A Modern Whodunit Set Among Social Media’s Hall of Mirrors

SWALLOW THE GHOST, by Eugenie Montague

For the general public, the worst things about the website we used to call Twitter include porn, harassment and fascism. But for writers of fiction taking up the site itself as a subject, the worst might be just how tricky it is to dramatize something that is both immaterial, in the literal sense of the word, and far from immaterial, in terms of its effect on so many lives. The novelist who decides to write a novel about a fictional novelist who is writing an imaginary novel on Twitter has only compounded the problem.

Eugenie Montague’s “Swallow the Ghost,”a coolly crafty debut,concerns a literary crime novel fashioned in part from tweets on various fictional accounts. The project is the work of the serious young Jeremy Miller, whose lofty ideas regarding experimental literature haven’t prevented him from shelling out to a P.R. company to help build buzz for his work in progress.

The novel (Montague’s, that is) consists of three sections. The first belongs to Jane Murphy, a diffident and troubled young woman with the P.R. company, who has been tasked with helping Jeremy. Meet-cutes work in mysterious ways, including, in this case, while churning out tweets from fake accounts in the voices of characters from Jeremy’s novel. (Whether these tweets also form part of the novel is unclear, and part of the tweets-en-abyme vertigo of the book.)

Soon, Jane’s in trouble: “Sometimes when he smiles at her, she feels like she’s won a prize.”

At one point, she explains to Jeremy the concept of a “soulbonder,” a term from Y.A. fandom. Such a person feels “an intense bond with a fictional character to the point where they exist in your own head.” Essentially, she’s describing cathexis, the phenomenon of intense emotional investment — something Montague’s stylish, convention-allergic novel resists.

In spite of her love affair with Jeremy, the aloof Jane is more a creature of groundhoggish repetition than romantic passion. Lines describing her daily wake-up recur multiple times, verbatim. While reiteration of the depressively cyclical is an audacious narrative strategy, it also means our girl remains chimerical; I did not soulbond. As a consequence, the dramatic fate (no spoilers) that strikes her at the start of the book’s second section registers with dampened shock.