PUBLIC ACCESS AFTERWORLD, by Jane Schoenbrun
No synopsis can possibly convey the weird, full-hearted wonder of Jane Schoenbrun’s electrifying first novel, but one must try:
It is June 12, 2009, and Erin Morrison and David Sawyer are staying up till midnight to witness “the legally mandated deadline when every television network in America” is “required to flip the switch and put analog broadcasting out of its misery forever.” These Westchester teens are precisely the kind of suburban Mike Teavees who would care about this, who’ve been “anticipating the deadline all school year long. They were, of course, losers.”
David: who is obsessed with Blockbuster and his AV club, whom jocks knock down in the hallways for no reason, who wishes his life could feel more like a TV show. David: who is in love with Erin. “Always had been. Always would be.”
Erin: who is the “mousy,” “sexless,” “future valedictorian of Hartsdale High,” vulnerable to fantastic destinies.
That historic night, the friends, drunk on Tito’s and visions of TV futures, kiss for the first time. A thrown David bolts for home. Alone in her basement, Erin glimpses something emerging from the static on the TV. It is a transmission, a broadcast from a “channel … buried under all the other channels, under even the static.” A channel with a title card: Public Access Afterworld.
After posting about this weirdness on the internet (because of course), David and Erin meet a rando who informs them that Public Access Afterworld is not, in fact, of this world but “a mysterious, interdimensional zone” that seeks out “special people with special abilities” “to travel through the screen.” Erin is one of these people, fated to cross over to a realm “where she would create TV shows by living inside them.”
All she has to do to start the journey is watch a certain videotape naked and kneeling, a tape the rando happens to have in his basement.
Erin, understandably, has misgivings but forces beyond reality are already in motion. An Erin doppelgänger begins making late-night appearances in her TV static, repeating the words: “Find the receiver. Make it real. Find the receiver. Make it real.” Eventually Erin makes a choice that will change both her and David’s lives irrevocably.
A decade-plus later we met Bethany, “a 27-year-old trans girl playing chicken with the poverty line” in Austin, Texas, who works as a content moderator for GlobalVill.com (YouTube by another name). On one shift, while clicking through “never-ending mixtapes of abjection,” Bethany stumbles upon a video from an “androgynous boy in their early 20s, lanky and malnourished,” who reminds Bethany of a younger version of herself.
This youth, Jules, is trying to finish a bizarre game that sends “special people” to the transcendent space called Public Access Afterworld. The creator of the game? None other than David Sawyer, now a shadowy fugitive believed to be responsible for 156 disappearances related to his Public Access Afterworld cult. Bethany panics when she sees Jules attempt the game’s shocking final challenge.
Her own life in shambles, she decides to travel to Lubbock to save this stranger’s. Faster than you can say “The owls are not what they seem,” Bethany is drawn into a multiversal conspiracy involving GlobalVill, a second secret project at Los Alamos, a TV monster turned transdimensional op named Chimotera, and the “receiver” that the TV ghost invoked years earlier.
Best known for a trinity of extraordinary movies (if you ain’t caught “I Saw the TV Glow,” you really should), Schoenbrun has written a doozy of a debut that reimagines the Orpheus myth for our hypermediated age. A purveyor of cinematic opacities, Schoenbrun is far more accessible here, though they haven’t abandoned their propensity for the uncanny.
Schoenbrun draws upon a cosmos of influences and genres: “Public Access Afterworld” is not just an Orphic epic, but also a political conspiracy, an urban fantasy and a neo-slave narrative that recalls “Videodrome,” “The Matrix” and even Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash.”
But for all this generic prolixity, Schoenbrun keeps the narrative planted in the everyday lives of their marginalized characters. By refusing the temptation to escape into the fantastic, they resist the very trap that the novel sets for its heroes.
Schoenbrun has an almost preternatural talent for rendering characters — for excavating strange channels buried underneath regular ones — whether it be the self-hating and substance-rattled Jules; David, who cannot see the harm he perpetuates; or anxious Willa, who, in a separate plotline set in 1940s Los Alamos, lives with her scientist husband and finds herself drawn to a newcomer named Rachel. Even when Schoenbrun inhabits a monstrous creature caught between dimensions, the effect is devastating.
But it is with Bethany that the author’s sympathetic genius really shines. Bethany might be our narrative’s Chosen One but she’s not your mama’s Neo. She’s a mega-messy work in progress who can lapse into opportunistic selfishness and is also compassionate and brave.
Profoundly realized and profoundly human, Bethany is an emphatic rebuttal to the vile cruelties that our conjuncture has heaped on trans people. In a novel where young women are stalked and eliminated, Bethany is an exceptional “final girl,” in Carol Clover’s phrasing, a tormented sole survivor who is part of a community that is itself always “scheduled for destruction.” She’s alert, trusts her scars and knows better than most what it is to be trapped.
It is because of Bethany’s struggles and her refusal to let society’s violence destroy her capacity for connection that, by novel’s end, she is able to perform an act of Morrisonian re-memory, of “recollecting and remembering, as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past,” as Morrison put it.
In a moment of doubt, Bethany despairs:
There’s no such thing as freedom. Not for people like me. There are just two things, on a loop, forever. Prison and escape.
But if the world has learned anything from the horrors of history, it is that even in days of chains there is much more to us than our manacles. Creativity, solidarity, laughter and, barely visible through the static of our agonies, something that might just be love. “Public Access Afterworld” is proof of these hard-earned sureties.
“Find the receiver. Make it real,” the novel urges.
An entire generation may have found a receiver in this revelation of a book. Schoenbrun has called together the dreams and tribulations of a dimension of peoples — long erased, long maligned, too often brutalized, heroically resisting — and made them real.
PUBLIC ACCESS AFTERWORLD | By Jane Schoenbrun | Hogarth | 600 pp. | $33
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