Adrift in Berlin, the narrator of Esther Yi’s intricate debut novel works as a copywriter for a business selling canned artichoke hearts. Her job, she informs us, “required [her] to credibly infuse the vegetable with the ability to feel romantic love for its consumer”. She has a sort-of boyfriend, Masterson, though she introduces herself at parties as his adoptive sister, not to shock so much as to indicate the true psychological state of their relationship. Masterson cannot bring himself to fall in love with her, a state of terminal indecisiveness our narrator responds to by falling in love with someone else. When her flatmate Vavra offers her a spare ticket to the first ever Berlin concert by K-pop idols the Pack of Boys, she is initially indifferent. “But this concert will change your life,” her friend insists. What ensues is not change so much as an overthrow of her previous existence.
The first generation of internet novels was preoccupied with technology: the novelty of artificial realities, the threat of surveillance, the confusion caused by covert communication and multiple identities. Twenty years on and digital technology is quotidian. Novelists are if anything even more obsessed with the internet, but what fascinates is societal impact, the ever hazier boundary between the online and the real. Recent years have seen a slew of narratives, notably from younger writers – Olivia Sudjic, Lauren Oyler, Sheena Patel – all deeply concerned with the act of seeing and of being seen. For the narrator of Y/N, the love she feels for Moon, the youngest of the Boys, is felt by her as more real and urgent than the pallid, almost two-dimensional interactions of her mundane experience.
