A Flight From Slow, Sad Reality

On Scott Spires' 'Social Distancing'

Ivan Shishkin, Logging, 1867, Oil on canvas

I can remember the first time I really understood the millennial obsession with authenticity. It was the summer of 2016, a few months after I moved to Seattle, as the bright lights of a newly urban existence began to dim in the rhythms of the day to day, and the lingering jokes about gentrifying hipsters with their artisanal beard wax and fair trade coffee had long worn out their punchline. My job at the time was ingratiating myself to hospitality workers, concierges of major hotels especially, so they might hand out my company’s travel magazine to any tourist looking for the hottest restaurant in the hippest neighborhood, one willing to advertise to the type of tourist who still reads print mags in the first place. Most of my exchanges with these higher-end concierges consisted of dull pleasantries and languorous chattering about special events going on around the city. One of these exchanges went sour, which I had sensed on the concierge’s face even before I was later called into my boss’s office. She simply asked how my day was going.

“Oh it’s going excellent, thank you. I’ll tell you though, I’m definitely ready for some different weather,” was my reply.

Her face darkened a bit. Despite dreary weather being the favored small talk topic of the city, I had broken some kind of code. That a high-end hotel retains an atmosphere of unerring positivity was the law of the land, and my wayward comment about the weather, as my boss later put it, exuded a certain negativity that made people not want to talk to me or stock our company’s magazine. To put it bluntly, it was simply off-putting. Can you do this job? We don’t need you if you can’t. Like many others who contort themselves into an alien personality for the majority of their waking hours, in order to not stand out and remain inconspicuous enough to pay their rent, I tried my best to reclaim a sense of my real identity in my off hours. For me, this meant a lot of time in grimy punk venues among a primarily Gen X crowd that would remind me that this city was in fact cool back in the 80s and 90s. I believed them, and still do. Amazon had already slowly amassed land throughout the entire city at this time, transmogrifying it into a miniature Silicon Valley, and the old scenesters talked about the glory days when it supposedly had a soul.

Yet, there was a pervasive anhedonia about these Cap Hill cliques, everyone wearing the garb of bohemia in their off hours to distract from the implicit gun held to their heads by Amazon executives during the day. The goth nights at the Mercury and horrorcore DJs could only distract so much from the stress of their Amazon jobs; the lines of the homeless camped on 3rd Avenue became an ominous enough warning against not hitting their numbers that they should each have been paid a middle manager's salary. The lingering financial uncertainties were coupled with a kind of placidity that was all but socially mandated. The coolest place to be was always in your own apartment, by yourself. In fuzzy socks. The more plans you canceled, the more you fit in. People spoke, no matter what type of conversation they were having, in a register that sat somewhere between an NPR studio and a therapist’s office, always careful not to invalidate someone in person. For a while, I would say some increasingly irrational and unhinged things just to see if anyone would call me out or contradict me on anything at all. No one ever did. And yet, I was as complicit in this Northwestern culture of avoidance as everyone else, despite all my discontents, and I wasn’t alone. The topic of “real people” was common in those circles. Some swore they existed just an hour or so south of city limits. “Check out Tacoma,” was a common refrain. Transplants from more extroverted cultures were always a welcome reprieve: jocular Lower East Siders who frequented CBGB in the 80s, singer-songwriters from Austin who perhaps over-punctuated their twang as if to balance out the city’s tonal grey scale. Places like Slim’s Last Chance, in gentrifying but still industrial Georgetown, offered that slice of mythic Americana everyone craved. What I took at the time to be a regional phenomenon was happening all across America: the localized urban village had collapsed, bought out and redecorated by BlackRock. Just as people seldom think of water outside a desert, people seldom think as much about authenticity outside a twenty-first-century city. It was no surprise when COVID started pushing people where they imagined authenticity still lingered: small-town America.

As this search for a soul within the regional makes up the heart of Social Distancing, a new novel from Scott Spires, it can be almost said to be a millennial novel — almost because neither the author nor the book’s protagonists are millennials. Unlike more overtly millennial novels, such as Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, which uses this millennial thirst for the natural aesthetic as fodder for the type of satire you’d find in a 2010s Tim Allen sitcom, Spires treats this yearning for a more fulfilling cultural experience with a real but subtle moral urgency. Fred Traubert moves to an idyllic small town in the Great Lakes with his son. The reason he gives for doing so is to have somewhere safe to hide during the apocalypse. Which apocalypse? He doesn’t know. Social Distancing is as mercifully far from a pandemic novel as one can get with section titles like “Sheltering In Place” or “The Toilet Paper Is Critical.” There is no mention of COVID and there is no substitute catastrophe laboring as a metaphor for COVID; the real social distancing here occurs long before 2020.

For Fred Traubert specifically, the social distancing starts years before the events of the novel, as fewer and fewer students enroll in his Germanic Languages courses, and the ones who do find it worthless. There’s pressure from the university to make his course on Icelandic Literature more diverse, perhaps with less emphasis on those overrepresented Icelanders. In short, his worth as a professor, and perhaps as a human overall, given the love for language and the North European aesthetic that makes up his very essence, is continually diminished by the university system and the wider culture it is held captive to. When Fred picks up a copy of Sigmund Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, known in English as Civilization and Its Discontents, he becomes fixated on the word Unbehagen. “Discontent” is what the translators settled on but there is no direct English equivalent of Unbehagen, which refers to a kind of upset in the soul caused by the disequilibrium between human desires and civilizational demands.

In any case, it was the salience of this phrase—the “sense of uneasiness of the culture”— that mattered most of all, irrespective of what Freud meant by that. It was the fragment that lodged in my mind and set me to thinking, and then worrying, and then looking for a way out.

From there, a host of historic catastrophes floods Fred’s imagination. He feels he must immediately prepare for some storm that wipes everything out, or a civilizational crash. This progression from cultural alienation to apocalyptic fixation strongly resembles the “prepper” movements across YouTube, and recalls a sentiment of Binx Bolling in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer: “People are not afraid that the bomb will fall. They are afraid that it won’t.” The best refuge against this disaster that will or possibly won’t swallow up and disintegrate the whole of mass culture turns out to be a small town called Roverton. Situated in the Great Lakes, which climatologists believe will be the least-adversely-affected region amidst the disasters of climate change, Roverton is one of the few traditional small towns in the U.S. that has preserved its Germanic roots and old architecture, rather than become an anonymous wasteland of big-box retailers. It’s the perfect place for a guy like Fred.

Fred Traubert’s son, Ethan, has his own Unbehagen with the wider culture. He wants to open a brewpub in Roverton. Craft beer brewing has been a favorite Millennial pastime since the rise of tech culture, but unlike those Millennials who turned to artisanal hobbies in a subconscious effort to join a simpler medieval lifestyle with a progressive neoliberal sensibility within the confines of single gentrifying neighborhoods, Ethan — in typical Gen Z fashion — is as much at war with the ideological present as he is with the aesthetic present. He reads “Boldmug,” a Curtis Yarvin-like figure, and discusses with his dad the need for a CEO King. Meanwhile, Fred’s wife is living somewhere in Europe, not technically separated but estranged to the extent she no longer views her life and Fred’s as one. She plans to see him in Roverton, but she seems to be coming for a visit, not coming home. Fred feels like an apparent failure, but takes comfort in the fact that Herman Melville also died an “apparent” failure.

Fred strikes up friendships with various locals to discover the town’s history. More specifically, he wants to know how language has evolved over time in this region. What was the Rovertonian dialect? Of the town’s various characters, the elderly Noodles Fontaine is the most happy to oblige him. According to Noodles, they used to refer to animals as “alfreds.” This was on account of a man named Alfred Schmidt who hated squirrels so much he would hunt them with a rifle. Except he wasn’t a good shot, mostly just waving the rifle around and yelling at them to get off his lawn. They also used to call rabbits “buckchucks,” or maybe it was “chuckbucks.” Noodles is full of these kinds of tales, and Fred eats them up voraciously until some of the other locals tip him off that just about everything that comes out of Noodles’ mouth is fiction.

All of this might seem like a recipe for a depressing novel, and no doubt, most novels featuring the parent of a child or young adult flirting with far-right ideologies would treat such subject matter with the solemnity of American History X. Ethan Traubert, however, is possibly the most lovable “radicalized youth” character I’ve come across, less Danny Vinyard, more Bobby Hill. After a while, he gets bored of Boldmug’s ideology and wants to give Islam a try, because it’s a “badass religion” unbending towards modern life. Fred tells him it would be awfully hard to be a Muslim brewer as they aren’t allowed to drink, but Ethan thinks maybe there’s a more liberal version of Islam with a workaround. But would a more liberal Islam be “sufficiently” badass? Fred asks. At some point, Ethan wants to join the Chinese Communist Party. Later he tries to invent a localized Great Lakes cuisine to serve at his brewpub, despite not really knowing how to cook. He needs an ideology to pair with his brewpub. Rather than deliver a sermon, Fred simply says that perhaps what Roverton really needs is a really great beer. He’s the rare protagonist with the kind of voice, humor, and wisdom that might make you wish he was your father as well.

Though Fred does assimilate into town life, he too misses the higher culture of urban America, holding onto hope it might spawn in Roverton. He rents a copy of L’Avventura and sees it’s been checked out from the local video store a couple times in the last few years, taking it as a sign of budding cultural sentience. He strikes up a friendship with the video store owner, with whom he plans to watch L’Avventura, and gets a remote job at a tech company he despises. Eventually, tragedy strikes, putting his newly-formed life back on the brink. Spires deploys the essayistic form to pristine use, weaving in quotes and digressions about Thomas Pynchon, Ingmar Bergman (whose Jonas Persson in Winter Light is a clear precursor to the character of Fred Traubert), Will Durant, and Harold Bloom without ever disrupting the narrative in doing so. There’s plenty of mystery in this small-town story too: an ex-musician who joined a cult, then went missing in the woods several decades ago, and the mysterious death of a dog. The end result is a spectacularly resonant upgrade to the Sebaldian form that feels distinctly American.

And so the “nukes” — this is what Roverton calls its affluent transplants — start to take over the town. A historic haunt called Reinhard’s Diner, with a flair of authenticity as it was once owned by a local whose name was Reinhard, has since been bought out. New management takes over and the cozy diner’s menu is ordained with poetic descriptions like “a mellifluous symphony of apple, cinnamon, and raisin.” This certainly wouldn’t have been on Reinhard’s menu under its original owners, and is hardly in step with its unassuming historic character. But that type of authenticity ceases to be so important to Fred towards the end; he’s found connection. He’s no longer in a desert. Now he just goes there for the coffee.

Adam Pearson writes the Substack newsletter The Pensive Pejorative. He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.