Reviewed by Abigail Holstein
4.3.07

Let’s say my sister has a new boyfriend and I want to make sure he’s not an ax murderer. Without hesitation, I Google him up as I would a recipe for curried squash soup and scroll through MySpace and Facebook. As I’m reading the notes on his “Wall,” I entertain a fleeting moment of guilt before I remember that this is the luxury and privilege of the Internet. (And what a relief to learn that my sister’s dating a regular old Econ major who kayaks!) As Kent Selkirk, the protagonist of Walter Kirn’s novel, The Unbinding, agrees, the more information we collect online, the better equipped we are to deal with the non-electronic world.

In the novel, Kent’s job at AidSat—a fictional service a la OnStar—depends on his ability to access information instantly, to explain how to julienne with your new-fangled Cuisinart or how to administer CPR. The confidential network is a portal into the lives of thousands of subscribers, and for Kent, a neat back door into the life of one particularly attractive client. As he insinuates himself into her life, Kirn’s novel explores what happens when the boundaries of privacy and trust are dissolved for personal gain. In doing so, Kirn reveals the world of electronic information to be a vast hall of fun house mirrors in which facts and people can be manipulated and transformed, and an opportunistic Kent Selkirk can exist as a hundred different reflections, not one of them real. Despite his trespasses in the real world, Kent is able to reinvent himself countless times online, and Kirn suggests that the Internet community’s constant search for companionship and connection will sustain even the most shadowy of characters. Dark and comical, Kirn’s portrayal of the desperation of the online world is more than foreboding; it’s sharp, clever and satirical, revealing how the shortcuts we take when communicating with others can actually isolate us further.

Kirn begins the novel with just such a search for connection, and likewise, a few seemingly harmless shortcuts. For months, Kent Selkirk has noticed the sexy Sabrina Grant in his apartment complex. He has also noticed the AidSat jack in her ear and asks a supervisor to look up her call history. Kent has started recording his life in an online diary at MyStory.com, and someone sends Sabrina an anonymous tip about Kent’s scheme to get to know her; she immediately gets in touch with her sister, to ask if “someone in your clever tech department, some nerd you can maybe bat your lovely lashes at…can use this guy’s name to find out what he’s been up to?” The entirety of Kirn’s novel is written in emails, online diary entries, confidential memos and files, and while it initially seems that we are only looking in on Kent and Sabrina, it soon becomes clear that their Internet lives have other participants, other onlookers seeking similar connections and community. Amy Hempel makes an appearance as an old acquaintance, “I am almost certain you are, or were, the earnest narcissist I spent a wearying evening with a year or so back.” Others mistake him for another Kent Selkirk, or someone else entirely: “Hey, Blake. Is this you? I was looking through old camp pictures the other day and I started to wonder how you were doing?” Kent’s activity with Sabrina, however, draws increased attention from federal agent Rob Robinson, who has been instructed to investigate them as potential persons of interest, despite his inclination that they’re “not bomb throwers…they’re the people bombers bomb.”

Their curiosity and mistrust of each other drives Kent, Sabrina, and Rob deeper into the dark heart of cyberspace, searching for more answers about who the others really are, or who they could be. But even as Rob digs up dirt on Kent’s history with the IRS, asking a colleague to “teach him a lesson and send him a hefty alarming manila envelope with all the cultic seals and stamps of power,” and Sabrina’s sister writes, “Not only isn’t this character [Kent] who he says he is, he isn’t…anyone,” remarkably, all three remain engaged in each other’s lives. It seems no abuse suffered, particularly those exchanged between Kent and Rob, ever pushes anyone to walk away or turn off the computer. Rather, their online sleuthing develops into a vicious game of virtual sabotage that sends Sabrina to an asylum, and Rob and Kent on the path to destroy each other. But their relentless chase suggests that they are nothing without each other. In their final exchange, Rob demands of Kent: “…tell me exactly why you’re calling,” to which Kent replies, “Because you listen.”

Kent does emerge victorious, if only because there is nothing to destroy. As his ex-girlfriend explains, “…next year he’ll go by something else…He’s still in play. Still forming.” While Kent initially says, “Before AidSat I had no self, no soul. I was a billing address. A credit score,” his ability to retreat into the ether of the Internet makes him impossible to pin down. His online existence becomes primary, and he holds a spot in reality by “cross-referencing himself to life” across dating sites, discussion boards, and chat rooms. And even after Rob has been rubbed out of existence, Kent persists, because at AidSat, the calls “never end,” and someone else is in need of information, assistance, of an anonymous, reassuring voice to connect with.

Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of The Unbinding is the way it fully embraces its Internet setting to capture the characters’ senses of dependence on the flow of information as they become inextricably linked to each other. The (electronic) epistolary form of the novel means that between emails and online diary entries, there is a challenging, often pleasantly confusing disconnect between each chapter. Originally published as a serialized novel on Slate.com over the course of several weeks, this disconnect would have been enhanced to fully mimic the character’s own process of figuring each other out. Kirn also dotted the novel with links to relevant (and ridiculous) youtube clips and web sites, which appear in the bound book as bold words. As Kirn himself says in his introduction though, “…people who relish the trancelike seamlessness of the traditional reading experience may retreat in frustration or disgust. That’s fine. Ignore the links.”

I visited the links after I finished the novel hoping they’d fill out the picture of The Unbinding, but all they did was lead me off in new and strange directions. Nevertheless, this experience affirms Kirn’s vision of the expansive online world—a place where can find anything and hide everything, connecting and disappearing at the same time.