Around this time an efficiency manual called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich was all the rage. The magazine was profiling Tim Ferriss, its author, and although the profile was arch and as skeptical as a profile of a productivity guru could possibly be, that the story had been assigned at all confounded me. Still romanced by the legitimacy of having a 9-to-5, and largely unbothered by the difficulty of my job, I couldn’t imagine wanting to escape it. Not that joining the new rich didn’t sound appealing, but four hours wasn’t nearly enough hours to prove I mattered. If anything, I wanted more work. I was sure that this was a book for the desperate.
Over the decade that followed, I joined the desperate. How’d that happen? I’ll make it quick: I made a wish on a monkey’s paw for more and better work and some capitalist fairy godmother granted it to me. With it came a new problem: Showing up wouldn’t cut it anymore. I would have to be productive.
All humans know the feeling. This isn’t the dark of the inside of a tent on a moonless night, when the forest sways in purple starlight, nor is it a creepy basement where a thin ribbon of light can weasel under the door. You can feel this kind of dark at a place like Carlsbad Caverns, where 830 feet under the New Mexican desert, the rangers turn off the lights and let the children scream. It’s the kind that triggers some atavistic line of code that sends your amygdala rag-dolling over evolution’s awful ledges. How can I survive this? How can I escape it? And the worst: What else is in here, and is it hungry?
Evening comes. Time to be brave. I take one last look around outside and gather a few more nuts. A mountain chickadee twitters about. Deer slip through the grass. I go inside and seal myself into the room with a few necessities I’ll be able to locate by touch. A toothbrush. A Hydro Flask. A gray cotton onesie my wife got me for Christmas, because of the way it feels and smells—two senses the dark can’t steal. I light a small candle and turn off the overhead light, hoping to feel a sense of control for one last minute.
Some film fans never gave up physical media: they’ve spent years quietly buying thrift-store discs, discarded by the many US households that no longer have DVD or Blu-ray players, and waiting for their chance to rise again. Other fans, frustrated by streaming’s limitations, have recently rediscovered physical media and trickled to join its rear-guard army.
From the very start, Memory Piece is a tale of escape and entanglement. Lisa Ko’s limber, ambitious second novel opens with three teen girls, bored at a Fourth of July barbecue, sneaking into a neighbor’s cookout to swipe burgers. The adventure jolts them briefly out of their boredom; it also creates a bond that lasts into adulthood. But Memory Piece is not, at its core, a novel of friendship. Ko isn’t especially concerned with the summer-afternoon alchemy that ropes her protagonists—Giselle Chin, who becomes a conceptual artist; Jackie Ong, a gifted coder who profits in the turn-of-the-millennium tech boom; and Ellen Ng, one of downtown Manhattan’s archetypal squatters—together for life. Instead, her central preoccupation is the doomed drive toward freedom—from capitalism, from expectations, from the public eye—that the three women share.
Phillips suggests an alternative, which he underscores through reference to the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky. To resist habit’s deadening impact, Shklovsky tells us, we can turn to art, to literature: he writes that “[t]he technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”
In other words, literature helps us give up mundanity. It allows us to sit with the shapeless morass of time by framing it on the page. The best form of giving up, it seems, may just be to take up a book.