As the captain’s log of an at-sea millennial, Liveblog resembles a social media feed, both extreme and mundane, shocking and tedious ... resembles recent novels depicting female disillusionment—among them Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Catherine Lacey’s The Answers, and Jade Sharma’s Problems. But while the narrators of these tight, polished novels speak in steady tones of sly nihilism or emptied resignation, as if their authors have dressed them in large sunglasses and T-shirts that say 'Nothing Matters,' Megan desperately wants to believe something does.
A masterpiece for the social media age...perhaps the most realistic novel ever.... a celebration of life – good, bad and boring... achieves a sense of what it’s like to be alive in 2013 by not shying away from the mundane details of life.
Boyle is hardly the first to want to record life in its entirety, but her persistence, attention to strange detail, and humorous sense of her own abjection begin to feel like a radical act ... Liveblog ’s closest ancestor is really Andy Warhol’s novel a., a series of transcriptions of conversations between Warhol’s Factory stars as they go about life in New York City ... Boyle’s persistence, attention to detail, and humorous sense of her own abjection in Liveblog begin to feel like a radical act. But the quest to transform life into literature can ruin the life.
Frequently funny, clever, and even heartwarming...universal and relatable. Though not a narrative in any conventional sense, this is a riveting concept and a challenging volume.
Full of zeitgeist-y stuff that will puzzle future historians, punctuated by moments of millennial aspiration, self-direction, and exhortation, from 'Do not fuck with me' to 'hang up clothes/laundry'...A stunt more than a literary achievement; not without merit but requiring more effort than most readers are likely to want to give.
