As in Uffish Thought: Alena Graedon’s The Word Exchange

Reading The Word Exchange against the backdrop of the protracted business negotiations between Hachette Book Group and online retailer Amazon.com, and the extended public debate surrounding those negotiations, gave Alena Graedon’s debut novel an extra layer of frisson. The story is set in a near-future Manhattan where our lives have become “slowly bereft of books and love letters, photographs and maps, takeout menus, liner notes, and diaries.” Instead, we have Memes: ubiquitous electronic devices that are like personal digital assistants, smartphones, and tablet computers rolled into one. They can even administer sleeping medication in small doses.

One of the companies that’s profiting off our dependence on Memes, Synchronic, has been buying the rights to the world’s dictionaries, building up towards a monopoly of meaning in which their “Word Exchange” would be the only way to get the definition of an unfamiliar word… for a price. (And once that monopoly is secure, of course, “nothing would prevent Synchronic from adjusting the price of words up.) The two major holdouts are the real-life Oxford English Dictionary and the fictional North American Dictionary of the English Language; the story begins when Anana, the daughter of the North American Dictionary’s editor, discovers that her father has vanished under mysterious circumstances. As she searches for him, she learns about the Synchronic plot, which turns out to be much grander, and much more sinister, than simply owning the language.

The dystopia of The Word Exchange isn’t rooted in catastrophic natural disasters or blindly destructive wars, but it does take on an increasingly apocalyptic tone as the Memes begin to spread a “word flu” across New York and then further out. When one person begins to lose his or her grasp on language, as Anana does to some extent and other characters do at a much deeper level, it’s an intimate crisis; when that loss begins to spread across society, Graedon suggests, chaos probably won’t take too long to kick in. The novel’s paranoid undercurrent works well in conjunction with the extended symbolic framework based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, imbuing Anana’s search with a vibe somewhat reminiscent of ‘80s cyberpunk—a world where technology is as likely to reinforce our worst tendencies as it is to improve our lives. Yet while Graedon may invoke a variant of the “Internet makes us stupid” argument over the course of Anana’s quest, that’s not her final answer. It’s not just that our modes of reading and thinking are changing through new usage patterns, after all, but that those usage patterns are being cynically manipulated by media conglomerates (and aspiring conglomerates).

Going by that, it’s easy to read Graedon’s story as an anti-Amazon allegory—particularly, as noted above, at a moment when (some) people are increasingly inclined to take a critical look at Amazon’s way of doing business with the publishing industry, in the same way that the language lovers of the novel’s semi-underground Diachronic Society explicitly define themselves in opposition to Synchronic. Maybe too easy. You want—I want, anyway—a novel to do something beyond fire buckshot at the side of a distribution center-sized barn, and I think The Word Exchange does have more to it, starting with Graedon’s love of words and language in all their complexity and ambiguity. Chances are you already share that love if you’re picking up this novel in the first place—whether you do or not, though, Graedon couches her philosophical argument for that love in an effectively suspenseful plot that keeps us invested not just in Anana’s search for her father, but her ability to resist succumbing to the “word flu” as it wreaks its havoc on the world around her.

(NOTE: This post originally appeared on Beacon.)

6 August 2014 | read this |

Life Stories #79: Molly Wizenberg

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photo: Kyle Johnson

When Molly Wizenberg‘s husband told her that he wanted to open a New York-style pizzeria in Seattle, she encouraged him—even though, as she explains in this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, she wasn’t convinced his plan would come to fruition. In Delancey, she tells the story of how it all came together, including what happened when her doubts finally came out in the open, and how she wound up becoming a full partner in the project—and so we talked about the point at which she realized that this was going to be the subject of her second memoir (following A Homemade Life:

“As Brandon was building it, and as the process began to switch from ‘my husband is opening a restaurant’ to ‘we are opening a restaurant,’ I started to realize that there was a story there. I didn’t really know what the story was yet, but it was there. And also, as soon as I could begin to get some distance from it, I could see that it was really funny. The things that we did, the mistakes that we made, the things that happened to us were not at all funny at the time, but in retrospect, it was a really funny story.

I wanted to figure out how to tell it both so that I could remember it and also so that I could understand the trajectory that our lives were headed in. Writing helps me understand my own life; it helps me see the throughline in my own life… Writing Delancey, when I started, I didn’t know how the book was going to end, and that was because I had to figure out the story as I went along.”

(By all accounts, Delancey the restaurant has turned out really well, and I’m looking forward to visiting it the next time I’m in Seattle…)

Listen to Life Stories #79: Molly Wizenberg (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

3 August 2014 | life stories |