"Meatspace" by Nikesh Shukla

Kitab, a newly published author, has just broken up with Rachel and is allowing maintaining an online presence on facebook and twitter etc to block him from writing the next book. His brother Aziz wants a tattoo of a bow tie and uses google image search to find a man in New York with the same tattoo and who looks like Aziz; Aziz decides to travel to NY to meet his doppelganger; here he has adventures as a crime-fighting superhero (all written up in his blog). Meanwhile Kitab is being stalked by another Kitab who is seeking to steal his identity and to lose his virginity at a sex party.

Normally I hate books about authors having trouble writing: it seems rather too self-obsessed. This one won me over by the fresh way in which it used language and the relentlessly modern picture of a culture in which social media and one's virtual self seems more important than the meatspace world.

Lines I loved:

• “Amazon recommends I buy the book I wrote.” (p 1)
• “They awkwardly remove each other’s clothes and fall into the patterns, Porn Grammar.” (p 9)
• “You’re just on that bloody phone making a lazy self-obsessed quotes about nothing.” (p 14)
• “We both snap poppadoms.” (p 22)
• “Dinner with my dad. He pays for the food. I pay for my lack of achievement. We both pay for the over indulgence in the morning.” (p 28) 
• “I'm glad he has someone he can talk to freely and easily. I wish it wasn't me.” (p 30)
• “I've got unfinished business in her pants.” (p 33)
• “the gentrified ghetto vintage shops, hipster bars and pound shops” (p 34)
• “that's another story for another time told by another person.” (p 38)
• “Talking about sex in front of people, it feels too intimate. There's too much focus on the meat and the flesh.” (p 70)
• “We bow tie tatt-bumped, innit” (p 98)
• “If x’s were actual kisses, I’d have glandular fever.” (p 115)
• “Life gives us nuggets everyday. Whether we choose to make them chicken or gold is up to us.” (p 115)
• “A sofa and a chair and a mattress that all looked like they'd been at the business end of a stream of piss.” (p 142)
• “All this takes up 10% of my battery, which is a currency in modern life.” (p 162)
• “I was walking with skin issues here.” (p 219)
• “The Internet is both transient and eternal and there's nothing you can hide from it once it goes online.” (p 226)
• “When you need a pilgrimage to have a long hard look at yourself, why take the bus?” (p 240)

A good read from a promising new author. September 2017; 291 pages