As someone who finished her undergraduate degree in the spring of 2020, I found a lot I could relate to in Catherine Prasifka’s début, None of This Is Serious (2022).
The mysterious crack is in fact the weakest element of the story. It is intended presumably as a stand-in for not just the Covid pandemic, but any number of impending crises, from climate change to famine to war. Unfortunately, this didn’t quite work for me. Some of the pandemic parallels are a bit on the nose (looking at you, televised speech from the Taoiseach). I’m sceptical about whether an experience like the pandemic can be captured accurately so soon after the event; the crack, in this respect, felt contrived and tacked-on. I would have preferred it if a less fantastical crisis was the focal point, and I felt the mesh of genre fiction and Rooney-esque (I know, I know, I’m sorry) social commentary never quite cohered.
What the novel does really well, however, is social media. Sophie is addicted to doomscrolling. Her body image is warped and her eating habits decidedly disordered. She arranges her thoughts on the Eighth Amendment and the housing crisis like preachy Facebook essays, a habit that can grate on the reader after a while. More than a depiction of social media, it is a depiction of how someone who grew up on social media, constantly transmitting their thoughts to a potentially hostile audience, might incorporate the panopticon-gaze of that audience into their own internal monologue. Sophie is infuriating because her views are uniformly ‘correct’ — and uniformly pessimistic. Sometimes reading the book did feel like an hour spent lurking on Irish Twitter, though I’m not sure if that was a deliberate choice on Prasifka’s part. What is deliberate, however, is that the reader never hears Sophie speak aloud. Instead, her words are mediated through her thoughts, or through her messages on social media apps, while other characters are afforded the privilege of quotation marks. It is an interesting way to underline just how much one’s online persona can shape one’s actual subjectivity. It reminded me of the Margaret Atwood line: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman.” Sophie is well-acquainted not just with an internalised male gaze, but with an internalised audience of social media followers, emphasised by the constant obfuscation of her own voice within the narrative in favour of the voice she presents in messaging apps or Tweets. She comes across as someone inadvertently alienated from her own self.
After a slightly unconvincing start, the novel really hits its stride around the middle, when a trip to Kerry goes wrong. The fallout from this event rockets the narrative to the end. I would have liked to see some more resolution for some of the relationships, especially those within Sophie’s family, but the wonderfully complicated friendship between Sophie and her long-time best friend Grace is the novel’s highlight. The layout of online conversations within the narrative, with each “voice” aligned on opposite margins, perfectly mimicked the cadence of messaging apps without trying too hard to be too current. And, if one is going through the same thing, there’s a certain level of comfort to be found in Sophie’s post-college inertia: maybe none of this is serious.
