Let’s stipulate that we all spend time too much time on our phones / online (kudos to any of you who don’t). Given that fact, and the associated guilt I feel for falling into the “too much” category, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to enjoy Abigail Stewart’s novel Select Screen, a narrative which chronicles the lives of people, many of whose lives are fully spent online. I was wrong, I loved Select Screen.
In a series of chapters, each focusing on one or two particular characters, we meet streamers, influencers, teenage addicts, professional gamers, and NextDoor lurkers. In some cases, Stewart takes us deep into their worlds. We travel to Cabo San Lucas and watch as influencers tend to their daily routine poolside, every photo angle and bronzed strip of flesh carefully considered. We go to Las Vegas and lurk deep inside a professional gamer tournament. Stewart’s writing is crisp and very much attuned to the senses. In this passage, we get a vivid portrait of a gamer just before an important match.
Porky changed into a different pair of sweatpants, washed his face, and ran his damp fingers through his short hair. “Here,” Gordon offered him some cologne. “You don’t want to live up to the ‘smelly gamer’ stereotype.” He applied a little, knowing it wouldn’t mask his four AM bedtime, then rushed out to the elevators.
In a particularly moving chapter, Stewart introduces us to Cedric, a twelve-year-old addicted to watching gamers, and his single mom who struggles to pull him back into the “real world.” After Cedric has gotten suspended from school for fighting, he tries to explain to his mom the root of the conflict.
They kept saying numbChux is washed and Porky is gonna win the next tournament, the big one in Las Vegas. They said Chux hasn’t posted in weeks because he’s dead and they started making fun of me saying only betas like Chux. They kept calling me ‘betaChux.’”
While Cedric’s mom, and the reader, may not have any idea what any of this lingo means, Stewart’s genius is that we care about her characters and their humanity. Our heart hurts for both the mother and son here, each trying to do their best in their own way.
Toward the later part of the novel, Stewart begins to wean us away from the online world. The pleasure of a housecat plays a significant role in one late chapter. I won’t spoil the final chapter, which pulls together several characters from earlier in the novel, other than to say, Stewart brings the story to a lovely conclusion far from the online world. Select Screen is a wonderful novel which lets us see the humanity in the most virtual of spaces. Put your phone down and grab this book. You’re in for a real treat.
To order your copy: https://whiskeytit.com/product/select-screen/
Sarah Freligh is the author of five books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and A Brief Natural History of Women, published in 2023 by Harbor Editions. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Sun Magazine, the Wigleaf 50, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), Best Microfiction (2019-22) and Best Small Fiction 2022. Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.