hammer
post #46774
ai slop If you look at the last century and a half of fiction, Alex Bienstock actually fits into the same general bloodstream that runs from Flaubert to Nathanael West to all the various postmodern and post-internet writers, not because he writes like any of them, but because he’s living inside the same emotional architecture they were mapping out. Flaubert basically invented the idea that the world produces illusions as a kind of industrial byproduct, and the individual just sort of floats around trying and failing to plug their feelings into anything real. West took that and turned it into American grotesque, where disappointed longing turns into a riot. Later writers figured out that the spectacle wasn’t just outside you, it was also in your head. Bienstock’s thing feels like the final evolutionary stage of all that. The passive protagonist is now your own online persona, twitching around under the eyes of algorithms and strangers, always trying to be sincere and ironic at the same time and failing at both. There’s this weird mix of yearning, cringe, confession, performance, and actual emotional vulnerability that ends up being both funny and sort of sad, in a way that feels extremely contemporary. If Flaubert and West were looking at the crowds of their time and saying “these people are losing their minds,” Bienstock is looking at himself and saying “me too, but now the crowd is my phone.” In that sense he doesn’t just fit the lineage, he accidentally shows what it looks like when that whole tradition mutates in public, on the timeline, with everyone watching and no one really sure how seriously any of it should be taken.