THE IMAGO STAGE

A woman lives through virtual reality.

The narrator of this provocative novel lives partially in a studio apartment in Montreal and partially in a virtual world of her own creation. Entranced by her avatar, Anouk, a digital creation she can edit at will, she spurns the outside world until her mother becomes gravely ill and is hospitalized. Suddenly, she is wrenched from the cloistered, digital life she has built for herself and faced with the reality of mortality. The novel alternates between the narrator's present-day struggles and stories about her childhood growing up in Montreal and young adulthood working as a model in Paris in the 1980s. From a young age, she was fixated on images and became obsessed with turning into an image herself. Instead of forming connections with other people, she began to live almost entirely through the digital world of avatars and virtual reality. Georges, who is an accomplished digital artist as well as a writer, clearly understands the power of the image, skillfully critiquing society’s fixation on the female body as an object through her protagonist’s fixation on images—she takes thousands of self-portraits while working as a model—and her inability to exist comfortably in her body. Only the digital world offers her true satisfaction. Georges’ novel is intellectually rigorous and provocative, and she evokes the 1980s vividly. Her characters are thin, however, and her prose can be overwrought: Sentences like “Our galaxies moving resolutely away from each other with the grace of a celestial ballet” are common. Ultimately, this slim volume is more satisfying as an intellectual exercise than as a work of drama.

A thought-provoking meditation on our relationships with images and digital life.