How do you make a self-absorbed narrator feel interesting? Alexandra Tanner’s first book, Worry, has to contend with this question from the jump. Jules Gold, a 28-year-old edtech employee living in Brooklyn, has good reason to be thinking about herself: her life is falling apart. We follow Jules through a breakup, a probable social media addiction, and most significantly her younger sister Poppy’s reintroduction into her life, getting her thoughts for the most part from her own mouth.
Yet while she opens the wound of her life to the reader, I never fully understood who Jules was. The novel is asking questions about her too– are she and Poppy the same? Is that a bad thing?– but its refusal to offer up an answer left me seeing it more as an allegory of sisterhood with sometimes thin characterization than a story about fully fleshed-out people discovering who they are.
Worry starts when Poppy comes to crash indefinitely in Jules’s Crown Heights apartment. Spanning one year, the book rolls up images and moments into itself: a three-legged dog, a mother who’s turned to Jews for Jesus, and a stable of ex-boyfriends haunting the streets of New York. Individual scenes feel like investigations into how someone would act, character studies, more than discrete moments in a plot that’s moving somewhere. If Worry does have a frame, it’s Poppy’s recovery from a serious depression through Jules’s eyes, and Jules’s parallel slip into the same.
Worry’s dark mirror is the internet, and Jules’s tendency to always be on her phone is both a warning and a relatable flaw. She’s almost too online, though the only way you’d know that is if you’re also too online. Sometimes the internet culture stuff feels reverse-engineered, as with the inclusion of Co-Star– was that app already popular in 2019?– or Jules’s obsession with tradwives. At times, it almost feels like a parody of existence in the social media age. Yet rather than an anthropologist’s removed gaze, Tanner writes about using the internet with a familiarity that makes small moments recognizable. For instance, when Jules sends her lover a meme, she complains “The conversation was getting too long for Instagram, but it feels too late to switch to texts.” Other details, like the impossible ask of dragging yourself to someone’s apartment in Harlem when you live in Brooklyn, will be familiar to anyone who’s dated in the NY metro area.
Throughout my reading experience, I wrestled with the novel’s main character. Jules’s strife bored me; she’s always low on money, yet more or less financially stable. I find myself wondering what the plot of this novel would even be if it focused on someone without a checking account flexible enough to order expensive mattresses (even if fiscal responsibility requires they be returned). This isn’t really a gripe with Worry specifically, but with a lot of contemporary novels set in NYC; and maybe it’s because I can’t get my mind off the housing crisis in New York long enough to suspend disbelief. In this economy, soon even these characters won’t be able to afford their apartments!
In fairness, Jules’s construction of herself as New York’s main character is heavily undermined. Poppy’s arrival smashes through this self-image Kool Aid Man style, ruining her confidence in the facade: though Jules has lived in NYC for a while, the front she’s built up is easily replicated. This is the root of much of their conflict, as well as the back and forth that arises when Poppy moves in and Jules begins to long for her to move out. When Poppy begins to develop her own routine and friendships, this dynamic shifts; Jules becomes more codependent, while Poppy pulls away.
The other side of the story here is that the novel reflects the time period I’ve spent living in New York. One scene in particular, where Jules’s ex’s girlfriend takes a picture with a blooming corpse flower at the NYBG, gave me a ghostly feeling of familiarity. I worked at the NYBG that summer; I saw the corpse flower bloom. Rather than endearing me to the novel, this almost became a point against it. I couldn’t eliminate the feeling that as I’d lived the past half-decade, I’d missed seeing Jules– or Tanner– just outside my line of sight.
While my personal feeling about this is not the novel’s fault, it does connect to the issue I raised before– that the plot can feel just like a collection of scenes rather than a story. Despite what the book jacket lightly implies, the book wraps up before March 2020, avoiding the fate of Beautiful World, Where Are You? a few years ago. The tension the pandemic gives is thus more a sense of dramatic irony every time Jules expresses feeling trapped, every time she considers leaving her remote job– just you wait, the reader thinks. I think it was very smart to leave this tension unexplored, but the novel’s end does feel abrupt in a way I’m still turning over in my head. The feeling that all these plot points are building to something never goes away; the ending seems to communicate the futility of arranging life moments into a coherent story, but on the other hand, isn’t that what novels are for?
All that said, the structure of the novel makes it extremely easy to finish in a few days. That’s what I did, propelled especially by seeing whether Jules and Poppy’s sibling conflict would resolve in connection between them or separation. Though my gripes about internet culture overload stand, this too made the book a very compelling read. Its high points reminded me of Sarah Thankam Mathew’s All This Could Be Different, which similarly uses late-20s work and romantic malaise to discuss career failure and purposelessness.
I neither loved nor hated Worry, but don’t let that statement imply that I felt neutral about it, either. It was sometimes irritating on a subdermal level and sometimes pointed enough to feel like staring into a funhouse mirror– what I imagine it must feel like to have a sibling. My dissatisfaction with the plot stands against the fact that I ripped through this novel in three days, and legitimately enjoyed its window into internet culture and mid-twenties nihilism. Feeling your age group become plot material might always be an uncomfortable experience; this one at least goes down smooth.
Emily Price is a former intern at Paste Magazine and a columnist at Unwinnable Magazine She is also a Ph.D. Candidate in literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She can be found on Twitter @the_emilyap.