The Novella in the Age of Being Performatively Offline

Ryan Lackey considers Damion Searls’s take on the vertiginous effects of digital life in “Analog Days.”

By Ryan LackeyOctober 24, 2025

• Fiction

OKAY, HERE’S A STORY for you. A while back, I was standing in the Tate Modern with a friend. I had dragged him up to a high floor to see the video installation Is That All There Is? by the South Korean artist duo Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. The four-minute loop cut between a series of psychedelic Windows 98ish graphics and a woman’s head, rendered in blocky pixels, reading aloud Peggy Lee’s song of the same name, in a similarly dated electronic twang: “Is that all there is? / If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing / Let’s break out the booze and have a ball / If that’s all there is.” Updated verses referenced the catastrophic fires of anthropogenic climate change.

Afterward, walking back to the Tube, my friend told me that he was attempting a total reconceptualization of his relationship with digital devices. Yeah, he said, I think I’m going to ditch my smartphone entirely. Analog only—flip phone, iPod. I admired his decision and told him I wished I could do the same but that I was too hopelessly attached to my phone and its worlds of polished distraction—an admission whose accuracy was borne out later in the airport, as I waited for my flight home by scrolling. I paused at a post linking the resurgence of 2000s culture to our present political bleakness. Everything’s twee again, the post read, while horrific things are happening in the Middle East. We’re sliding into a recession and once again analog’s back. The next post was a screenshot of a post claiming that vegans have a moral obligation to serve meat at dinner parties.

When I landed back in the United States, reconnected to the digital network, I received a message from my friend, who said he’d been thinking more about the video. He wanted to figure out why those particular things—climatological hellfire and 1960s Americana and old computer graphics—had been put together, what they had to do with each other; the juxtaposition seemed both blindingly obvious and endlessly associative. What was the video supposed to do? What were we supposed to do?

This is what reading Damion Searls’s debut new novella Analog Days is like. Little personal anecdotes, coffee shop conversations—basic everyday bullshitting—reveal a matrix of personal-political-aesthetic anxieties, a millennial and melancholy what is to be done? The title says all: Analog Days wonders about the effects of digital life, the consequences of its styles of parataxis and juxtaposition—and about how attempts to duck and dodge digital life only serve to underline its historical significance. How should we think and feel about the recent past, the end of the Great Recession–Obama-hipster years and the beginning of the age of Trump, of the Great Realignment and raw-meat, raw-affect fascism? If, as it often feels, no real political action is possible any longer, if no form of art or narrative can revolutionize or even really alter our thinking, feeling, or action, then what’s the point of reading or writing or telling a story?

Those anxieties hound any work of contemporary fiction—and also me and all my friends—but they lie especially heavy upon the novella, compelled by its intermediate position to justify itself. What, specifically, can a novella accomplish that the compression of a short story or the reach of a novel cannot? It’s not just Searls and Coffee House Press, his publisher, asking these questions. Like CDs and the economics of Smoot and Hawley, the novella seems in vogue. Melville House’s Art of the Novella series now includes more than 50 titles, and New Directions’ recent Storybook ND lineup features small fictions from big writers: Helen DeWitt, Clarice Lispector, László Krasznahorkai. Novella-like things have arrived lately from Catherine Lacey, Mark Haber, Max Porter. Joyland Magazine founded a whole publishing wing just to put out novellas. And among the luminaries whom Searls has made his name translating—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Victoria Kielland—is the Norwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse, most famous for the chunky interiorities of his 700-page Septology (2019–21) but whose three novellas appear in English under Searls’s imprimatur.

Unlike Fosse’s work, Analog Days addresses digital life directly, seeking a kind of perspective or purchase on it. Like a contractor peering at the cracks in an old concrete foundation, Searls hopes to read the forces of contemporary life in the stresses and torsions they effect on narrative. The novella is thus useful as a kind of test sample or biopsy. A primary problem of contemporary life, especially life online, is figuring out how to reconcile scales, how to fit individual experience (the feed, the scroll) alongside or into global political experience—a fitting constantly requested, redirected, and refused.

No surprise that Analog Days, much to its credit, feels cramped and sprawling at once: unfinished and overwrought, a claustrophobic snapshot and a vertiginous panorama. Dead internet theory aside, being online—being alive—today generates so much mass that attempts at totality or whole-horizon encompassing fall short. Rangy maximalism ends up being insufficient, while exhaustive examinations of slivered detail can feel provincial or rarefied, at worst a remember this? oh you weren’t there cliquishness. Stuck between sizes and scopes, Analog Days tries to become a necessarily incomplete analogue, as it were, for the scalar contradictions, the structural incomprehensibility, of contemporary life, which itself confusingly incorporates and recapitulates its own past; 2025 is not 2016, but also it is.

The elaborately tentacular relationship between 2025 and 2016 obsesses Analog Days, which covers one month in 2016: June 21 through July 20, the day after Donald Trump won nomination at the Republican National Convention. (As it happens, Trump’s favorite song, according to interviews with biographer Michael D’Antonio, is Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”) Sometimes the narrator describes things he’s doing or thinking about, and other times he recounts conversations among his friends: “Someone once told us we all sounded the same when we talked,” he writes, a citation of Noah Baumbach’s anxious-young-people-chatting movie Kicking and Screaming (1995), and “we took it as a compliment.”

Here’s an example from June 21: “The whole gang was there: Pam and Chris, Edward, Jennifer, Gideon, Josh and Ben, Scott, Anne-Sofie, Iris, Jeon. […] Jennifer was talking about her date, David, teacher (sexy), smart.” As Jennifer explains, David and another man start debating; the man, who is religious, says truth must be absolute, which David denies. “If something is here today gone tomorrow,” says the man, “can it be the truth?” David responds, “Some kinds of truth are like that, some aren’t.” The conversation winds on familiarly—other people have different ideas of truth; if something changes, can it be the truth?—toward a dead end. But realizing that “David couldn’t have the conversation the man wanted to have,” Jennifer has a kind of epiphany, realizing that she “would never love” David because he “couldn’t speak this stranger’s language. He was rigid in just the way he thought he was arguing against. And he had forgotten about me.”

Jennifer’s story is floatily allegorical, gesturing toward the sheer vertical face of conviction that language cannot surmount, the fact that our interpretive framings of the world share no common plane of encounter. From these divisions, according to some, emerge all our political problems. We cannot talk to each other! Of course, our political problems in fact begin in material maldistribution, and pointing out that we cannot talk to each other is reflexively neutered, given that you can only point out that fact—that we cannot talk to each other—to someone to whom you can talk. Thankfully, Analog Days is much less concerned with liberal anxieties about the free exchange of ideas than with the ambient tensions they reveal and the way we attempt to rectify them. Those anxieties mark how material, political realities map imperfectly onto, and thereby stress and squeeze, our individual lives, which are much easier to think about. At the end of her story, Jennifer emphasizes that David errs when, obsessed with winning the argument, he “forgets” about her. To Jennifer, love requires that efforts at truth or intellectual engagement be considered against—and probably deprioritized in favor of—attentive interpersonal intimacy. Which isn’t to say that Analog Days agrees; the point is that the way Jennifer recounts her story reveals how this tension between political and personal feels real to her. It’s one way she makes sense of things. She is, we all are, symptomatic.

Similar tensions arise throughout Analog Days, illustrated in the juxtaposition of the personal stories and the political events the narrator records. He begins July 7 with the news of a shooting “at a protest against the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile”; he opens the next day, July 8, by informing us that his friend “Keith starts calling himself (((Keith))) online.” Once again: What has the former to do with the latter? Are we supposed to take acrid political news and bar-table conversations and stuff happening online seriously all at once? Is that even possible?

Some contemporary writing responds to these problems by piling up references to (one person’s) life online. On one hand, we, hungry for gossip, do indeed want to know whether a writer’s introduction to flash video or fan forums or porn resembles our own. On the other hand, these references nostalgically stabilize digital life in a time before, say, federal accounts posted Nazi memes and before AI-Ghiblified excuses for atrocities in Gaza circulated widely. (Even these references, mine just now, will seem not just outdated but also shellacked by the time they pass your eyes.) Internet-reference fiction often participates in the same compensatory nostalgia-as-consumable-feeling tone, a vaporous relationship to an imagined past, that we often think inheres in fashionable goods literally or culturally “analog”: vinyl records, cassette tapes, dumbphones, film cameras.

The fiction that deals with contemporary digital life most successfully tries to line its problems in its form, like setting wiring and insulation into the framing of a house, rather than either accumulating references or adopting the internet’s styles and voices. Thus, Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This becomes most interesting not when it unrolls references to memes in its first half—“a garage door spray-painted with the words ‘STOP! DON’T EMAIL MY WIFE!’”—but in the disjunction between its memey first half and the obsession with political paradox and natal life in its second. By contrast, the fiction Sam Kriss calls “alt lit” remains shamelessly “enraptured by the surging raw nowness of the internet” and thinks that “literature that tries to rise above” its rhetorical and formal waterline is “blinding itself to the way we actually live today.” His examples include Tao Lin and Honor Levy, to whom we can add Megan Boyle, whose 2013 online novel LIVEBLOG (published in print by Tyrant in 2018) returns us to Analog Days and its narrator’s tweely named friend Mark Slope (“you’ve seen the t-shirts,” he says), who writes the “world’s first print blog”—or, as Slope calls it, “plog.”

Slope lends the novella its title. Unable to find his plog a publisher, he organizes “unplugged field trips” called “analog days,” whose participants “pay him to walk them around a neighborhood and encourage them to talk or daydream and forbid them from taking out their phones.” Although Slope’s plog attempts “life-writing without the internet” (which, for example, requires buying travel tickets “in person at a travel agent’s actual office, or over the phone”), the obvious irony is that “the agent used the internet to book his ticket, the plane itself was fully digital, etc.,—there’s no way to go analog alone.” Nevertheless, Slope valorizes the hassle because “logistical difficulties have become moral.” The better joke here hides in the line “there’s no way to go analog alone,” which at once gestures toward a collective ethical project and ironically underlines the obsession with analog media as a performative decoupling from digital life.

Analog Days succeeds by rejecting Slope’s gimmick and his vague moralizing. Instead, it folds the anxieties and symptoms of its narrator and his friends into its structure and form. Although never airily metafictional, Analog Days destabilizes its own fictional ground by, for example, confusing the status of its narrator, who occasionally appears as a character named John and at one point reads a short story online that Searls himself published in a 2009 issue of Vice, or by using bits of anonymous coffee shop speech as narrative camouflage: “Anyone sitting here? […] Yeah, he’s not in your status bracket. […] Yeah, hey, which is moister, lemon bread or scone.” Tucked into these fragments is a section that begins, “The author, who has made every effort to create a gripping narrative, feels that he should pause here for reflection.” As it turns out, this reflection constitutes another etiology of contemporary life:

It was an age in which despair and material comfort, technological wizardry and political malaise, and a paradoxical freedom […] were mixed together, along with deep but narrow enthusiasms, the renunciation of utopias, condescension toward the past, weariness of the present, and pessimism for the future. […] [W]e had no vocabulary to describe how their absence felt, or what it might mean.

None of these observations surprises us, which is part of the point. Here, the crisis of contemporary life and contemporary fiction concerns failure, the shadow of the modernist desire to transform living through transformed language. Analog Days explores the possibility that language lacks not only such transformative power but also the ability to even describe living, that it can no longer help make experience comprehensible to others or to ourselves. For me to even call this a crisis seems like a symptom, as if calling this designation promises a meaning and eventually an end: the ever-trusty OED points out that crisis, as a turning point in an illness or portentous convergence of cosmic bodies, historically points in both directions, toward collapse and recovery. Fittingly, the author-intrusion section ends by recommending as “the greatest book of [our] time” a photo book rather than a novel, quite possibly Edward Burtynsky’s Oil (2009). Of course, the tricky thing is that, reading Analog Days, we don’t see these photos of “oilfields, tankers, refineries, […] polluted water, skies on fire”; we receive not the images but the ekphrasis. Analog Days cannot accomplish what the photo book does; it cannot render palpable the power of the photo book’s images.

And, well, maybe fiction is thwarted by the vast sprawl of multinational capital; by the collapse of liberalism and the incapacity of collective politics to seize upon or remediate that collapse; by the felt acceleration of the disjunction between immediate phenomenological experience, which is hard to describe (doomscroll brainrot enshittification over/under bots bots bots), and the flows of capital and power, which seem impossible to describe (what does it mean to write “genocide”?). Can we, can a narrative, do anything other than point out that thwartedness, in however clever or strangely looped or even satisfying ways, forever?

I think Analog Days says no, that the fretting isn’t final, or at least shouldn’t be, and I want to agree. Doubting fiction’s comprehension and mapping of the world corresponds, at least in Searls’s novella, to an imperative to bludgeon that doubt with writing, which strikes me as necessarily hopeful, maybe even doggedly utopian. By inlaying the coffee shop eavesdropping with a narratorial aside about the difficulties of finding form for fiction commensurate with contemporary experience, Analog Days makes an (incomplete, frustrated) attempt at finding commensurate form. At the same time, Searls’s novella, in trying to speak to the world by chalking the lines of its speechlessness, by aligning anxieties that the novel might make nothing happen with anxieties that no one can make anything happen, at least not anything good, risks not just deflation but also depression—a belief in one’s own irrelevance, in one’s own pointlessness and stupidity, a kind of self-obsession. Of course, we’re all depressed, economically or affectively, diagnostically or atmospherically, chemically or historically (at least I am). Of course, again, maybe that’s the point. Of course, one lives on, keeps writing, turns toward the world—if one can.

But that’s much easier said than done (or written). Depressive handwringing about fiction’s uselessness can be just as navel-gazing as the romantic melodrama and lush interiority of unworldly novels whose pleasures, the fear goes, preempt or short-circuit political consciousness and action. The narrator of Analog Days tells us that the “defining moment (extended moment) of our age” is the 2009 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, responsible not only for “thousands of gallons of oil a day” released into the water but also for “reshaping us more than the Kennedy assassination, moon landing, Tiananmen, fall of the Wall, 9/11.” What allows the Gulf oil spill to surpass these other, more obviously tectonic events is the way attempts to write about it fall back into “the comfort of narrative perspective.” All the attempts to historicize and contextualize the spill, to situate it amid “deregulation, Republican hatred of government responsibility, [and] criminal corporate negligence,” only serve as a kind of release valve, a consumable catharsis, a sense that, by reading about these things, we have done our duty and so are free to go on living with the strangely comforting knowledge that “nothing could be done about it. […] [W]e all knew it, all felt it: There Is Nothing To be Done.” (We might say: Is that all there is?) Exhaustive and keen critical writing does the same thing as “light” or “escapist” fiction: nothing.

Does the attempt in Analog Days to point out that writing doesn’t seem to catalyze any kind of transformation or action mean that Searls himself is doing something more effective? As the narrator concludes the section on the Gulf spill, before moving on to a paragraph on Labrunie handbags, “individual action doesn’t make a difference.” If not, why write?

Analog Days is pulled into shape by these lines of tension. A strange congruence holds it together, like the first loop of a knit or weave. Analog Days places the question of whether individual action matters inside a work of fiction that doubts its own ability to matter. It wonders about the reconciliation of scales between the local and global, or the narrowly personal and vastly digital, inside a novella—a form that sits, fidgety, between scales. The novella is always an exercise in neither/nor: Analog Days endorses neither a credulous faith (in fiction, in ourselves, in the worn promises of digital life) nor a total skepticism. Nor, in fact, does it occupy some platitudinous in-between. Analog Days seeks out contradiction rather than compromise, the cleft coincidence of disappointment and desire, the deflation of seeing the world as it is and the conviction of demanding a better one not yet visible, which is all captured in a phrase like is that all there is?