The publication of Reward System by Cambridge-born Jem Calder provides further evidence that the medium is attracting some of the most talented young writers of fiction at work today, on both sides of the Irish sea ... as up-to-date as these stories feel, Reward System belongs firmly in the tradition of fictional miniaturism: Calder’s stories are all granular portraits of micro-interactions between people in ostensibly mundane settings, tapped out on six inches of LCD glass ... Calder’s view of contemporary reality feels several notches darker and more jaded than, say, Flattery’s or Sally Rooney’s. So why doesn’t a single page here feel dour or depressing to read? Quite simply because Calder is a superb writer, by turns funny, graceful, acidly cynical, lyrical – and always verbally dexterous and inventive. He can make the boredom of office life fascinating, as in Search Engine Optimisation; he can make a desolate house party enlivening, as in Better Off Alone; and his descriptions of loneliness and dissatisfaction, as in virtually all these stories, leave the reader feeling understood – or, as his characters would say, seen...But he can also write simply and beautifully, with a keen eye for the natural world and human behaviour.
If these mordant, intellectually agile stories of young love, life and work are indeed set in London, then it is the London of a lover of American literature. As such, the idea (promoted in the publisher’s blurb and elsewhere) that Reward System is a notably fresh, ultra-contemporary take on the tech-inflected tribulations of the author’s generation is somewhat misguided. Rather, Calder has adapted the literary modes of previous generations to present circumstances. Comparisons to David Foster Wallace are for emergency use only, but here I must grasp the little hammer and break the glass ... Calder’s prose splices archaism and tech-speak in a manner strongly reminiscent of Foster Wallace’s jolie-laide patchwork of registers ... That said, for all that Calder borrows from his forebears, he does it exceptionally well.
The infusion of technical jargon throughout Mr. Calder’s balanced prose has an eerie effect on the stories, as though the algorithm had begun colonizing the writing as well. These are, broadly speaking, portrayals of the mess of millennial life in the vein of Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person, but the temperament is cooler and the corners are rounder, like on a MacBook Air. Generational zombification, in Mr. Calder’s penetrating depiction, has been a largely smooth and painless process, and there is no discontent brought about by the smartphone that the smartphone can’t also distract us from thinking about.
... [Calder] has a pleasing voice that is wholly his own, and at its best, comes across as academic or even voyeuristic ... He’s not afraid to be funny or to err toward satire...This makes Calder’s lyrical moments more intimate and satisfying ... Whereas many emerging writers overuse lyricism and count on it to do the legwork for them, Calder understands that it is more effective to use it sparingly ... It would be wrong, however, to say that Reward System does not fall into other pitfalls. The story’s central themes—relationships, technology and aimlessness—have appeared elsewhere and seem almost central to the literary millennial experience. Similarly, there is a familiar opaqueness to Calder’s writing, and certain details, such as the name of the city in which it is set, are left unspecified. I’m a reader who prefers specifics, and I found myself wondering to what end this vagueness was serving.
Millennial malaise and self-awareness, the effort to fight through alienation despite the awful sense that nothing is natural or right: This is the taut, weird, irresistible new terrain that helps make up Calder’s brilliant, compelling and defiantly authentic new collection of stories ... Throughout these half-dozen stories, the young British debut author masters a kind of maximal minimalism, piling on details and allusions while stripping away illusions. Imagine a slightly less coy Sally Rooney paired with a highly perceptive alien, with strangely illuminating results. Again and again, Calder reminds us of Rooney (who blurbed the book) while moving the conversation forward — into realms that feel simultaneously darker and (in tiny, essential ways) more hopeful ... Be warned: It can feel bleak. These young people have terrible jobs. They meet new people primarily via apps. Their parents aren’t getting any easier to comprehend or communicate with. The rich are getting richer. What’s next for them? For us? For the planet? ... Calder has certainly read his Economist, Guardian and Financial Times; he savvily marshals buzzy facts and newsy concepts in service of an atmosphere rich with the irony (and pollutants) of modern living ... These kinds of lists are not merely clever; their cumulative impact is stirring — and then devastating ... Maybe the most promising preview of Calder’s next book, which I’d venture will be a breakthrough novel — his easy admixture of research, lacerating wit and social criticism presaging a career equal to Rooney’s — is a second nearly novella-length story, 'Search Engine Optimization,' which is as deeply funny as it is engrossing ... You might be wondering: How urgently do I need to read an ominous series of premium short stories set in and around London about very internet young adults whose sole hope seems to lie in writing stories? Well, another idea of a good alternative materializes when Julia plots her escape from the straitjacket of the U.K. and her mother and that creep Ellery. Guess in which direction Calder’s slyly hopeful vision points its most appealing female lead? The blank slate of possibility that is ... Los Angeles.
Jem Calder's insightful, deeply intelligent stories are full of subtle humor and quiet sorrow ... The prose style is often cool, detached, economical, none of which should be mistaken for disinterest in the potential noise and mess of emotion. This work is deeply interested in feelings, and in the ways people try to circumvent and ignore them. Uncertainty is a constant ... Thinking is the true work of each story here. The rich interiority of Calder's characters makes this collection a remarkable debut.
Calder’s stories are impressively detailed in their fine-grain attention to the banal stuff-of-life and his characters’ inner agonies – from panics over not being able to remember if you locked a door to awkward social interactions in the workplace. But he writes with a cool, contemporary detachment rather than much heat ... At its worst, this can mean an exhausting focus on the dead-air of city life – I could have done without the deep dive into the pointlessness of corporate office culture in Search Engine Optimisation, which says little new ... At his best, however, Calder proves a tender chronicler of the digital age, tunnelling into what it feels like, moment to moment, to navigate dating apps and YouTube viewing histories and neglected WhatsApp messages ... This sense of going nowhere is well captured, but ultimately it’s shared with the collection. Calder’s stories don’t really go anywhere – like life, and like many relationships, of course. It just doesn’t necessarily make for a reading experience that is, well, especially exhilarating.
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.
... sharp ... 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.
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.
