Anything that can be consumed is now understood as a brand — and on the internet, that’s every last bit of content. This is how a consultant like Eric Garland can, on the strength of a viral tweet storm about the “game theory” behind American politics, brand himself as a Russian conspiracy sage and market subscriptions to @gametheorytoday. It’s also why actual brands, like Hamburger Helper or Denny’s, hang around social media masquerading as people, posting jokes and memes and roasting haters. Even the most cynical internet users speak semiseriously about our posts being “on brand” or “off brand.” There is no refuge from the logic of the brand — and if there is, some up-and-coming strategist will soon enough bolster her own brand by colonizing it.
Sometimes I forget that I’ve never been to Dublin. I feel its cobblestones under my feet. I hear the “shouts in the street” of Irish schoolboys—what Stephen Dedalus calls “God” in James Joyce’s Ulysses—as clearly as I do the susurrations of my dog Bloom beneath my desk as I write. I picture the cemetery where my dog’s namesake, Leopold Bloom, attends the funeral of Paddy Dignam, spying at the edges of the funeral party a “lankylooking galoot” wearing a mackintosh, more vividly than I can any of the cemeteries in which my grandparents are buried. I have an uncanny familiarity with what Dedalus elsewhere calls the “items in the catalogue of Dublin’s furniture”: the Martello Tower at Sandycove, the Forty Foot promontory, the “scrotumtightening sea” below, the “unwholesome sandflats” of Sandymount Strand, the residence at 7 Eccles Street, Sweny’s Chemist, Trinity College, Merchant’s Arch, where a man might buy a smutty book like Sweets of Sin for his wife, and on through to the Liffey.
The appeal of what might be called literary tourism seems to be the shared hope that a spark of the celebrated author’s genius might be transferable, though the particulars might be a bit vague. Aspiring writers are drawn to the Starbucks on 23rd and Fifth Ave, where Edith Wharton’s home once stood, where, if nothing else, you are guaranteed a jolt of caffeination. I’m not a believer in the supernatural but there’s a term for this kind of thing: Akasha. The Sanskrit word translates to “unmanifested potential,” but in the Buddhist tradition, akasha refers to the idea that the energy of all the things that have ever happened in a place are always present.
What’s so radical then about Future Home of the Living God, among other traits, lies in the way it positions pregnancy, maternity, and birth control policies within a racialized and indigenous framework. It displaces and interrogates this new world order in a way that Atwood doesn’t. By having an indigenous protagonist, the novel is haunted by the issue of how whiteness has conditioned access to reproductive rights and body autonomy. Cedar grapples with her own Ojibwe identity, as a Native American adopted by a liberal white couple. Her allegiances are complex and she strives to make sense of the very idea of lineage, both for herself, for her son, and for a world where evolution is no longer functioning the way it’s supposed to.