Book reviews: 'Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age' and 'Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life'

'Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age' by Vauhini Vara

Though there's a growing pile of books that critique today's Big Tech overlords, "Searches stands out for emphasizing how they've also shaped our private psychological terrain," said Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. Author Vauhini Vara, a former Wall Street Journal tech reporter who has become a Pulitzer Prize–nominated novelist, came of age as the internet was just beginning to creep into everyday life, and she has woven together her life story and the history of the web as a way of underscoring how integral that technology has become to the very construction of self. "Vara, like many of her readers, is both enchanted by the web and disgusted with the companies that control it." At the same time, she "exposes the fragility of the technology," demonstrating that even AI is still just a parasite of humanity.

"She is equipped to take on these issues to an almost uncanny degree," said Hannah Bae in the San Francisco Chronicle. Four years ago, Vara's essay "Ghosts," in which she used GPT-3, a precursor to ChatGPT, to write about her sister's death from cancer, went viral. The essay is reprinted here, and it remains riveting to see how AI helped Vara share her painful memories, sometimes hitting on felicitous turns of phrases even as it invented facts and made countless other mistakes. She enlists the technology in similar experiments here, including by having ChatGPT provide commentary after many passages, starting with her account of navigating an Oklahoma middle school as the daughter of Indian immigrants. "Initially, I found these conversations painful to read," because I fear writers could be replaced by AI. Fortunately, "AI is still a terrible writer," and Vara proves again and again that "nothing can make language sing like a gifted human mind."

At times, though, Vara's book "slides into tedium and banality," said Meena Venkataramanan in The Washington Post. At one point, she shares a list of her Google searches across a 10-year span—how to warm up pork chop, how to orgasm, who is cardi b—and that five-page run "feels endless." Searches also raises ethical questions about AI that are left unanswered. Mostly, though, Vara's account of her lifelong engagement with tech is "at once genre-defying and gripping," and it offers "a glimmer of quixotic hope" that the internet could one day be owned by the people, not a handful of corporations. How? Vara gives examples of nonprofits that operate search engines, message services, and the like. But she also grants herself the right to do what AI does: make things up. "To call a proposed invention impossible," she writes, "is as nonsensical as calling a declaration impossible, or a fiction, or a joke."

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'Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life' by Dan Nadel

Robert Crumb had one stipulation before agreeing to participate in the creation of this biography: that his myriad faults be part of the story, said Chris Vognar in the Los Angeles Times. In a book that "astutely connects the work to the life story," author Dan Nadel more than keeps his promise. Crumb is "the kind of biography that opens up an entire scene and movement." The so-called godfather of underground comix arrived in San Francisco in 1967 primed to call out the lies of the misogynist, racist culture he had grown up in. He'd endured an upbringing "as macabre as anything he drew," rife with adults prone to beatings, addiction and mental illness, and his comics rendered "with grotesque vitality" the worst of the human traits that he saw in himself and others. Nadel, to his credit, "honors the complexity of his subject, perhaps particularly when it gets ugly."

"There is a lot of ugliness from Crumb here," said Marc Weingarten in The Boston Globe. But the story of his art turns on LSD, which the already married Crumb first indulged in at age 21 in 1965. "Nadel pegs this as the moment when Crumb's id took charge." By the end of 1966, he'd created such comic book avatars as Eggs Ackley and Mr. Natural, who'd soon appear in the landmark first issue of Zap Comix. By 1968, his widely distributed output included racist stereotypes and rape fantasies, and, "understandably, this is the place where many Crumb fans get off the bus." Nadel, wisely, "doesn't make excuses," calling some of the work deplorable even as he concedes that Crumb's intent may have been to indict himself.

"What saves Crumb is the shakiness of his hand," said Gal Beckerman in The Atlantic. "In being creepy or dark or dangerous, he was also making himself terribly vulnerable, and he knew it." From an early age, "he was the anti–Norman Rockwell the culture was craving," and by filling that vacuum, he risked being derided as a sicko. He has mellowed since then, said Dan Piepenbring in Harper's. But the critics who once predicted that vulgarity would doom his art to history's trash bin couldn't have been more wrong. "Today, his pieces command six figures." Clearly, "the perverts won."