The American Girl

Author: Kate Horsley

Rating: ⭐ 3/5

Date Read: 2016/11/25

Pages: 423

I have long been of the opinion that technology should play a limited role in fiction. This is not because I’m some sort of Luddite: I’m typing this review on my iPad, whilst streaming XM radio through my phone to my Bluetooth speaker, taking occasional breaks to check Reddit. In fact, I sometimes feel like an interloper at bookstores, because I actually prefer the convenience of a Kindle to the romance of physical books (I’m taken to understand that the romance mostly involves the smell. After working in a library for four years, I’ve deconstructed this smell with some degree of accuracy: it’s two parts dirt, one part must, and zero parts appealing). At this point, my dear reader should note that book reviews are a form of nonfiction, thus I can name drop contemporary technologies with impunity.

My problem with technology in fiction mostly boils down to Moore’s Law, which postulates that chip efficiency will double every couple of years. This has a few major implications, the first being that my iPhone will become woefully incapable of running any app within 24 months of purchase, and the second being that any mention of technology in a book will likely be outdated once the manuscript reaches print. I’ve oft used this argument to pontificate about the fact that Twin Peaks retains a timelessness partially due to its lack of reliance on technology, whereas episodes of CSI are immediately placed within a particular temporal space, rendering their relevance somewhat liminal.

Anyway, The American Girl is a quick read that relies on technology, including (but certainly not limited to) a heavy-handed description of the uses for Snapchat. On some level, this is excellent, as the youths around me have yet to proffer a thorough explication of digital ephemerality, especially as it relates to a paradigm in which storage space is only getting cheaper (see also, Moore’s Law). However, extensive use of technology places The American Girl strictly within CSI territory: incapable of timelessness, but not a terrible use of a few idle hours, all things considered.