Personal essay and book review on Private Rites by Julia Armfield and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

...I did not think to pity us. I did not realize living out of a car and tent was pitiable, or even unusual. My situation seemed normative and safe compared to those of the runaway heroes of the books I read around that age: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The Catcher in the Rye, The White Mountains, The Midwife’s Apprentice, The Giver, and I Am the Cheese. Those YA novels teach readers to be at ease — if not quite at home — in museums, the city, their own minds, or on the road. They defy mid-twentieth-century nuclear family ideals contained in a white-picket-fenced ranch house — what queer theorist Lauren Berlant calls “conventional good-life fantasies.” The runaway heroes know what Berlant would tell them: Such a vision of home is impossible and will never be theirs, and obsessing over ownership is madness. Rather than showing me ideal homes I should be missing, my adolescence was rich with books premised on the impossibility of a stationary home, books that told me living out of a car with my mother was neither inadequate nor unusual.

Now, I live with my wife in a Taipei apartment whose bookshelves bow with more queer theory and new lesbian fiction than classic YA lit. Yet in my recent reading, I have noticed a critique of home as an elusive myth similar to what I witnessed in my formative young adult reading and life. Most strikingly, I see the house rendered into an almost gothic rhetorical figure, a synecdoche of the crumbling town, nation, and world. Two exquisitely haunting lesbian novels published last year epitomize this critique, in which the unattainable home serves as a figure representing a broader world that will never truly belong to the characters: Private Rites by Julia Armfield (Flatiron Books, 2024) and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Avid Reader, 2024)...

Sitting alone on the riverside, my neighbor is immersed in viewing our familiar corner of Taipei through the perspective of the drone he’s piloting. Looking down through virtual reality (VR) glasses, he’s unaware of his physical body, disappointing my dog, who has loped over to greet him. My neighbor is in his own virtual world, isolated from our shared world or other individuals. This image of immersion as isolating is prevalent in popular culture (like the frenzy over internet addiction) as well as in science fiction (SF), from as early as E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops,” which presciently envisions a future of humanity partitioned into honey-comb cells, constantly communicating with and surveilled by the titular entity. The story opens, “Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee…There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds.” Though connected through the unassailable Machine’s network of what resembles a social media world, they disdain personal contact, not even raising their own children. Their interactions are short and distanced, physically and emotionally, for “the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people.” Aside from the one rebellious character, humans in Forster’s future seem content to stay isolated in their cells, without access to nature nor one another, absorbed in the Machine’s world. But could technological immersion [...] 

Smart homes in speculative fiction (SF) range from the ominously sinister to the strategically life-saving, revealing our hopes and fears for science: possibilities we envision for artificial intelligence (AI), yet also dangers of such technology. Within these narratives, we can also see the cracks in our conceptions, where it may be time to rethink our assumptions about intelligence, ethics, motives. The epitome of the midcentury techno-utopian dream is [...]