What do you call a phone when it rings in a fictional world? “Mobile” and “cell” are old, “smartphone” is almost a tautology and “phone” is so intrusive that the word seems to ring out shrilly from the page the instant you type it. This may be because we read fiction partly to escape our phones, or it may be that phones, even fictional ones, seem to demand too much of our attention. Telephones, of the kind we all keep handy, are so much a part of daily life we touch them as often as our faces. But phones in fiction require a sleight of hand: if characters use them as realism dictates, they will feel as interruptive on the page as they do at the dinner table. How can authors navigate this challenge?
Like bathrooms and paid employment, it is amazing how often phones are dispensed with by many otherwise realist fiction writers. JM Coetzee famously wrote to Paul Auster (in Here and Now, the 2013 selection of their letters) that he was not prepared “to write novels in which people go around with personal electronic devices”. Because, if “everyone has access to more or less everyone else, what becomes of all that plotting?” He also lamented the impact of mobile technology on the “novel of adultery”, though surely Sally Rooney has proved there was nothing to fear.
“If you want to write about contemporary existence you can’t disavow the smartphone. It is a huge part of people’s lives,” says Jem Calder, whose debut collection of interlinked stories, Reward System, explores in granular detail the detachment that smartphones create. While some authors choose a time or place beyond the reach of mobile technology, Calder argues that just as “a city [can be] a character, the smartphone can assert itself”. He is happy to put the phone on the page even when it is doing nothing. It idles beside a sink, slides off a chest on to the bed, and is invoked absently in hands that are “non-smartphone-wielding”. Calder, whose characters make the protagonist of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This seem unplugged, points out that in Reward System he constantly uses the term “smartphone”, never “phone”. “I like that there is a little syllable of friction between the person picking up the phone and you being able to read what it is,” he says – it mimics “the awkwardness of the physical interaction of picking up the device”, a sort of conscious interruption, a micro discomfort.
In my new novel, Speak to Me, the narrator regards her partner’s phone as the third party in their marriage: “For the record, it is not because I think Kurt is having an affair that I want to take his phone,” she says. “The phone is the third party here. I want to take it so Kurt can’t have it.” She names the phone Wendy and tries to put an end to it once and for all. Similarly, Saba Sams treats the phone as “a character that can come in when it’s serving a purpose” in her 2022 collection Send Nudes. The stories feature an array of young women who connect, disconnect and define themselves with their phones in their hands. In Snakebite, a story about coercive friendship, a phone symbolises character brilliantly: “Lara had one of those brick phones that could be dropped from any height and survive. It was battered at the edges.” The choice of a brick seems to say everything about the sort of robust, unprivileged yet dominant person that Lara is.
Phones can carry plot, of course, as well as challenge it. Just as Coetzee worried about the adultery novel, others have bemoaned the impact on thrillers and crime fiction of characters always being reachable. But non-landline phones also create opportunities. Stephen King’s Cell, published in 2006, builds a horror story on the idea that a signal broadcast across the phone network transforms those who hear it into killers. In Gone Girl, the first time the reader hears the voice of missing Amy is her “quick-clip cadence” on her voicemail, and that distance and elusiveness help to drive the suspense.
In domestic dramas such as those by Elizabeth Strout and Tessa Hadley, phones exist mainly to make and receive calls. Hadley’s Late in the Day begins with a landline ringing, and the call – announcing a death – cracks open the story’s foursome of friends. It has a counterpart in the second half of the novel, when a smartphone goes unanswered, thereby geolocating the start of an extramarital affair.
But there is a sort of realist lag of smartphones in literary fiction, as if novels are always struggling to keep pace. Perhaps in order to toy with this anachronism, Strout has Lucy Barton remark in her novel Oh William!: “I had not seen a flip phone in years.” It isn’t until her Covid sequel, Lucy by the Sea, that the characters really embrace mobile technology, using phones to send texts, hold conversations on speakerphones, play music. There are twice as many references to mobile technology than in Oh William!, which was published just one year earlier, and whose timeline it continues; but that’s the pandemic for you. In fiction too, mobile technology helps characters through.
Sams thinks that “a lot of writers make the choice not to include these technologies because it places the work in a specific time and [authors] are worried about [their] work dating”. Even writers who once were at the vanguard of fictionalising mobile technology now seem pinned to their time. Rooney’s novels are full of characters who send emails, a method of communication that seems about as youthful as Facebook. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad was lauded at the time of publication for its “radical text-speak”, as one reviewer called it, which Egan deployed in the final chapter (“if thr r children, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?”). But Egan’s novel was published in 2010, three years after the first iPhone was launched, and although its fragmented and interconnected structure is inflected with technological advances, as the book moves into the future phones themselves are mostly curiosities, fantasy creations that fold up to the size of after dinner mints or potato chips.
Of course, while Coetzee lamented the “gamut of interpersonal signs and signals” that authors lose when they let mobile technology on to their pages, others have allowed a new world of interiority to open up. For Calder, the different registers that characters use in texts give access to “a kind of dialogue which is almost pre-speech … semi-conscious thoughts, which you could argue are a bit closer to their interiority. The smartphone gives voice to this almost in-between space.”
It is easy to feel nostalgic for stories written before the invention of the smartphone. How different literary history might have looked: Odysseus would have found his way home easily enough, Holden Caulfield would not have wandered New York from payphone to payphone and there would have been no go-between in The Go-Between. But maybe it’s time to appreciate what mobile technology can bring to fiction. Besides, as Calder points out, in the 1966 novel Rocannon’s World, Ursula K Le Guin created the “ansible”, a communication system that operates faster than the speed of light. If smartphones had never been created, novelists would probably have invented them.
• Speak to Me by Paula Cocozza is published by Tinder. To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
