Sociable

January 1, 2018
Harrington (Penelope) gleefully skewers digital media and postgraduate working blues with this dark satire of self-absorbed millennials trying to remake journalism and romance. Her cyber coming-of-age tale revolves around Elinor and her college boyfriend, Mike, who live together in a cramped New York City apartment with no stove and a foam pad for a bed while they work toward their dreams of writing about important issues. Mike, who has a leg up—his parents pay his rent and his mom is a famous essayist—scores a writing job at a snarky website. Meanwhile, Elinor, making money as a nanny, winds up at a struggling rival news site, Journalism.ly, where she’s hired to pump up its audience as “viral trends editor” and proves to be a natural. While Elinor refines the art of clickbait, her relationships with Mike and her best friend fall apart. After relieving her heartache with a takedown of Mike online and on TV, Elinor dives into online dating and, unsurprisingly, meets other disaffected millennials with pretentious ambitions. With shrewd observations and biting humor, Harrington paints a bleak picture of a generation relentlessly focused on looking inward—and at their social media status.

January 15, 2018
A young woman traverses her 20s and the toxic landscape of New York media in Harrington's (I'll Have What She's Having, 2015, etc.) novel of millennial manners.Well into her tenure in New York City, aspiring journalist Elinor Tomlinson has a job as a nanny, a painfully self-important literary boyfriend from college, and a foam pad that serves as a bed. That is, until her boyfriend's mother--a hotshot essayist who writes incisive columns like "A Mother's Guilt" and "What Gen X Forgot"--hooks her up with a job at Journalism.ly, a BuzzFeed-esque startup, where she's in charge of viral content. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, Mike, is writing Important Think Pieces about Important Topics like waste management for Memo Points Daily while surrounded by small, Virginia Woolf-looking girls with appropriately literary credentials. Mike doesn't have much use for Elinor's new job (Mike has few redeeming characteristics), but Elinor, it turns out, has a gift for writing high-traffic posts, even when she's miserable, which she soon is: Mike unceremoniously dumps her, coming back to their shared hovel only to collect his stuff (including a "This Is What a Feminist Looks Like" T-shirt and his Gatorade); Elinor is forced to a "semi-studio" in Queens (shared bathroom, no kitchen). In general, Elinor is drowning in a sea of lackluster men with inexplicable standing; not just Mike or her subsequent online dates, but her two male bosses, who have both magnanimously appointed themselves her "mentor." And yet Elinor, despite these obstacles--principally, being 20-something and a woman in New York--begins, slowly, haltingly, to find a more functional version of herself. No one really says much of anything, thanks to Harrington's preference for mumblecore-style dialogue, nor do the characters particularly transcend their archetypes, but Harrington captures the oppressive narcissism and frustrated ambitions of Elinor's world with nauseating accuracy.Frothy on the surface with teeth underneath.

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December 15, 2017
Elinor and her boyfriend, Mike, graduated with communications degrees from a prestigious-enough New York college a few years ago, but it's been pretty hard to find actual jobs in journalism? (Question marks end many a declarative sentence in Harrington's satirical second novel, following Penelope, 2012.) Elinor finally hops the line when Mike's mom, a well-known columnist, connects her to a new news website, Journalism.ly, and she's hired to create viral contenta dream job. But all does not remain so rosy. When Mike dumps her almost immediately, Elinor must trade their dismal Manhattan garden apartment for a far-worse semi-studio on the outskirts of Astoria, Queens. As her competing male colleagues declare themselves her mentors (something she expressly does not seek), their advice unfailingly results in non-viral content. Mike won't respond to her messages even though she tries to be supportive by tweeting his articles, and Elinor's best (only) friend just doesn't understand. Though certainly smart and fluidly written, this send-up of the painfully antisocial nature of social-media culture will be too much for readers who tire of unlikable characters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)