“If I don’t pick up my phone to look, is anything really happening to me?”
Sarah Selecky’s first novel Radiant Shimmering Light offers a satire of the self-as-brand phenomenon in the social media age. As in the writing of Margaret Atwood—one of Selecky’s mentors and patrons—there is a dystopian undercurrent to characters’ incessant Instagram updates and saccharine e-newsletters subversively selling not only products but also that terrifying corollary of the social media generation: one’s lifestyle. Like Charlie Brooker’s hugely popular television show Black Mirror, Radiant Shimmering Light similarly “answers to a mood of global unease about the breakneck pace of technological development,” as The New Yorker’s Giles Harvey put it in his review of the series. Such answers, in both media, come in the form of satire and irony. In the case of Selecky’s novel, the specific target of critique is identity capitalism and its effects on characters’ interpersonal relations and private selves.
In her much lauded short story collection This Cake is for the Party (2010) Selecky balanced a wry, sardonic tone with genuine pathos for her characters. The stories contain interpersonal struggles and moments of realization, all rendered in precise dialogue and with lasting metaphorical resonances. Selecky empathizes with her characters, including a woman on the cusp of conceiving a child with an unfaithful partner, another who commits to an unregulated drug trial during college because she is hard up for rent money, and a teenager experiencing her first kiss on a Greyhound bus. These women are smart and self-reflective, and their situations are relatable: they find themselves hard-up for money and taking unsavory employment, or being drawn into sexual relations with older and seemingly more powerful men. The stories in This Cake is for the Party gripped me—I felt for the characters and kept thinking about them after I closed the book.
Unfortunately, I found it difficult to care for or relate to the majority of the characters in Radiant Shimmering Light. Despite an abundance of space to render them due to the length afforded by the novel, they are less potent, their backstories less gripping and realistic. Further, my critique of the novel stems from my uncertainty about its modality and intentions. I read Radiant Shimmering Light as a satire of the social media generation, and yet the conclusions offered by Selecky’s satire are difficult to ascertain.
They meticulously erode the lines between private and public, intimate self and profitable persona.
Radiant Shimmering Light introduces readers to Lilian Quick, a struggling pet portraitist in her 40s living in a sublet in Toronto. Lilian attends an event helmed by her long-lost cousin Florence, who now goes by the alias Eleven. Eleven is a New Age internet-savvy self-help guru who preaches a secular yet spiritual message of self-discovery and dynamism. She evangelizes such tenets as: “Create before you consume; Do no more than three things a day; Let yourself want what you want,” and other aphorisms you might find on your Lululemon reusable shopping bag. Prior to attending the event, Eleven’s team has found Lilian on social media and has taken a liking to her artworks, which are ostensibly created through her unique trait: Lilian can see auras around animals and she includes them in her portraits. Radiant Shimmering Light doesn’t explicate Lilian’s superpower. Was she born with the rare condition of synesthesia? Does she really possess the innate or acquired ability to read auras around living beings? Is she a magical realist character at the centre of an otherwise realistic novel? The underpinnings of Lilian’s gift are unclear. What matters is that she is special, sensitive, and vibrating on a frequency desirable for Eleven and her quest for lifestyle-brand demigod stardom. The plot of this 360-page novel hinges on this reunion and potential collaboration between the two cousins.
One way to understand the major characters in Selecky’s novel is to see them as identity capitalists. Emily M. Keeler recently defined the term in her discussion of overwork in the digital age:
I can demonstrate how meaningful my life is by telling you I’m just so busy, so in demand. I’ve been working so hard and my personal brand has never been stronger. And, of course, by becoming the job, with all the social capital that entails, the worker’s whole life also becomes the clock—it’s impossible to distinguish time at work from personal time if the person identifies themselves as the ultimate product of their labour.
Selecky’s characters embody Keeler’s concept. They meticulously erode the lines between private and public, intimate self and profitable persona, via crafted social media strategies and calculated online networking. They inhabit the realistically drawn cities of Toronto, New York, Portland, and Honolulu, yet their geographic locality bears little weight as the majority of climactic moments in the text occur through the creation of and reaction to online posts and comments—events occurring in the cyber ether, both seemingly nowhere and everywhere.
My misgivings about the use of satire in Radiant Shimmering Light come from Lilian’s optimism about the authentic feelings of her digital community, and her inability to critically analyze her peers’ avatars. Lilian constantly performs her scattered social-media-affected self: the accidental spilling of loose leaf tea on her kitchen counter must be documented visually via Instagram for her scores of followers, as must her painful run-in with an X-Acto knife at a friend’s art studio. The responses to the latter help to heal Lilian’s physical pain:
The notifications float up on my screen and collect in a list. I watch them come in, and it makes me feel a little better … Marie Real is a pet portrait artist from Mexico City. We haven’t met in person, but we connected on Pinterest. I know from her feed that she lives a bright and colourful life, she has so many beautiful friends, and she’s always laughing. She’s a light, an inspiration.
It is unclear to me how the reader is meant to interpret this passage and others like it: are we merely to be critical of Lilian’s naiveté? Satire is intended to be funny, yes, but it also usually possesses a goal or intention to change, or at least check, people’s opinions about the status quo. At 30 years old, I am one of those Millennials who grew up on both sides of the social media generation, i.e., I remember life both before and after it, and, as such, find myself extremely wary of the avatars people create online. Lilian is 40 years old, a decade older than myself, and should therefore be wary of the internet’s deceptions. However, her relationship with her online self and those around her strikes me as juvenile, like someone coming of age in a virtual landscape who has yet to develop the critical tools to see beneath its shiny, capitalist surface.
Her relationship with her online self and those around her strikes me as juvenile, like someone coming of age in a virtual landscape who has yet to develop the critical tools to see beneath its shiny, capitalist surface.
I had the same critique of the novel’s politics elsewhere in Radiant Shimmering Light, when Lilian laps up her peers’ e-newsletters without commenting on their potential inaccuracy. The e-newsletters sent to Lilian from Eleven, Juliette (Lilian’s best friend from university), and Jonathan (a yoga and lifestyle instructor who engages in business partnerships with Lilian’s cousin Eleven) interrupt her narration in the same way notifications appear on our electronic devices. These passages are dripping in a neoliberal, inward-looking, secular humanist veneer. From Eleven: “Dear Goddess Lilian, It can feel very dark for many of us this time of year … The truth of February is that the darkness of winter has started to lift … We needed this winter so we could reflect on what we want out of living.” From Juliette: “Dear Lilian … [t]here’s a stillness to this month that fills me with peace … Hibernation can be luxurious. Today’s post is chock-full of cozy options that will make your January deep and delicious.” Selecky’s inclusion of these characters’ social media networking approaches is meant to inflate and critique a culture that would fall prey to these gimmicks. However, she makes it challenging to connect the dots due to the sheer length of Radiant Shimmering Light and the amount of time it spends merely displaying the workings of social media marketing. The characters inhabit a shallow, virtual world of pings and unread emails requiring attention. There are very few moments when readers are able to glimpse the characters’ private selves behind their carefully curated virtual personas. We spend so much time in Lilian’s head burdened by her incapacity to think critically about herself and the world around her that the force of the novel’s critique is diminished.
Perhaps Selecky’s own feelings about identity capitalism and the self-as-brand phenomenon in the social media age are not fully transparent to her, either. As someone who maintains a well-crafted online personality and business (she runs a virtual creative writing school), perhaps she is too close to her subject matter to offer up the conclusions her satirical treatise demands. In Radiant Shimering Light, her critiques are submerged beneath layers of seeming counterarguments, despite the novel’s length and her own potential, as displayed in This Cake is for the Party. Radiant Shimmering Light left me wanting to know on which side of her own arguments the author falls.
