Open Book: Justin Taylor

An interview with Justin Taylor on his novel “Reboot" and the pull of pastiche.

RIYL: Florida, ‘00s teen dramas, cover songs, the deep state, Tiger Beat, Hollow Earth theory, fanfic

Like the obsessions we’ve fostered with numerous teen dramas, Justin Taylor’s novel Reboot, out now on Pantheon, inspires the same kind of fierce devotion — evoking the kind of can't-look-away chaos that inspires relentless fandom, even long after it's over. 

The novel traverses a spectrum of whacked-out ideologies, from toxic fandoms to hollow earth theory to Goop-y solutions to climate catastrophe (i.e. glow in the dark GMO wine). Ultimately, Reboot is a fierce and biting satire that begs you to hold on tight and enjoy its video game-like ride.

Reboot follows David Crader, a 39-year-old washed-up teen actor in Portland, Ore. on the edges of a quiet midlife crisis. Crader is a bar owner trying to be sober, a former actor now the voice of a popular, rogue video game, and a flailing father. While in LA for a fan convention, he meets up with his ex-wife and ex-co-star of Rev Beach, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets The O.C. ‘00s teen hit TV show. There’s a reboot in the works and David is tasked with getting his other former co-stars on board — taking him on a journey to flash flooding in NYC to sinkholes in Florida. The one constant is movement. 

A smart satire of celebrity memoir, fan culture, pastiche, and homage, Reboot is a rabbit hole of a novel, one that captures a fractured culture. It’s a self-reflective book, one where every song mentioned is a cover song, where every bar used to be another bar. A Russian nesting doll of a novel that is as complex and loony as the conspiracy theories with which it's riddled, Reboot is ultimately about the frenzied propulsion of the world. 

Below, Language Arts caught up with Taylor about the book.

Did you feel any pressure to accurately capture what fan culture online is like right now?

I always wanted to do something that was relatively contemporary. One thing that I believe as a writer is that all fiction is eventually historical fiction. Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein is bringing to bear everything she knows about modern science to create this speculative story. It’s contemporary to its own moment, and before you know it, it’s historical. My idea was to write as close to the present as I could, but then to be unafraid of that time capsule aspect. 

This book is so whacked-out (celebratory). How did you decide how far to push things? 

At the fringes of this story are some real speculative or science fiction elements. I hadn't really planned to do that going in. Once I did it, I thought we’ll see how far I can push this while staying within the bounds of what is more or less a realistic story. Most of the characters are not that impressed by the stuff that they encounter. I like the idea of a near futuristic tech that is a little far-fetched, but just not all that impressive.

“One thing that I believe as a writer is that all fiction is historical fiction eventually.”

I always think about how depictions of the future were often about the ability to video chat with someone. Now we have FaceTime, but most of the time I still just call people on the phone. 

There's a great piece in the New Yorker by Gideon Lewis Kraus about how he got to fly in a car. At a certain point he's like: It tells us something about the limits of our own imagination. We want to fly a car instead of drive, but we can't actually think beyond the car. He talks about how in The Jetsons, George Jetson has this flying car and when he gets where he is going, the car literally folds up into his briefcase. You're supposed to be so blown away by this, but the punchline of the whole thing is George Jet is just trying to get to work. The whole thing is about optimizing a commute to please your boss. He's like, that's not what the future should be.

In the book, David takes a pill that helps him temporarily breathe underwater, which is one of the not-that-impressive futuristic inventions that also adds to the sense of climate anxiety in the book. 

In a weird way, all the climate disasters that are threaded throughout are probably the most realistic part of the novel. For years while I was working on this, I had three tabs on my Google Chrome: celebrity stuff, hollow earth stuff, and then environmental stuff. The first two were pretty deep research. I read a lot of child star memoirs. I read a lot of 19th century junk science.

I read the Miami Herald and a couple other Florida newspapers. I read all the coverage here in Portland about the wildfires. A lot of it was not page one. It's like page five of the metro section of the Miami Herald. In Miami, where I grew up, there's these amazing stories, like if they get a high tide at the same time as a super moon, they'll get a flood, even if there's no rain — it's just the water table rising through the limestone. The photos in the paper are crazier than anything I put in the novel, because you're literally seeing fish on people's lawns.

David has a constant need to make everything feel very filmic, like he’s a character in a TV show of his life. Can you talk about his relationship to self-mythology?

Most of the book takes the form of his memoir. I read a few celebrity memoirs, particularly from former child stars. The big three I always mention were Cory Feldman's Coreyography, Jodi Sweetin's Unsweetined, and Dustin Diamond's Behind the Bell, which are all really interesting books. They're different in a lot of ways. There's some really interesting patterns there, too. These people write these books to take control back of a story that's been told about them for a long time. One of the first things they find is they're not really sure what story they're telling. I think a lot of these books are double dramas of demythologizing and remythologizing back and forth, which is sometimes quite conscious and sometimes not conscious at all. 

The book is about so many different reboots: the show, David himself, the planet. Addiction is a really interesting idea of a reboot. What’s the most interesting reboot to you?

I really liked all the cover songs in the book. Anytime you hear a piece of music, it's a cover song. Some of those are real, and some of those aren't. When they're in the bar in Gowanus, it's Jerry Garcia covering Lead Belly’s “Goodnight Irene,” and that's obviously real. But at one point, the character Shane is screwing around on a piano in his friend's apartment. He does a Taylor Swift cover, and then he goes from that into a very long, 20-minute jam band style cover of a Guided by Voices song on solo piano. I was pretty proud when I came up with that one. I'll cop to the vanity.

Bonus: Language Arts is proud to share friend-of-the-substack Kareem’s new talk show, The Last Stop with Kareem Rahma! In the premiere, it’s an inter-generational throwdown between Boomers and, well, everyone they’ve fucked over. It’s a different, yet equally fundamental type of “reading,” some might say…