BONDING, by Mariel Franklin
Mariel Franklin’s first novel, “Bonding,” is about next-level dating apps, existential pharmacology, mass psychology and the marketing of the libidinal economy. It’s an easy novel to make sound kinky and futuristic — and it is those things. But “Bonding” matters because Franklin’s most salient gifts are old-fashioned ones. She’s a confident storyteller with reserves of judgment and discrimination. You know from the first pages that you’re reading the work of a novelist, not just someone who has written a novel.
“Bonding” is set largely in London. It’s the story of Mary, who is solitary, in her early 30s and tenuously employed in marketing for companies with names like Healthify. She lives in a substandard apartment with a roommate but slips away on fine vacations. She has a hard-won sophistication, with opinions about the chameleonic style of Nobu’s restaurants. She reads Reuters and the FT’s “How to Spend It” magazine. Her descriptions of hours spent doomscrolling will speak to many readers. Here is one: “I gave myself an orgasm, then I moved on to The New York Times.”
This novel does not reach for generational statements, but it locates them. Aware that many of the pins that once held England’s society together (“family, religion, geography, an unyielding social order, a communally enforced vision of what it meant to coexist”) have come permanently loose, she thinks:
The result was the existence of someone like me: floundering, mostly on my own, bombarded with ads for various prophylactics — fitness programs, anticapitalist marches, psychotherapy courses. Anything to ward off the realization that no one had any idea how to live.
On one vacation, Mary meets Tom. “Bonding” is also a love story of a sensitive and melancholy sort. In her sex writing, Franklin does a lot with a little — she provides only notional descriptions, as gentle as the lines in a Thurber drawing, but they hit with force. There is not a surfeit of food writing, but it too is good. (At a fine restaurant: “The bread was dark and coarse, like something a medieval peasant might have eaten.”)Tom went to Eton, she discovers. To admit to this is to have “dropped the E-bomb.” Mary shudders with class panic; she fears she’s not good enough for him.
She gets a job with a start-up called Openr, a breakthrough dating app, though no one can describe what’s new about it. “It’s about world-building,” the pretentious founder babbles. “It’s about the fluidity of digital identity.” Franklin, who has worked in the tech industry, has a perceptive ear for the higher bogosity of its jargon. The elites in the novel’s corporate world prevaricate as naturally as Sam Bankman-Fried, while twinkling patronizingly.
“Bonding” takes on darker hues. Tom, who also works in marketing — everyone, this novel posits, now works in marketing — takes a job with a company that manufactures Eudaxa, a psychedelic drug that in low doses works as an antidepressant. It makes people feel more free, whole and dignified, and it negates gender, class and racial tensions.
In higher doses, it makes people want to shag the socks off every sentient being within 15 feet. It’s like the rage virus in the “28 Days Later” movies, but with more erections. Is Eudaxa a force for good or evil? Using it can be like kissing God, as Lenny Bruce reputedly said of heroin. But ask the normally buttoned-up people who’ve been videotaped taking on, ecstatically, a roomful of strangers. The large print giveth; the small print taketh away your S.T.D. resistance.
Advertising, and by extension marketing, has long been a dark and primal force in fiction. As John Carey wrote in “The Intellectuals and the Masses” (1992), his powerful book about the disdain with which elites view mass culture: “Failure to recognize the damage done by advertisements is a sure sign … of substandard intelligence — or worse.”
Mary and Tom, similarly inclined souls, are cynical about marketing, the hacking of brainstems; they long to make an escape. But like everyone else they are swimming in its poisoned seas. How to stay sane in a demented world? Franklin is excellent on the dark camaraderie behind the scenes, and she is brutal on the gap between corporate-approved appearances and fundamental realities. No algorithm or euphemism can disguise the fact that there are obvious winners and losers in life, online or otherwise. She touches a lot of sore spots in the culture.
This isn’t a perfect novel. (Sam Tanenhaus, a former editor of the Book Review, banned this phrase because it’s a reviewer’s cliché and you could say it about almost any novel. He’s right. I will try to do better, Sam.) The plot machinations churn more jerkily than they might have. Franklin is good enough that she needn’t have leaned so hard on them. This is also one of those novels in which the narrator (Mary) is an outsider and a loner who happens to resemble, one person comments, Francoise Hardy, widely acknowledged to be one of the great beauties of the 20th century. Looking like that can buff the edges off any anxieties a reader might feel for the character’s prospects.
Franklin makes a habit of describing people by their similarities to celebrities. One woman has “Navratilova-esque features”; a man is “good-looking in a loose, Kurt Cobain kind of way.” Even Tom is said to resemble Patrick Bateman, albeit “too basic to have killed that many hookers.” On the one hand, these crutches are lazy. On the other, one of the first jobs of the novelist is to attend to how people speak, and people speak of others’ looks by comparing them to famous figures.
Mary’s good sense and irony put me in mind of the protagonists of Margaret Drabble’s earthy, anxious early novels. Franklin’s prose has affinities with Sally Rooney’s, too — a certain self-assuredness and aplomb. The best thing may be that you sense she has better novels in her, that she has only begun to tap the motherlode.
Mary is a fan of detective novels, especially Agatha Christie’s, in part because they remind her of her childhood but also because they brim with “an interconnectedness that had a comforting, almost tranquilizing effect. Everyone’s lives were intertwined and as a result, everyone was implicated, from the servants to the upper aristocracy. Her novels played out like symphonies, each player intimately related to the others.”
Watch out what you wish for, this impressive novel suggests, for you will surely get it.
BONDING | By Mariel Franklin | FSG Originals | 338 pp. | Paperback, $18
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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