Reboot: A Novel - Hardcover

Taylor, Justin

 
9780553387629: Reboot: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0553387626 ISBN 13: 9780553387629
Verlag: Pantheon, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A raucous and wickedly smart satire of Hollywood, toxic fandom, and our chronically online culture, following a washed-up actor on his quest to revive the cult TV show that catapulted him to teenage fame

David Crader is a has-been. A former child actor from the hit teen drama Rev Beach, he now rotates between his new roles as deadbeat dad, recovering alcoholic, and occasional videogame voice actor. But when David is summoned to Los Angeles by Grace, his ex-wife and former co-star, he suddenly sees an opportunity for a reboot—not just of the show that made him famous, but also of his listless existence.

Hollywood, the Internet, and a fractured nation have other plans, however, and David soon drinks himself to a realization: This seemingly innocuous revival of an old Buffy rip-off could be the spark that sets ablaze a nation gripped by far-right conspiracy, climate catastrophe, and mass violence.

Reboot is a madcap speculative comedy for our era of glass-eyed doom-scrolling and Millennial nostalgia—and yet it’s still full of heart. It’s a tale of former teen heartthrobs, striving parents, internet edgelords, and fish-faced cryptids, for anyone who has looked back on their life and wanted—even if but for a moment—to hit “reset.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JUSTIN TAYLOR is the author of the novel The Gospel of Anarchy, the story collections Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and Flings; and the memoir Riding with the Ghost, His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Bookforum, and the Oxford American. He is a contributing writer to The Washington Post Book World and the director of the Sewanee School of Letters. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

There were fires in the gorge outside of Portland and there were fires in the hills in LA. From the plane as we departed PDX I had seen the river of smoke flowing above the actual river and now, as we made our initial approach to LAX, I saw a slightly different version of the same thing over again: whole hills were missing, or their topmost reaches peeked out like islands from this other smoke. The flight attendant, a narrow-featured man with a soul patch, noticed my noticing this.

He said, “It’s not as bad as it looks.” A breath. “Or it is but it isn’t, I mean it feels normal at this point, doesn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Still better than lockdown,” he continued.

“Yes,” I said. “My business was closed nearly a year.”

“Were you shooting a movie?”

“I own a bar. A restaurant, really. A bar and restaurant.”

“In LA?”

“In Portland.”

“Oh.”

He asked if I wanted another drink before we landed. I said no.

Thank you, but no.

I was trying this new thing where I only drank in moderation. I know what that must sound like, and I admit that this wasn’t the first time that I was trying it, but hear me out. I wasn’t one of those people who couldn’t walk past a bar without ducking inside, or who counted down the minutes until the liquor store opened. I was never a morning or a maintenance drunk. I was capable of keeping bottles in the house, and sometimes when people offered me drinks I said no, No, thank you, not tonight. Saying no was simple, at least to the first round. My problem was—or rather, it had been—that once I said yes I wanted yes to last forever. Once I started, I didn’t stop.

So I quit cold turkey. A few fits and starts there: one step forward, two back, you know how it goes. Two back, or three or four. Whatever. Then I tried AA, which went better, seemed to be working, but lockdown put an end to the meetings, and the Zoom version didn’t do it for me, so there were a couple of bigger slips. Then I went rogue. I started watching cognitive-behavioral therapy videos on YouTube, treacly self-help and smug “one weird trick”–type life hacks promoted by self-licensed life coaches. But you know what? It worked. I hated it, but it worked. Maybe it worked because I hated it. Night after night I let myself in to my locked-down bar and sat there and streamed videos and built willpower, discipline, self-awareness, self-control. Control, control, I would repeat to myself, sometimes aloud and sometimes just in my head, as a little grounding mantra, almost a prayer. I taught myself—or the internet taught me—to catch the bad thought before it hatches, patch the egg back up. Bad birds stay unborn.

Now I can have a glass of wine with dinner, two beers at a ball game—not that I go to ball games, but if I did. I can even have liquor if I want, though I usually don’t, though for whatever reason, I did today. I’d ordered a Woodford when I took my seat, and when the flight attendant came by an hour later to ask if I wanted another, I’d said yes without thinking, and he poured it before I could retract what I’d said. I suppose I could have let it sit untouched. I had that power now. Instead I drank it slowly and reminded myself that two was my self-imposed daily limit and that I would be fine as long as I refused a third drink. As you’ve seen for yourself, this is exactly what I did.

A lot of bad nights began with bourbon, but all the worst ones ended with gin. Something about the juniper, I suppose, or maybe it’s the quinine in the tonic. (I’m kidding; there was no tonic.) I’d be out on the town, or at home, enjoying some run-of-the-mill debauchery, and I’d get this kind of psychic prickle, like the first twinge of a hard-on crossed with the feeling of walking alone at night and knowing you’re being watched. The feeling would plant its flag in me. Palm sweat and salivation. I’d wake up in a strange bed or a wrecked car. (Strange cars and wrecked beds were not unheard of, either.) One time I came to on a small yacht full of workers from the main office of the network that used to broadcast the TV show I had used to star on: secretaries, assistants, payroll, a couple of janitors. Why did they invite me to the company picnic? I wondered. And why did I accept? They explained to me, delicately, that I had chartered and provisioned this ship and invited all of them aboard.

Gin is my final boss, the Big Bad of a game I’ve almost beaten. Oblivion tastes like cucumbers. But all that was a long, long time ago. As ancient as my so-called fame.

The flight attendant returned with my would-be third bottle of Woodford and a fresh plastic cup full of ice. “I know you said no,” he said, “but then I thought—this is David freaking Crader! How am I not gonna hook him up?”

I understood that he thought he was impressing me; he may have believed he was being kind. There was murder in his heart, though he did not know it. He wanted a story to tell his friends later, or perhaps he hoped to embed himself in a memory of mine, small and gleaming like a sliver of glass. I asked him not to pour it. I said thank you but no, I’m really serious, I can’t. Abruptly, he got it; apologized. I said I appreciated the gesture all the same. He asked if he could take a selfie with me, and I said sure.

“I’d be there,” he said, seeming to mean the fan convention where I was headed, “if I didn’t have this shift.” He was kneeling in the aisle now, scrunching his shoulder into mine. I could smell his Old Spice, beads of forehead sweat, and I knew that he would have liked to throw an arm around me but wasn’t sure if he should. If I had accepted the drink he would have done it, but he didn’t want to risk a second offense before he got his pic.

“When does your day end?” I asked.

“Eleven tonight,” he said. “In Dallas.”

The pilot called for seat belts.

“Better hurry,” I said. “We don’t want to get in trouble.” He snapped the picture.

“It’s an honor,” he said. “I grew up on you.” Then he hurried off to finish the preparations for landing, and I noticed that he’d left the Woodford on my tray. I pocketed it. You will still be unopened tomorrow, I told the little bottle. I am the man I think I am, and I know how to mean what I say.

This was my first time flying in a while. I’d taken this gig less for the money (though I wanted the money) than for the excuse to get on a plane. I’d weathered quarantine largely alone and entirely sober, aforementioned slips notwithstanding. During lockdown I sometimes had strange, immersive dreams that felt more real than reality while I was in them and were difficult to shake upon waking, perhaps since the actual locked-down day was something of a strange dream itself. The idea for a Rev Beach reboot had come to me in one of these.

In the dream, me and Corey Burch were standing on a beach; there were all these flashbulbs firing off, but I couldn’t see any cameras. As near as I could tell we were entirely alone, the lone and level sands stretching out in both directions and the resort hotels looking oddly desolate, unoccupied but more than that, sort of—deflated? Defeated. Used-up, somehow, like in Stephen King’s The Langoliers. Do you remember this one? I’ve never read the book, but I’ve seen the miniseries that Tom Holland made for ABC in the mid-nineties with Dean Stockwell and Bronson Pinchot. It’s the...

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Verlag
Pantheon
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553387626
ISBN 13 
9780553387629
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
PANTHEON
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/

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