Literary Style and the Lessons of Memoir | The New Yorker

Learning from poets' sharply quotable lines, and from travel writers' set pieces and first-person assertions, Wagner has made a book to dip into, open almost at random, or get lost in. In this respect, the book resembles, as she knows, the endless branching paths of social media, which become her subject: "my method of describing the sunset, its noise, is likewise noise. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr." Fragmentary prose, composed of disconnected observations and advice, goes back as far as the Bible, but Wagner's combination of patience and jumpiness, and her search for "the real, presence, materiality" in snippets that keep slipping away from her, seem to fit our age of distraction and hyper-alertness, when we might look up from Proust, or from the Grand Canyon, to see if we've been retweeted, or liked, or tagged.