I enjoyed this debut effort from Disabato and I hope it garners her enough success to bring her writing further into the public eye and future book deals. This is a book about Lady Gaga. Well, it's about a fictional character named Molly Metropolis, who is an obvious a stand-in for Gaga. Gaga/Metropolis suddenly disappears and the book explores the reactions of the characters, under-employed millennials floating along the underside of the affluent class through contract labor, gifts from parents, and the peculiar luck that shields the entitled from real hardship through connections and liberal arts degrees. "But srsly, tho... wht would u do if Gaga disappeared?" And that's the book.
Disabato is fluent in the digitized, attention-deficient superficialities of the millennial generation. Indeed, I think she prompts an interesting debate about whether the pop-culture ephemera of the interwebs, those endless scrolls of Tumblr and the daily paroxysms of tweets, posts, grams, yaks, and snaps might be more than the mindless ejaculate of a hopeless generation. She injects a bit of philosophy, nothing too deep, but enough to make you pause that perhaps there is some sort of an intellectual spine supporting the weird antics of Gaga and the young creative minds spewing out Buzzfeed listicles and HuffPost blogs, the pseudo-intellectual output of the new millennium. So if Lady Gaga is the fairy godmother in the novel, than Guy Debord, the Marxist and Situationalist theorist, is its godfather. Driving the story is the paranoia of conspiracy: How is Metropolis related to the Situationists? What does the Chicago train system have to do with all this? What is the deeper political meaning to Gaga/Metropolis's lyrics? Why am I so hungover? Where is the nearest Trader Joe's?
One criticism is that the narrative is not particularly compelling. I never understood how professional tensions led a rival underground group to develop and what motivated them, to the point of violence, to end the search for Metropolis. Likewise for the protagonists; their motivations seemed forced. Is the point that pop stars create real disciples willing to risk life and limb (literally) to uncover the esoterica of their idols? I found myself not particularly interested in what the characters uncovered, because I never really understood why they were invested in the search. Additionally, I sensed, perhaps erroneously, a real commitment to the idea that the mayfly pop-culture Lady Gaga exemplifies has deep importance, that Lady Gaga has succeeded in blending popular art with real philosophy. I very much doubt this is the case and thus found tedious the novel's efforts to pitch the digitization of adolescent angst as intellectually useful. Gaga is not a cultural signifier, she's a sale pitch.
Yet the authorial structure of the novel is fascinating. The book is presented as a draft written by another author, Cyrus Archer. Disabato frames herself merely as an editor for Cyrus, inserting her editorial voice, confusions, and questions in footnotes throughout the novel. I found this delightful. It created peculiar layers of authorial intention that Disabato is able to play with: the sources that Cyrus uses to create his narrative, Cyrus's authorial voice, and "Editor Disabato" who is part of the fiction of "discovering" the Archer draft. Not only is the narrator a fiction, the editor is a fiction as well. I think this is pretty smart as "Real Disabato" is able to exploit these removes in interesting ways. So, this is a smart novel and a lively novel. It is worth investing not only in this book, but also in a young author who seems to have some neat tricks up her authorial sleeve.
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