CONNECTIVITY

A lonely man develops a long-distance attachment to a stranger in this debut literary novel.

When he was 12 years old, Doug Faraday moved in with his aunt in Maryland after a traumatic family event left his father in prison and his mother unable to care for the tween. Doug never really got over what happened—he is still plagued by bad dreams at night—and he never adjusted to his new home, where his cousins kept him at a distance and the kids at school bullied him mercilessly. At 18, the bookish Doug comes across the LiveJournal of Courtney Bressler, a young woman his age living in Illinois. Doug becomes a voracious reader of Courtney’s blog—a combination of photographs, movie reviews, and irreverent updates on her life—and continues to follow her from afar for years. As he struggles with isolation, depression, and thoughts of suicide, Courtney’s social media accounts offer the lone consistent bright spot in Doug’s existence. Can Courtney (unbeknown to her) save Doug from his own bleakest instincts and help him come to terms with the tragedy that haunts his past? Or will Doug’s desires lead him to try to make their imagined relationship a real one? The novel covers the course of 15 years, during which Rouleau adeptly charts the maturation of older millennials, from anti–George W. Bush angst, Razer phones, and viral videos through to the present ennui. His prose is simple but closely calibrated to Doug’s discomfort, as here where the protagonist meets a woman for an awkward date: “Their orders arrived shortly afterwards. As the minutes crawled by, the conversation became more and more scarce, and Doug grew increasingly certain that once they were finished eating, they would say their perfunctory goodbyes, and that he would never see or hear from Leah again.” The book is not as creepy as the premise suggests. Rather, it gets at a very contemporary sort of loneliness—not only Doug’s hikikomori-like existence, but also Courtney’s one-sided affirmational exhibitionism. Many readers of a certain age will see themselves in these characters, blundering quietly through the years in search of the lives they might have had.

A dark, affecting tale of the desire to connect.