In a new novel about a contemporary female artist, the chapter titles borrow from the names of real-world artworks, mostly by contemporary female artists. Very private little random possibilities, Chloe Wise, 2021; Small Beasts, Louise Howard, 2022; Trouble Moving On?, Issy Wood, 2021; Untitled (Pig Woman), Cindy Sherman, 1986.
Maybe the reader pauses to search on Google Images, scrolling with one hand while holding the hardback in the other. Or, if the reader bought the “eccentric novel about what it means to make art as a woman,” perhaps she is already aware of the art. Maybe is even one of some 213,000 people following the Instagram of Canadian painter Chloe Wise. The author presumes she’s familiar with Wise’s grid of fleshy, feminine anatomy and with her cultural cachet. If the reader doesn’t get the reference, she probably won’t “get” the book.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter, out with Catapult on December 3, is a kind of “reference novel,” a fictional story laden with real-life people, places, and products. In the post–alt lit, autofiction-fatigued, always-on-the-internet landscape that young writers are working within—or struggling against—hyper specificity has become a fashionable device. In the hands of a master, a pileup of proper nouns can be a conduit for sharp commentary or satire. It can also easily slide into status signalling, where the book serves to confirm the status and milieu to which the author, and their ideal reader, belongs. Not a character or a plot point, Wise isn’t there in Woo Woo to make narrative meaning, but to signify the context in which the book is supposed to be read.
It’s not groundbreaking to set a story in an explicitly current moment and to make that clear by name-dropping a bunch of relevant things. John Cheever stories, circa the 1950s, read like an appendix to WASP-y New England. In the ’90s, Bret Easton Ellis noted his characters’ every designer clothing tag. In modern editions of Shakespeare, there are countless footnotes clarifying that medieval audiences would have totally understood a nod to some politician then.
But considering the way that many recent novels reference recent, niche cultural fragments most relevant to an incestuous class of urban media professionals, future generations would need a comically thick companion book. (How to succinctly explain the hilarious-to-me line, “I don’t use TikTok because it makes me feel like I’m having a seizure, but lately I can’t open Instagram without being bombarded by some ‘sapphic bookstagrammer’ or ‘queer radical sex therapist,’” from Anna Dorn’s Perfume and Pain?) The text is not timeless, and is not trying to be. It’s of an era, gone as fast as brat summer or hot girl summer or the summer of Barbie—a cycle of buzzwords to describe the same concept.
A few years ago, there was a panic over the rise of the “internet novel,” in which the “reference novel” finds tradition. Web 2.0–informed writing “is dystopic in its moral vision,” author and frequent tweeter Brandon Taylor wrote in a “Substack post.” “‘Internet novels’ have succeeded too entirely, which is to say that they are too exactly like being online,” wrote critic Becca Rothfeld. The fear was of a cheapened literary experience that leaves you as empty as a scrolling binge. Today’s internet novel doesn’t recount a person using websites and social media so much as those websites and social media form the linguistic scaffolding of a story. With My First Book, published in May, writer Honor Levy proposed the internet as co-author.
The first line of My First Book—“He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb”—is language ripped from chat forums (and the rest of the short story collection follows suit). In his review for the New York Times, Dwight Garner admits that he had to look up “haplogroups,” but that he “responded to the way these sentences crackled even before.” Levy’s whole thing is style, because the internet-voice provides the substance. Internet-voice has zettabytes of information at its disposal. Internet-voice assumes the reader does too.
And true, it’s never been so easy to look up an unknown term. But there’s a reward if you get the reference: you are in communion with the author; your specific habits and tastes are seen, confirmed, and validated by the knowledge that someone else is watching the same shows, reading the same books, reposting the same posts as you. I smirked at mentions of the Quebec Writers’ Federation and a “loft party on Beaubien” in Frankie Barnet’s Mood Swings, published this past May, because I, too, served my time in Montreal’s Mile End trenches. I loved reading Alexandra Tanner’s Worry, in which the protagonist scrolls through Mormon influencers, because it made all the time I’d spent on the @ballerinafarm “trad wife” Instagram productive.
In an interview with Maggie Millner, author of 2023’s Couplets, a novel in verse, writer Maya Binyam inquires about the fictional speaker’s use of highly specific real-world references, ones that lit up group chats at the cross-section of “Brooklyn resident” and “Goodreads user.” “Eckhaus Latta, Saraghina: I find them to be rather ugly words,” Binyam says. “Why did you include them?”
They are words important to a specific social class and milieu that the speaker is trying to infiltrate, Millner explains. Her book’s speaker is highly attuned to the existence of these proper nouns (Eckhaus Latta, an independent fashion brand; Saraghina, a pizza restaurant in a gentrifying neighbourhood), but there’s what Millner describes as an “inevitable friction between the person she knows herself to be within the social contexts that she has occupied, and the world that these proper nouns stand in for.”
Standing in for description is the basic function of a proper noun. Unlike a lowly English adjective and the limits of its dictionary definition, a name is a point in a constellation with the possibility for infinite expansion, its associations exploding outward to conjure an entire world already mapped. This can be a useful tool to cut to the business of plot, expediting establishment of social class and milieu in order to have space to say something about it.
In the case of Woo Woo, the critique is of ego in a shallow, posturing arts scene. Early on, the protagonist, Sabine, is getting dressed for a party where she is anxious to assume the role of “a successful artist in a room full of more interesting undergraduates.” Her friend, Ruth, waits while she tries on outfits:
Rolling the dice, Sabine changed into a slip and cowboy boots.
“I’m dressed, I’m coming. But I’ll leave early if everyone is wearing tabis and doing nangs,” said Sabine.
“Me too,” said Ruth.
“Tabis,” a shoe with a polarizing split-toe design, refers in the contemporary context to Maison Margiela’s $1,290 leather boots. One of the most memed articles of clothing, tabis are a staple of “fashion girlie” starter packs; the joke is that they are ugly to anyone not in the know, and that those in the know feel superior for knowing. So Baxter’s “tabis” come with a wink.
“Nangs” I had to look up. An Australian term for nitrous oxide as a party drug—Baxter is Australian, and Woo Woo is set in Melbourne—I figured it was something like that with the clue that they could be “done.” This reference, though, doesn’t speak to me. In my mind’s eye, I can see the metallic hoofs of tabis on a pale SSENSE model’s feet; even if I search for a definition of “nangs,” I lose the image in the stumble. (How the sentence changes with my invocation of high-end retail site SSENSE: I’m communicating authority in my knowing.)
If a reader does not know the reference, there’s the feeling of lurking at the conversation circle’s edges, at a party you were indirectly invited to, listening to strangers talk about someone they’ve all met before but who isn’t present himself. The name sort of sounds familiar: ah, you realize you follow him but he doesn’t follow you back.
The proper noun seduces with exclusivity, but the language of exclusivity can be readily manufactured. In the current state of cultural production on the internet, realistically small subcultural phenomena balloon so that references specific to, say, a New York City neighbourhood hold meaning far away. Viewers of lifestyle blogs, listeners of podcasts, and subscribers of Substacks can quickly learn the lingo of a creator without ever “belonging” to the place where the content originated. They sustain the wheel of the operation by paying for a peek inside.
What journalist W. David Marx calls “savvy consumers,” those desiring cool and convention-breaking pop culture, are still consumers. When the names of products or celebrities appear in a book, they prick us like a targeted ad, jumping from the page as digestible morsels. Reference novels work because of globalized digitization; the danger in them is the possibility of further narrowing our taste to revolve only around what we encounter online, often as things to buy. The books themselves operate within the market, as Christian Lorentzen identified in his screed against literature’s sociological turn, as “commodities and demographic specimens.”
Also cropping up in contemporary fiction, potentially in reaction to “reference novels,” are descriptions of modern phenomena that aren’t name-checked, as if the author went out of their way not to. In the novel Ask Me Again by Clare Sestanovich, published in June, New York subway riders use “fare cards” and pass ads “featuring a famous actor’s face” and join what seems like an Occupy Wall Street movement but that Sestanovich declines to confirm. In Jacob Wren’s Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, published in September, an unnamed narrator navigates an unnamed war zone, internally monologuing on morality and pain. These slightly blurrier, vaguer worlds suggest a search for a human universal. While reference-heavy writing is stuffed, like a meme’s compaction of complex emotion and history into a single low-res image, there’s an alternative roominess: space to take ideas past previous or logical bounds, or to articulate opinions that a mutual follower hasn’t posted already. Those ideas are probably harder to sell, and to write.
Greta Rainbow is a Canadian American writer living in New York. Her writing has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Review of Architecture, Interview magazine, and the Guardian, among others.
