Nolan Mancl > Recent Status Updates

This guy was satirizing AI in 1980!!

This book is very strange. It’s like Kurt Vonnegut, but not good.

“And his father had passed on too, the mechanism of his persistence seizing up without the fuel of hope…”

“We each knew a part of his story, and together this assembled a significant portrait, although naturally there are countless ways one can narrate a life.”

“We all question the motives behind the ego stroke once the pleasure ebbs.”

The writing is DENSE

“But do you notice how the things we do when we have time to ourselves attempt to recreate some portion of the world in our image, according to the peculiarities of our vision?”

“These five days, then, back on the island after a decade, had all the choked elegiac flavor of old friends, whose intimacy lay buried in a receding past, returning to the site of a closer moment in hopes of digging up the capsule of their affection from the sunbaked earth. The love we bore one another had little fuel left but its own endurance, we knew, the fading image on a retina of an extinguished flame.”

“‘Go forth. Collect the debris of the soul.’”

McGhee has managed to create a protagonist with which the reader can identify and sympathize, but simultaneously dislike. It’s almost as if Jonathan Abernathy represents the worst parts of us all.

I’ve never seen a narrator lay out an alternative plot if the characters made a different choice: namely, if Jonathan Abernathy had humbled himself at a crucial moment. The narrator expressly says that because Jonathan is Jonathan, he has doomed the characters to their fates.

This one is my favorite