Reward System

May 23, 2022
Calder debuts with a sharp collection that follows characters as they negotiate their relationships, self-presentation, and the banality of their routines. In the long multipart opener “A Restaurant Somewhere Else,” a young woman named Julia celebrates a new sous chef job and an exciting romance with the restaurant’s head chef, Ellery, all of which seems promising until she receives troubling messages about Ellery from her predecessor. In “Better Off Alone,” Julia’s ex, Nick, reconnects with their old friends while nursing an inferiority complex brought on by his dead-end copywriter job and continuing struggle to write fiction. Months later, in “Excuse Me, Do I Know You,” Nick and Julia bump into each other. As they catch up, Julia doesn’t share about her relationship, nor does Nick talk about his stalled attempts with writing. They part ways, but as Calder shows in “The Foreseeable,” they stay connected over emails, texts, and FaceTime during the Covid-19 lockdown. While the choice to stretch out the narrative across several stories often diminishes their impact, it leaves room for Calder’s insightful observations on the nature of romance and friendship in the age of right swipes and perfectly curated Instagram grids. There’s plenty to dig into, even if the whole’s a bit uneven. Agent: Tracy Bohan, Wylie Agency.

May 31, 2022
London-based writer Calder debuts with a book of interconnected short stories cataloging the everyday lives and relationships of twentysomethings. The opening and longest story, ""A Restaurant Somewhere Else,"" introduces Julia, starting a new job as a chef in an upscale restaurant and becoming romantically entangled with her older boss. It's exciting until it isn't, and then a former coworker texts her a warning about her boss' predatory nature. In ""Better Off Alone,"" Julia's college boyfriend Nick, a struggling writer, is determined to make a good impression at a party but ends up wasted and alone in the bathtub. Other stories give glimpses into Nick and Julia's wider world, like a drawn-out story about Nick's predictably awful corporate job. They also have a chance to reconnect, including FaceTiming during the early stages of the pandemic. Calder deftly captures the dichotomy of true self and presented self, especially in a world of technology and social media, and the angst within when those two things don't match, as they rarely do. A somewhat uneven but overall intriguing, worthwhile collection.

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August 1, 2022
In six interwoven stories, young millennials navigate the gap between their overconnected digital identities and the yawning loneliness of their real lives. In the first story, "A Restaurant Somewhere Else," Julia has started a new job as a sous chef at an upscale restaurant. She likes the work, particularly the way focusing on a single repetitive task, or "deep monotasking," makes the "hours [pass] easily, like minutes...her body all but detached from the experience of time." She also likes her boss, the enigmatic ex-junkie Ellery, whose No. 1 rule is "no smartphones in the kitchen" but whose online activities betray a reality both triter and more disturbing than Julia had imagined. Meanwhile, in "Better Off Alone," aspiring novelist Nick--Julia's ex-boyfriend--has a drinking problem that is really a living problem. At a party, he spends much of his time in the bathroom scrolling through his friends' social media feeds in search of identities that feel more authentic when displayed on the phone than they do when encountered in real time. Some months later, in the highly sympathetic "Search Engine Optimisation," a freshly sober Nick is working as a copywriter at a marketing firm where every employee's internal monologue reveals the same frustrated disenfranchisement from the stakes of their own lives. The stories work best when they're performing their own deep monotasking, exploring the lexicons of their various workplaces in compelling detail. In each, however, space is taken away from the relatable banality of the characters' struggles with careers, sex, and paying the rent to critique the anonymizing effect of their various apps and algorithms. While this social commentary rings true, the insistence with which it is centered as the stories' guiding philosophy and the relative lack of character development outside this central tenet render the book's grim loneliness as something more like a trope about millennials than a truth about humanity in its multifaceted and surprising whole. Relatable and entertaining but ultimately too preoccupied by its message.

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