another signifier of shifting representation levels—not a dismissal of the characters’ reality, but another lens on it.
More pointed, if implicit, is Plastic’s commentary on modernity’s focus on hyper-commercialization and inauthentic “optimization.” Erin lives in a world of relentless advertising and branding, in both the “real” world and the virtual reality she frequently escapes to, and, though she takes comfort in her self-help megachurch, I think we’re justified in wincing when her PrayZone app congratulates her on a “One-Year Prayer-Streak!” Where much of the humane surreality of Plastic put me in mind of James Morrow or T.C. Boyle, and its gloomy fascination with violence of Thomas Disch or John Brunner, its gonzo critique of capitalism reminded me of nothing so much as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Plastic’s juxtaposition of the commercially absurd and the inescapably existential is one of its strongest throughlines, and perhaps goes a way towards explaining why its characters are “figurines” in the first place.
Erin lives in a terribly stressful world: her family scarred by experiences in refugee camps, her daily life wracked by frequent eco-terrorist attacks and the totalitarian police state’s response, with the twin threats of nuclear war and climate change (the “Heat Leap,” as they call it) above it all. And it is, of course, no work at all to connect those terrors to our own world: the zany details of Erin’s reality confer no protection. Where Plastic shines is in how it remains focused on humanity—no matter how superficial or hollow circumstances make us—and in its sheer inventive sense of play, even with such stakes.
FICTION
Plastic
By Scott Guild
Pantheon Books
Published February 13, 2024
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