If you have an appetite for other people's business, the Internet is an all-you-can-eat buffet. Feelings, jokes, gossip, petty gripes—it’s all there, and you barely have to look for it. I have a tendency to gorge, and sometimes I feel like my metabolism cannot handle such bounty.
Mostly, though, I enjoy living in this time of abundance. It was not until recently that I thought to wonder whether gluttony was dulling my palate. Could I be losing my taste for strangers’ emotional lives? This is what I found myself considering as I worked my way through “Talk,” Linda Rosenkrantz’s 1968 novel, reissued this month by N.Y.R.B. Classics. The book consists of edited transcripts from a summer’s worth of conversations among three thirtyish friends visiting East Hampton. But for a book of modest length that is, on the surface, the perfect highbrow beach read—nineteen-sixties Manhattan art-world denizens talk about parties and sex, often while at an actual beach—“Talk” is weirdly arduous. Its three protagonists have nothing but time and nothing to do but talk about themselves. It’s a bit like “No Exit,” though in this case the characters, at least, seem to be having fun.
Rosenkrantz has said that to gather the material for the book she had her tape recorder running constantly, “even dragging the bulky monster to the beach.” The tapes gave her some fifteen hundred single-spaced pages and about twenty-five characters. The finished book, which is two hundred and forty pages, has just three speakers: Emily, an actress flirting with a drinking problem; Vincent, a gay painter flirting with his straight female friends; and Marsha, a writer, Rosenkrantz’s stand-in, the one who’s making the tapes. “Talk” is made up entirely of talk; stage directions must be inferred, but action is mostly lacking, anyway. The trio’s conversations take place on the mornings after big fights; on the beach, people-watching; in the car, pulling away from the party. The summer is sorted into episodes, such as “Emily Relates Her Psychedelic Experience to Vincent” and “Emily, Marsha, and Vincent Discuss Orgies.”
Even with such apparently juicy material, blithe self-exposure quickly grows dull. Their mutual trust comfortably established, Marsha, Emily, and Vincent unleash endless confession, allowing one another to stand in for the analysts they aren’t seeing over the summer. Nobody has to coax anything out of anyone. “I haven’t told you about the big breakthrough I had last week,” one will say, just before explaining the big breakthrough she had last week. At one point, Marsha and Vincent show their genitals to one another, in a matter-of-fact way that suggests toddlers rather than sexual adventurers. For all their world-weary posturing (“It’s been an awful lot of sacrifice and pain, darling, but I had no choice,” Emily says, of analysis), what registers most sharply is their innocence—particularly as concerns Marsha’s tape recorder.
This innocence, I think, rather than a diminished hunger for intimate revelation, explains why “Talk” did not grip me. Confession is not riveting because of its details—or not primarily so, at least. It is riveting because of the stakes involved in disclosure. The speakers in “Talk” are proudly liberated from a previous era’s strictures (while talking among themselves, at least), but they haven’t yet recognized what the new era’s might be.
Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?” (2012) also depicts an interlude of artistic self-invention among young, ambitious, unencumbered friends, and it, too, incorporates the author’s actual recorded conversations. But, four decades after Rosenkrantz, Heti’s cohort brings a different kind of savvy to the project of self-documentation. They love “The Hills”; they’ve watched celebrity sex tapes. When the Sheila character proposes to her friend Margaux, a painter, that she record their conversations, Margaux is aghast: “You there with that tape recorder is the scariest thing!” she says. “Then whatever I happen to say, someone will believe I really said it and meant it? No. No. You there with that tape recorder looks like my own death.” She relents eventually, but her wariness sets the tone for a book-long negotiation of the friends’ intimacy. The tape recorder is more than a neutral witness—it’s a source of power, and both women know it.
“She paints my picture, and I record what she is saying,” Heti says, in a half-serious summary of the working relationship they establish. “We do whatever we can to make the other one feel famous.” But fame, especially fame founded on self-exposure, is a prospect they regard with ambivalence. “Most people lead their private lives,” Heti writes; they “live their entire lives with their clothes on.” And then there are those “destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.”
Fame interests the characters of “Talk,” too. “She wants when she’s out here in three years to come on this beach and for everyone to know who she is,” Vincent says of Emily. “I’ve always had that need,” Emily agrees. “I have it too,” he says. “I would love to be famous,” Marsha says. They’re just chatting on the beach, but their belief in openness—to one another, to the permanent record of the tape, to the more pervasive exposure that fame might entail—is a value that passes without scrutiny. In another chapter, Emily and Marsha sit on the beach and discuss sources of pleasure. After listing things like massages and dancing, the conversation grows more abstract:
Their uncomplicated enthusiasm is both striking and boring.
A world of WiFi-enabled public sharing encourages a second skin of public self-presentation that Rosenkrantz’s trio hasn’t yet acquired. They perform for themselves but not for any other imagined audience. “Talk” documents what has turned out to be a fleeting historical moment: when it was possible to bring a recording device to the beach and not expect that everyone else has done the same.
“We’re all pioneers going through new frontiers, new jungles,” Vincent declares. “We’re breaking psychic, social land so that people following us will be able to lead better lives.” He’s talking about an acquaintance’s unconventional marriage, but the real progress the book depicts is the trio’s blossoming self-awareness. Halfway through, Marsha remarks that recording their conversations has brought her “face to face with myself.” Later, when she walks into a conversation Vincent and Emily are having about her, they obligingly rewind so she can listen. (Marsha agrees with their assessment of her behavior.) As the summer progresses, all three begin to muse over the shape the book will take and the way it will reflect upon Marsha. The results aren’t as flattering as they expected. Unpacking, in the final chapter, Marsha tells Emily what a letdown it was to describe the summer to her analyst:
Sex and food and self-congratulation: this could also serve as an ungenerous summary of most social media. Marsha’s weary assessment sounds like the beginning of a more modern relationship to her public self. The book ends with the ambivalence that many of us feel these days about recording everything on our phones: “I wrote the book,” Marsha tells Emily, “and everything I missed in the summer as well as everything I gained was because of it.” For the first time, she sounds like one of us.
