Admittedly, this comes at the expense of any real characterization, which plays third fiddle to the novel’s formal playfulness and puckish conceit, but if the novel never rises above a trifle, it’s at least a delicious one.
He likewise proves deft at depicting the particular rhythms of group chats, with all communication here existing within a haze of disruption. The author masters mood, inflecting his comedic core with bits of surreal horror, and demonstrates a keen ear for lingo, expressly humorous without ever forsaking authenticity. Light topicality follows this high-concept premise, including commentary on late capitalism’s internet-aided work/life imbalance and the fiction of modern communication, but it’s Kasulke’s execution rather than his ideas that recommends this work. Kasulke may have set out to demonstrate the inescapability of the office, but-multitasking like most of us-he also reveals the stickiness of fiction. Puzzling over ambiguous signs: this is literature’s game, too. Reading the novel, I thought of a Slackian pleasure, which is the work of constructing, in your mind, a flesh-and-blood colleague from the messages she writes.
(A last-act queer love story, which taps into the delight of realizing that two colleagues are seeing each other, is surprisingly satisfying.) But the benign vibe only underscores how estranging even the best offices can be, with their demands that we upload more and more of ourselves for work. the ebb and flow of formality feels sharply observed-that is to say, realistically tricky. He is as alert to Slackers’ individual tics-the team member who uses the 'away' status as a crutch, for example-as he is to the ambience of the program itself. It wonderfully captures Slack’s tropes, from the broad (anxious jokes about the boss reading one’s D.M.s) to the subtle (the use of Giphy to soften an interaction). I blazed through it in an hour, came up for air, and then immediately blazed through it again-behavior that mystified me until I remembered how I am on Slack. It doesn’t feel much like literature, but it does feel like any number of Slack-adjacent activities: procrastinating, eavesdropping, solving a puzzle.
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