David Crader, the leading man of Justin Taylor’s newest novel, Reboot, has a plan to redeem himself and cancel his alcoholism—he’s watched a ton of cognitive-behavioral therapy videos on YouTube, and is sure it’ll work. The idea is to cut himself off after two drinks—cancel any potential miniseries about his addiction bubbling up—and return to the segments of stability he’s ripped from his old cycles: a son, an ex-wife he supports, an estranged mother in Florida. A former teen actor from a Buffy/Dawson’s Creek mashup called Rev Beach, David understands that in America, there’s always a new opportunity. He’s parlayed his teen stardom into a voice-acting gig for a video game about squid cultists in the depths of Chicago. He’s left one marriage for another, and then left that one, too. He says “I could” a lot.
When, in addition to David’s attempts to revive some of those old, stable elements of his life, another potential reboot emerges—more episodes of Rev Beach following its success streaming during quarantine—David connects with others seeking reboots of their own: a former co-star who’s still bookable but in need of money, an ex (and former co-star) with a full-scale replica of Rev Beach’s set in her mansion who’s hungry for further relevance, a writer who’s looking for a spot in the writers’ room but can’t write an ending. As the pieces begin to fall together, David tells us he’s “perhaps redeemed [him]self after all, maybe not completely but in part, yes, a small down payment on redemption.” Rebooting Rev Beach feels like the new beginning to end all new beginnings.
But then the hollow earthers and fandom trolls start to show up. They’ve started to link up online as yet another former co-star mutates into a blustery conservative darling in Florida. When David finds out that the Rev Beach renewal could be at the center of an alt-right conspiracy, he finds that things could indeed be totally radical—just not in the ways that he’d hoped.
As David continues pursuing reboots of all kinds, cautious but not really handling any of the uncomfortable stuff, blotches begin to appear on his storyboard. A visit to the old fame-machine hotel where he and his co-stars met as wannabes brings back memories of how he’d treated one of them. A need to return to an old filming location where David’s mom lives means he’ll have to see her for the first time since his alcoholism began to shatter him. As power dies across a penthouse where David rides out a hurricane, he starts to wonder, “What was this future we were flailing toward, with its fires and floods? Its rolling blackouts and tornadoes? Where was the reboot on this?”
I know that sounds like a finale, but it happens at about the halfway point of the book. David Crader still has a lot of time and many more pages (and episodes, and—yes—reboots) to flail across. But it brings up a compelling turn of conflict between his individual actions and the backdrop of an America that’s more obsessed with reboots by the day, and is thus destroying itself at speeds newer and more efficient. There’s an immediacy happening around Reboot’s characters as much as there’s one happening around us, and both are equally easy to ignore—to become more addicted to oneself. Taylor’s beckoning toward this idea places him thematically among many of the other great contemporary Southeastern American writers, like Brenda Peynado and Lauren Groff—writers who’ll wield the environment as a character who’s begging for you to look at it, but are clever in how they allow it to emerge.
This book, of course, also goes out to all the ’90s kids who stayed up reading Roth and DeLillo and Denis Johnson after The X-Files ended at 10:00. Taylor’s language in this one, it’s worth noting, is faster and poppier than the ’90s postmodernists to which he nods. It’s a shift for Taylor, who’s lived in the lit-fic space for the bulk of his career (two story collections, a novel, and a beautiful memoir—2020’s Riding with the Ghost), and it raises some genuinely interesting questions about where the language of literary fiction can tease into other realms. There are moments in Reboot that dip into the language you’d expect to read in teen drama, thriller, and (fictional) memoir. There are bottle episodes. It’s a voice that works, even if the character who’s speaking keeps making wrong—but new!—decisions.
You can rifle through any fandom’s memes to find one of its characters looking directly at the camera, disappointed, the text at the bottom hypothesizing the special hells awaiting only those who post spoilers for their media of affection’s final scenes, so I won’t do that. If you want to know which—if any—of Reboot’s reboots bring their instigators the redemption they’re looking for, you’ll just have to keep watching.
FICTION
Reboot
By Justin Taylor
Pantheon Books
Published April 23, 2024
