I remember signing up for Facebook. It was the second semester of my freshman year of college. Michigan was on the first or second round of colleges it was released to outside of the Ivy League. We all felt very smug because we got it before Michigan State. I can’t remember if we even had profile pictures, at first. I think it was just your name. Status updates had the prompt “[Name] is…”. It was 2004. I’ve been on Facebook for over 20 years.
There was a time when social media felt innocent. But those days are long gone. We have influencers now. This phenomenon is at the heart of Megan Angelo’s debut novel, Followers. The book follows two separate storylines: in one, set just a few years ago from the present day, Orla is a wannabe writer who moved to New York City to chase her dream…and ended up writing posts for a celebrity gossip blog. Feeling stagnant, she finds herself receptive to a proposal made by her pretty new roommate and aspiring reality star, Floss: to cover her on the blog, raising her profile towards at least the D-list. It pays off when Floss starts dating a former child star, Aston, and Orla becomes a bit character on the reality show that films in their apartment. She’s no closer to her professional dreams, but her association with fame brings a long-held personal dream suddenly within grasp…her high school crush, Danny, wants to reconnect, changing her world in ways she never could have imagined.
In the second storyline, taking place in the 2050s, Marlow lives in a real-life version of The Truman Show: she and the fellow residents of her town, Constellation, are on-screen 23 hours per day and live as government-appointed, network-controlled full-time influencers. After a violent incident in her childhood, Marlow is sponsored by the mood-stabilizing drug Hysteryl, which keeps her numbly content with her life of constant surveillance. But when she and her husband, Ellis, decide to have a baby, she goes off the drug in preparation for pregnancy and finds herself deeply unhappy. Unhappy enough to make a run for it into an outside world she’s never really known, where the consequences of a cataclysmic event called The Spill several decades prior have rendered it very different than we might have thought.
The world is definitely ready for novels that try to reckon with the damage that has been and could be wrought by the rise of the internet and the proliferation of social media, so I’d been excited to read this book. It does some things very well: both Orla and Marlow are rich, interesting characters. Neither are particularly sympathetic, but they feel real in their struggles, especially Orla. But Floss never develops with any similar level of care despite some early promise, and the decisions that Orla makes sometimes feel more like plot contrivances than anything organic. This problem becomes bigger as the stakes are raised later in the narrative. The book as a whole is paced well, I found it compelling enough to keep turning the pages and invested in where the story would go next. Angelo has good prose styling, neglecting neither humor nor pathos.
It’s fairly evident, however, that it’s a debut. The dual timeline structure loses balance every so often, and it was just usually as one part really started to cruise along that it would switch to the other, stopping the momentum of the story. Failing to really dig into developing Floss hinders the book, as she appears throughout both timelines and her decisions often steer the course of events. And most of all, I found myself at the end unsure of exactly what it was that Angelo was trying to say. There’s clearly a message that more privacy, and less screen time, is preferable to the alternative. But that’s pretty wishy-washy, and there’s no real strength behind it. There is very much potential here, so it’s frustrating that it never really comes together. I do look forward to seeing what Angelo does in the future, but can’t recommend this book for more than a plane/beach read.
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