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.
