Contemporary Authors

• Rubik ( novel) Unnamed Press (Los Angeles, CA), 2018

• Brio Books - https://briobooks.com.au/authors/elizabeth-tan

  ELIZABETH TAN
  Elizabeth Tan is a writer from Perth. In 2015, she completed her PhD in creative writing at Curtin University. Her thesis investigated the intrusion of science-fictional tropes and iconography onto our current social reality, and the cultural anxieties that this has produced. This practice-led research culminated in her first novel Rubik, published in 2017. Elizabeth’s fiction has appeared in Voiceworks, Westerly, The Lifted Brow, Sleepers Almanac, Overland, Seizure, Best Australian Stories and Tincture. She is also the creator of Mais Pourquoi, a webcomic, et-maispourquoi.blogspot.com.

• Perth Festival - https://www.perthfestival.com.au/event/rubik

  WA author Elizabeth Tan’s debut novel Rubik is the result of investigations into the intrusion of science-fictional tropes and iconography onto our current social reality, and the cultural anxieties that this has produced. She talks to Jane Cornes Maclean about virtual lives and viral mortalities.

  Purchase Rubik from Boffins and start reading today!

  Be part of the conversation! #PERTHFESTWW #PERTHFEST on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram.

Print Marked Items
Tan, Elizabeth: RUBIK
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Tan, Elizabeth RUBIK Unnamed Press (Adult Fiction) $16.99 4, 24 ISBN: 978-1-944700-57-7
Tan's debut novel is both a love letter to fandom and a sustained meditation on alienation, artificiality, and the sinister nature of capitalism.
In this novel of interconnected narratives that mimics the shifting planes of a Rubik's Cube, characters appear and reappear in stories that pastiche
various genres, from anime and video games to sci-fi thrillers and fan fiction. The cycle begins with Elena Rubik, a young 20-something who is
struck and killed by a car, leaving behind a ghostly electronic footprint. From there, we meet a succession of guarded misfits: a piano teacher
haunted by a seven-note motif and her shy student; an isolated voice-over artist and the former model enamored with his voice (the model's
employer, Ampersand, offers a dark satire of the chain Urban Outfitters). Tan winks at her readers, sprinkling mentions of Leonardo DiCaprio and
dream totems a la Inception here, aviator glasses-wearing assassins straight out of The Matrix there. It becomes clear that we're caught--
somewhere--in a potentially bottomless, self-referential piece of fan fiction, of the type characters in the novel would post on a forum called
Luxury Replicants. One of the most inventive of these experiments is a narrative treatment for the faux anime series Pikkoro and the
Multipurpose Octopus, in which a floating octopus cares for a precocious child. Together, they must defeat HarvestTime, a shadowy corporate
entity. This, it turns out, is a reference to the novel's capitalist bugaboo, Seed, a tech company with recurring viral marketing campaigns and
obliquely sinister intentions--a throughline reminiscent of The Matrix via Infinite Jest. Fans of matryoshka-doll novels like Cloud Atlas and A
Visit from the Goon Squad may be expecting a baseline narrative around which alternate worlds and realities shift, but Tan provides her readers
with no such luxury. Like many of the sci-fi films Tan references, each narrative threatens to collapse, revealing its own artificiality, in a
seemingly endless hall of mirrors. And while Tan's imagination is inventive and capacious, her characters can exhibit a kind of fairy-tale flatness,
too. This, however, might be part of the game. As one character remarks, "Once the machine is in motion...it doesn't have to obey us. It's almost
like there's...[something] that wills the objects, that determines how things will behave when they're triggered." Tan is skilled enough to keep
readers guessing about what that next mysterious movement might be.
An intriguing, high-concept effort cut from the same generational cloth as Tumblr and Wattpad.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Tan, Elizabeth: RUBIK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959944/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f8e27c1a. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959944
Rubik
Publishers Weekly.
265.7 (Feb. 12, 2018): p52.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Rubik
Elizabeth Tan. Unnamed (PGW, dist.), $17
trade paper (256p) ISBN 978-1-944700-57-7
Tan knits subtle critique of a hypercommodified, networked world into her debut, an inventive linked short story collection. In "Retcon," Jules
Valentine's small role in an experimental film shot in Perth, Australia, sets in motion a series of mysteries that build toward the uncovering of an
insidious viral marketing campaign for Seed tablets and phones. Her image from the film as the "falling girl" becomes a hollow symbol of edgy
individuality around Australia in "This Page Has Been Left Blank Intentionally." In "Good Birds Don't Fly Away," young Peter Pushkin searches
for his missing piano teacher, who was driven to a breakdown through the marketing campaign's prank calls. Tim voices the automated tech
support in "T" and gains a rabid following in "U (or, That Extra Little Something)." Other connected characters correspond with spambots
("Congratulations You May Have Already Won"), get cornea transplants ("Light"), and write anime fan fiction ("Luxury Replicants"). The stories
slowly reveal their connection to Seed, but mostly overlap through oblique details that reward the reader's attention, such as a cat's red collar or
the imagined unisex clothing brand Ampersand. A particularly poignant thread tracks the accidental death of Jules's best friend through the
history of a five-cent coin and a convenience store meat pie. The disorienting effect of accreting, repeating details and unanswered questions
makes the final cohesion of Tan's only slightly fantastical Perth even more delicious. Tan's careful layering and nuanced craft will gain a strong
following among fans of experimental narratives. (Apr.)
Caption: Elizabeth Tan's linked story collection, Rubik, is an inventive and nuanced take on a hypercommodified, networked world (reviewed on
this page).
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Rubik." Publishers Weekly, 12 Feb. 2018, p. 52. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528615464/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ea59dcb3. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528615464

• Full Stop
  http://www.full-stop.net/2018/06/16/reviews/emily-alexander/rubik-elizabeth-tan/
  Word count: 2972

  Rubik – Elizabeth Tan
  by Emily Alex

  elizabeth tan rubik cover[Brio Books; 2017]

  Elizabeth Tan’s Rubik is an uncomfortable sort of fun, a vertiginously meta novel-in-stories that delivers a sharp critique of the Internet age in its own language. I have been most successful thus far in describing this immense novel as an Inception fan fiction. To consider Rubik from this angle — that is, through the lens of pastiche — is not to undermine the work, but rather to applaud its manner of deconstructing conventional standards of value when it comes to art. Originality, in particular, comes under scrutiny — not only as it applies to artistic production, but also as it applies to identity itself. This is a work of uncanny doublings and echoes; rife with cultural allusions, real and invented. It is massively, profoundly intertextual. It is recursively — though not redundantly — metafictional. It is metafiction that swallowed metafiction, that chuckles at metafiction. Like all great metafiction, it deploys art as metaphor, a mirror for life itself, except here the reflections proliferate and the plot is lost. Like the puzzle to which its title refers, Rubik is ever-shifting, moving from one plane of reality to a contingent one. And, like one character’s “totem,” a Rubik’s cube with more colors than faces, its (re)solution is not merely a challenge but in fact a deliberate impossibility.

  For its formal brilliance and contemporaneity, Tan’s debut novel might bear comparisons to a work like Infinite Jest; however, if Wallace’s masterwork is a “baggy monster,” then Rubik is a baggie monster, neatly apportioned even in its sprawl. While the novel impugns continuity (the illusion of) on both an overt/conceptual and implicit/structural level, careening from one character to the next in the space between stories, it nonetheless presents a unified whole, greater than the sum of its parts. Like Wallace, Tan effectively problematizes not only the idea of novelistic coherence, but also of the novel itself, coherence itself — suggesting that coherence and incoherence are not opposed or mutually excluding, but rather symbiotic: co-incident facets of an infinitely complex universe. Rubik is a vortex and the view from the vortex at once; it is high-definition photos snapped at 200 mph and never going back. It is not the first to say that it is not the first to say what it is not the first to say; and yet, it nonetheless finds its way into and through the postmodern mire: it makes new.

  Like most great works of metafiction, Rubik arrives at its self-reflexive mode of commentary through an abundance of representations of representations of life. At or near the center of each of the novel’s fifteen stories is an individual endeavoring to document the human experience in some fashion or another. Theatre, film, classical music, punk rock, sound design, installation art, journalism, and advertising are just some of the art forms that take center stage. Perhaps most interesting are the stories that either refer to or (rhetorically) replicate the genre of fan fiction. For instance, the Inception fan forum “Luxury Replicants” (an obvious and apt nod to Blade Runner) is one of the novel’s most prominent recurrent threads.

  We also catch fiction catching its reflection in Tan’s fiction, with the novel Seeds of Time making several appearances across the stories — first as a prop, then as a plot point, then as quoted text. In other words, making its first appearance as what could be called, from a formal standpoint, a seed. Tan’s seeding of Seeds of Time is emblematic of the sort of ingenious language play that characterizes her work. Clever but not cute, this is Tan taking full advantage of the meta level which is constantly engaged and reinforced by the novel’s subject matter, structure, and motifs. The fact that these stories are not only linked but also nested (one story a fanfic ostensibly written by a character from another, read by a character from still another) means that Tan can play with such a concept at various levels.

  Another notable example is the concept of retconning: that is, retroactively introducing a revision that occasions a reinterpretation of previously described events. In the story “Retcon,” a retcon is instantiated at the mimetic level (the story’s protagonist experiencing a sudden shift in meaning); but this phenomenon is also a suitable metaphor for the experience of reading the novel itself, where later stories often come to re-color our interpretation of earlier events — much like, in poetry, the idea of a “turn.” Which is, in turn, a suitable metaphor for the reader’s experience of acquiring knowledge in their own world. Understanding unfurls gradually and not towards any distinct or authoritative end. The fact that Tan embraces the retcon as a sort of narrative strategy is apparent in her decision to place “Pikkoro and the Multipurpose Octopus,” as the novel’s second story/chapter. This story adopts the form of fan fiction, but the references to the (invented) anime canon are like broken web links: we know they point somewhere, but we must turn quite a number of pages before we learn to what. In this way, Tan is making a rather large wager on her reader, in terms of their willingness to proceed on uncertain grounds. Another way to think of it is that “Pikkoro” might not be a gamble so much as it is a shibboleth, sorting out the readers willing to abide ambiguity from those who require closure, as the latter are ultimately going to be disappointed, even frustrated, with the novel as a whole.

  As is standard in metafiction (and inevitable) (and delightful, if you’re into this sort of thing), the observations that Tan’s characters make about their various artistic pursuits often seem to fold back—that is, make oblique reference to the novel itself: to the manner in which it is presented, or to its global thematic concerns. For instance, one character describes Seeds of Time in a way that a reader might be inclined to describe Rubik itself: “It is not like any novel he’s read before: each chapter seems to take vast leaps forward . . . characters disappear and return in strange ways, or they do not return at all.” Furthermore, the characters are frequently compelled to remark upon their experience in a manner that calls attention to what the reader might otherwise perceive as narrative deficiencies—such as continuity errors and unlikely coincidences. “Something isn’t right about the convenience of your discoveries,” one character tells the hero in “Pikkoro and the Multipurpose Octopus,” just as Pikkoro begins to get the sense that she is caught up in a plot, in both senses of the word. The character interrogates this sense of uncanny convergence, of life taking on the quality of narrative: “Has her life always been this charged with moments of significance, relentless as an assembly line? Pivotal moments advancing from a conveyor belt, delivered with suspicious regularity”? In “Retcon,” a film extra explains why she didn’t ask for more information about the student film in which she would be featured, saying that she “kinda liked not having context” and “wanted to jumpcut all that bullshit.”

  Populating her fictional universe with characters who are inclined to think about story (and story’s relationship to time, and story’s relationship to reality) also permits Tan to make frequent departures from more typical modes of delivery: there are many instances of telling out of sequence (“Jules rehearses how she’s going to tell this story to Elena later. The present moment is the future’s past”), or deliberately calling out and then subverting reader expectation. For instance, in this same story, “Retcon,” a gun (perhaps even a loaded one) appears, and we leave the scene before it can be brought into action, but not before the focal character, “out of loyalty to some sense of continuity . . . thinks she glimpses” the gun’s holder drawing the weapon.

  Tan’s characters also have a tendency to ventriloquize what is ostensibly the viewpoint of the novel itself. In “Good Birds Don’t Fly Away,” a young boy comes face-to-face with the horror that is vision on a cosmic scale:

  [he] becomes omniscient—the powerless sort—and the room becomes small like a diorama, one of many dioramas, and his room is just one cubicle in a shoebox out of many shoeboxes, and his life is just one version of many illustrations of the same sad facts of the world, and his tragedy is just one tragedy out of the infinite tragedies of the universe.

  And in “Retcon,” two college-aged women argue about whether or not they should even care that authenticity is being commodified, given that this is such old news. Their back-and-forth here seems like the very dialectic that sustains the novel itself: its ambition in spite of prior acknowledgement and acceptance that every thought has already been thought, that everything is always already pastiche. As one character rails against the music industry’s “tepid appropriation of nothing” and its attempts to “sell outsiderness” and “prescribe the terms of . . . rebellion,” a second character interrupts with: “You sound like a first-year who’s discovering capitalism for the first time. Everyone is a package. Everyone knows that everyone is a package.” It could end here, but instead the first character follows up: “Things just — things don’t cease to be evil when they’re boring and old, you know?” The regularity with which the stories resonate in this manner, beyond their diegetic bounds, has the effect of endowing the novel with a certain almost self-reflexive capacity — an almost-sentience, which is, in itself, thematically salient.

  As it turns out, Tan’s rejection of a unitary voice—her narrative eclecticism—is one of the novel’s greatest delights. Each autonomous story reflects a distinct narrative mode. “T,” for instance, is structured more like a lyric essay than a story — with the juxtaposition of digressions pertaining to Grimm’s fairy tales and sound theory functioning to draw out the uncanny undertones of an otherwise mundane occurrence. Taking advantage of the power of suggestion (while at the same time sounding off about the power of suggestion), Tan reminds us about the pernicious ends to which mistaken identity can be used: “In cinema, a little bit of sound can achieve the greater deception of continuity . . . A film is not completely unlike actual perception, anyway. A series of discontinuities assimilated into a provisional whole.” By joining together an instance of potential deception with a synopsis of “Little Red Riding Hood,” Tan subtly primes the reader to detect sinister intent in this somewhat innocuous (/perhaps not-so-innocuous) case of doubling.

  The novel’s last story, “Kuan X05” replicates, in form, the experience of video game play, with its protagonist repeatedly dying, resetting, and starting her quest anew; while “Congratulations You May Have Already Won,” the novel’s funniest story, is delivered in epistolary form, as an email correspondence between a bored receptionist and an automated email server. “I must say that I am intrigued by your vague and enticing offers” the human correspondent writes, in response to the initial spam-ad gibberish. “I am trembling with desire to purchase a Seed product. Any of the breathless array of Seed goods you have mentioned would satiate me; I just really want one now.” The story grows less ironic, more pathetic as it goes on, with the receptionist pursuing this correspondence well past the point of a simple gag: “You are by far the most dedicated correspondent I have had in recent memory” he tells the bot. The more personal his own missives become, the more he is inclined to project conscious intent onto the poorly auto-generated responses and even ends up reading the utterly impersonal, often ungrammatical adverts as aphorisms. When it calls itself “the trusted brand that takes good ideas to life,” he praises the bot for its perspicacity: “At what point does an idea come to life? . . . You ask all the important questions.” While absurd to be sure, this story is also relatable, because its absurdity is germane to life in our high-tech age. If you have ever wished your cellphone assistant “Goodnight” or worried about offending your GPS, you are already familiar with the particular version of the uncanny that applies to technology. This is one of the major ideas that Tan explores in the novel: the extent to which we engage with non-human entities and objects as though they were conscious, feeling beings — often projecting consciousness onto our devices and the systems the surround us. This blurring, Tan illustrates, is evident even in our habits of language, such as placing an entity like IKEA in the subject position of a phrase: What does it want me to do? On the one hand, this might be mere shorthand, linguistic convenience. On the other hand: what is subjecthood? What is consciousness?

  In addition to inviting us to consider what counts as conscious, Rubik also asks us to ponder, more broadly, what counts as real. First and foremost, Tan achieves this through intertextuality, the dense and complex network of references she makes throughout the novel — both to works that exist in the world of the readers and works that exist only in the world of her characters. For instance, the rock group Miko and the Exploding Heads and the novel The Seeds of Time are stable entities within Rubik, making several appearances across various stories; while the work of Australian composer Tristam Cary and contemporary films like The Matrix and Inception, as well as corporate entities like IKEA and Windows, appear alongside fictional analogues like the mysterious tech company Seed Corp, or the anime Pikkoro and the Multipurpose Octopus.

  One of the axes around which the puzzle that is Rubik rotates is that between reality and the imaginary. There is much here to call to mind the Japanese novelist and practitioner of magical realism, Haruki Murakami. The linked stories “Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit” and “Good Birds Don’t Fly Away,” which center on a piano teacher’s mysterious disappearance and her young bookworm pupil’s quest to find her, both seem like potential nods to Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. Beyond their incidental similarities, Tan’s work and Murakami’s are similar in their varying relationship to mimesis. This referential fluidity serves to destabilize the reader’s notion of reality both within and (potentially) without the text. The many layers of story we encounter in Rubik — the stories themselves; the stories as they stand in relation to one another; the stories embedded within the stories; the stories the characters receive from the surrounding culture, through media and pervasive advertising; the stories the characters are preparing to tell — have the effect of rendering yet another distinction—that between the real and un-real — both indistinct and irrelevant. The imaginary is not merely a means for Tan to convey a particular character’s unconscious; rather, fantasies and fictions have a tangible effect on the material world. There is, in other words, no uncontested and privileged status granted to the real as distinct from the unreal. Thus, the reader is inevitably left with the (clearly absurd) question: but which of these fifteen fictions is more real?

  The fact that such a question has implications beyond literature is not lost on Tan, and it is the story “U (or that Extra Little Something)” that explores this most explicitly. Here the protagonist, Ursula, is haunted by the absence of her once-conjoined twin, a so-called “parasitic twin,” whose short-lived existence was determined to be effectively less real than hers. “At some crucial, secret stage of our becoming, I could have been the parasite, and [she] the autosite,” Ursula muses. This anxiety about the so-called authenticity and independence of her own identity is foregrounded all the more by Ursula’s work as a model for a lifestyle/fashion brand whose very aesthetic hinges on passing off the engineered realities of their photo shoots as genuine life.

  Tan goes to great lengths throughout the novel to not only demonstrate the power of dreams, but also to remind us just how much of what we consider real, the world we interact with from day-to-day, actually reflects a sort of carefully-orchestrated rhetoric — that is, how much of a self-referential morass we already inhabit. Ursula attends a party and declares herself “impressed at [its] party-likeness . . . like the work of a really conscientious set dresser”; while the protagonist in “Retcon” observes that the film director “doesn’t snap [the clapperboard] like [she] has seen in movies of movie sets.” Ursula’s lifestyle brand markets kitsch like the “Crumple Cup,” an homage to an imitation of an actual party cup. There is even an entire chapter dedicated to the life-cycle of the phony delicacy that is the “Homestyle Country Pie.”

  Within the exhausted funhouse that is our contemporary cultural landscape, Tan’s novel makes no exception for itself. It assumes the heritage of postmodern literature, and popular culture, and mass marketing. It embeds within it. It does so bravely and without apologies, because that is all it can do. These are the terms of our reality, and this is the language we speak; our only real grace is the turn, the metaphor.

  Emily Alex is the prose editor at Puerto del Sol and a prose editor with Noemi Press. She teaches creative writing and composition at New Mexico State University, where she is an MFA candidate in fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Offing, and is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly and The Collagist.

• Readings
  https://www.readings.com.au/review/rubik-by-elizabeth-tan
  Word count: 311

  Rubik by Elizabeth Tan
  Reviewed by Marie Matteson

  28 MAR 2017
  Rubik is a novel in stories that embraces science fiction, speculative fiction, satire and fantasy. In an ever-expanding array of viewpoints, Rubik slots into place like a Rubik’s cube as you unfold the puzzles. This makes it sound clever and tricky, which it is, but it’s also a novel of great compassion and tenderness.

  Rubik is a book you need to sink into. It starts with the death of Elena Rubik, in a moment of bracing everydayness. As people start to mourn, we fade out – and arrive in Chapter Two with Pikkoro and her multipurpose octopus, Tako. Shifting from suburban Perth to an octopus who knits while its charge goes to primary school is the kind of tonal shift that Rubik continues to deliver over the course of its story-in-stories, yet it very deftly maintains its central axis of loss, grief and connectedness. As each part of the puzzle unfolds and each viewpoint is given space, the world of Rubik continues to open out, with a sharp-eyed focus on technology and consciousness, interconnectedness and the rewards and vulnerabilities of shared experience.

  The stories connect artfully in (often very sly) passing references to each other, as well as picking up narratives and characters who are frequently revisited. We return often to Jules, Elena’s close friend who carries a central thread of the story, as well as a recurring cast of well-realised protagonists who occasionally seem to start as an idea, a signifier – but then almost always gain a sense of solidity, of fully realised interaction.

  Rubik is an unusual read, one that requires a willingness to go with it, to see how these disparate parts will come together.

  Marie Matteson is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.

• Kill Your Darlings
  https://killyourdarlings.com.au/2017/05/seeing-the-whole-machine-elizabeth-tans-rubik/?doing_wp_cron=1529986038.5801908969879150390625
  Word count: 1323

  Seeing the Whole Machine: Elizabeth Tan’s Rubik

  BY SONIA NAIR
  11TH MAY, 2017

  Image: Samuel Rönnqvist, Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
  Image: Samuel Rönnqvist, Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

  In Elizabeth Tan’s debut novel Rubik (Brio Books), the untimely but seemingly ordinary death of 25-year-old Perth student Elena Rubik sets off a chain reaction, with every character thereafter inextricably linked in one way or another to Elena’s demise. Some characters disappear and then reappear in unfathomable ways, while some don’t return at all, at least not in the form that they first appeared in.

  Recalling the narrative structure that earned Jennifer Egan rave reviews for her kaleidoscopic A Visit from the Goon Squad, Rubik is an unusual novel relayed in a series of disparate yet intertwined short stories. The result is a dense collage; each chapter demands concentration and introspection. Time is a fluid construct in Tan’s genre-bending, sprawling palimpsest, with different mediums and modes of storytelling coalescing to form a searing treatise on connectivity, social isolation and remembrance.

  Time is a fluid construct in Tan’s genre-bending, sprawling palimpsest.

  Some chapters are unanchored narratives that function as social commentary pieces in their own right, while others chart characters in a loose chronological pattern. Together, they form an astounding achievement in exposition, with sharp moments of clarity and insight punctuating the humdrum existences of Tan’s meticulously crafted characters.

  In this way, major characters that propel the narrative forward begin to emerge: Elena’s best friend, Jules Valentine, a straight-talking IKEA sales assistant, becomes ensnared in a sinister indie-film-turned-corporate-branding-stunt that spawns the viral ‘falling girl’ meme; a music teacher named Kish Amar is haunted by a seven-number sequence; Peter Pushkin is a lonely schoolboy who sets out to unveil the mystery when Kish goes missing; April Kuan is an overzealous investigative reporter and photographer with a secret.

  Through her characters, Tan cleverly subverts dominant whitewashed narratives where people of colour either do not exist, or exist only in relation to their race – in Rubik, characters of diverse backgrounds exist effortlessly and without comment. Chief editor of student newspaper Lorem Ipsum, who goes by the name ‘Arch’, is offhandedly revealed to be Archna Desai; Ursula Rodriguez is an artist slash catalogue model whose ‘non-threatening brownness’ has been co-opted by capitalism’s commitment to diversity and multiculturalism in the form of beauty that is ‘safely transgressive’.

  Tan is drawn to exploring nebulous and intangible concepts in her writing, in part due to the fragmented way she experiences and remembers reality. Indeed, the infallibility of memory plays a pivotal role in comprehending Rubik’s plot – reading it sporadically and failing to fully inhabit its world of discursive plotlines and minute details exposes you to the risk of missing the faintly discernible spiderweb that binds all the narratives.

  Rubik gradually reveals itself to be as much a critique of neoliberal capitalism and the movements that have sprung up in its wake as it is a rumination on technology and the ways it forces us to re-navigate our personal identity and our conception of the world we inhabit.

  The hyper-connected world in which Tan’s characters reside allows for each and every moment of their lives to be immediately captured, expertly reconfigured and forever memorialised in the annals of cyber history. Many of them know no other way.

  Her laptop is static except for a blinking cursor, but Arch can sense all the activity twitching in the other windows and tabs – her News Feed updating ceaselessly, the banner ads flashing in Outlook, the artist and album title scrolling in her dormant iTunes like a blimp flying over an empty landscape.

  Yet time occupies the characters in Rubik in ways that resist this easy categorisation; for them, time is a more slippery notion that can’t be recast or recreated.

  Kish observes that the scales her student so dutifully performs on the piano ‘will nonetheless resist replication’ because nothing will exist so perfectly ever again. When Jules is accosted by a Corona-drinking girl that she stands in for on a film set, she reflects how the ‘present moment is the future’s past’, and wonders how the culmination of experience, perception and desire will reframe her eventual account of the incident.

  Tan steers clear of proselytising on the wanton effects of technology – Rubik is far too astute and nuanced to evoke the tired sentiments that underpin cafe blackboards that say No Wi-Fi, Talk to Each Other – but she adroitly explores the role it plays in the manipulation and monetisation of human desires and emotions.

  In a particularly stunning passage, Corona Girl pierces Jules’s apathy with a tirade on capitalism and counterculture:

  Now they’re taking the identity you specifically cultivated to resist all that fakery and they’ve turned it into a package. Turned the rejection of packages into a package. They’re prescribing the terms of your rebellion. They’re trying to fix it down, and so they’re invalidating the sincerity of your own identity, your own actions.

  The spectral forces of both capitalism and technology, and the conflation of the two, are expressed through recurring motifs in the novel. Hipster gift store Ampersand, famous for its ‘unisex clothes and miscellaneous quirky shit’, peddles diversity and gender neutrality while appropriating feminist notions of empowerment and prioritising the masculine.

  The matching outfits adorning the Ampersand models would always be unisex, as is Ampersand’s brand mission – to design and manufacture clothes that can be worn by both men and women – but these outfits would never include a dress.

  The spectral forces of both capitalism and technology, and the conflation of the two, are expressed through recurring motifs in the novel.

  A technology company by the name of Seed assumes an insidious, sentient quality in whichever narrative it appears. Most significantly, it is the corporation behind the viral marketing campaign that Jules stars in, fragments of which are scattered around the city in QR codes – forcing people to not only consume a commodity, but play a fundamental role in its creation and dissemination. Seed sears itself onto people’s consciousness through the viral ‘falling girl’ meme, in a way that makes it hard to imagine there was ever a time before Seed.

  Who is Seed, really? What is Seed? Is it possible for a corporation to possess consciousness? To possess a will? To want?

  Tan’s parody of the bizarreness of our hyper-connected world reaches its zenith when she reveals Ampersand sells a falling cat meme of the falling girl meme on a T-shirt.

  The surreal plot is anchored by its very ordinary location – Perth. By making it the centre of her meta-absurdist tale, Tan accords the humble state capital a level of prestige it isn’t usually afforded in Australian fiction.

  The experimental and distinctively unmoored narrative structure of Rubik demands a level of trust from the novel’s readers, with characters and plot lines interlinking in strange and wonderful ways that do not become wholly apparent until the very end. In Ursula’s own words: ‘You can’t trace anyone’s motives because you can’t see the whole machine.’ Rearranging the Rubik’s Cube of lives and stories, Tan reveals a fully-formed picture of the entire neoliberal capitalist machine with wit, flair and gumption.

  Rubik is available now at Readings.

  End

  Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. She has written for The Lifted Brow, The Big Issue, the Australian Book Review, The Wheeler Centre and others. She tweets @son_nair and blogs at whateverfloatsyourbloat.com.

  More from Sonia Nair

• Post Magazine
  http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/2092750/elizabeth-tans-debut-novel-full-loops-echoes-patterns
  Word count: 235

  BOOKS
  REVIEWS

  James Kidd

  Elizabeth Tan’s debut novel is full of loops, echoes, patterns and surprises
  Rubik is a series of surreal short stories that deal with the aftermath of a car accident – a series set in motion, like the cube of the title, by play.

  7 MAY 2017

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  Rubik
  by Elizabeth Tan (read by Eloise Mignon)
  Audible

  “Elena’s bladeless fan pivots in mono­chrome silence, the centrepiece of a room that’s untidy in an engineered way. Like movie teenage bedrooms.” The opening of Elizabeth Tan’s impressive debut novel could describe Rubik itself as it traces the considered chaos that comes after 25-year-old Elena is run over by a car. Tan suggests this isn’t a tragedy so much as a fact of geo­metry: “making a right turn as simply as a child rotates a toy 90 degrees”. This allusion to the Rubik’s cube is the first of many. A series of interconnected short stories, Rubik itself works like a literary Rubik’s cube. There are loops, echoes, patterns and surprises. Eloise Mignon’s voice strikes a lovely balance between lightness and gravity that matches Tan’s calm surrealism. An oddity, but an ambitious, enjoyable and moving one.

• The Lifted Brow
  https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/built-around-the-bones-a-review-of-elizabeth
  Word count: 1410

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  ‘BUILT AROUND THE BONES: A REVIEW OF ELIZABETH TAN’S RUBIK’, BY CHLOE PAPAS
  April 21, 2017
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  Rubik is about death, and the internet, and big corporations taking over the world, and fan-fiction, and loneliness; but despite all that I can’t stop thinking about the fact that it is set in Perth. It sticks out to me in a way that it only could to others who grew up there: a jolt to the guts, a reminder that it’s still there, breathing and living – someone else cares about it too.

  This book isn’t really about Perth, but it is built around the city in a way like no other novel I’ve read. The author treats it like any other city: a home, a place with intricacies and streets and people and billboards and coffee shops – an honour often reserved for more important destinations. The author mocks the slogan of my old university (“It’s the brightest minds that will make tomorrow better”), aptly describes the shitty shopping centre and KFC nearby, drives along major roads that I can map in my mind, from one side of the river to the other.

  It’s a city that pushes you away, but once you leave it keeps pulling you back in.
  Perth isn’t a city that novelists write about. It is small and uninteresting to the eye of newcomers and disenchanted locals. Precariously built around the mining boom and fallen football heroes, an insular suburban sprawl and an identity that can’t quite be pinned down. It’s a city that pushes you away, but once you leave it keeps pulling you back in. It has bones, just like anywhere else, and this astonishing novel—the first from imprint Brio Books, and the first for its writer, Elizabeth Tan—is built around those bones.

  I never usually think about the title of a book until after I’ve finished it, but Rubik made me think about it all the time. Titles have never been too important to me as a reader: a few words pulled from a line in the novel, a self-explanatory phrase. But the title Rubik fits so perfectly (primary colours, stacked in rows) with its contents that it becomes a standalone element; a word that pops up like a flashcard as you begin to discover the novel’s unbelievable architecture.

  I’m quite shit at Rubik’s Cubes, and I’m also not great at reading slowly. These two things are related because Rubik is a book that you need to take your time on – to focus on each word, to make little mental notes as you wander through – so that as you reach the latter half of the novel, you are gasping in recognition rather than staring blankly, frustrated. It is a book that deserves your full attention, that offers up its pages as a puzzle for you to solve – but that will ultimately be solved for you, if you let it.

  Elizabeth Tan lays out the stories in Rubik in a way that appears completely unrelated, or perhaps only tentatively linked: a familiar name here, a familiar location there. Switching between tabs in a browser, losing a trail in Wikipedia. It’s difficult to ascertain what is reality and what isn’t – and whether there is a reality at all. It’s meta and messy in an intricately structured way, a minefield of fragments that you can get lost in if you aren’t paying attention. There is method to the madness, you just have to look for it.

  You can’t skim, or lose track of names, or charge full steam ahead – the experience has to be slow and almost methodical.
  I didn’t begin to realise that the stories in Rubik were linked until, perhaps, a little too far into the book. There are tiny clues; names or settings or concepts that drop into your lap and sit there, tauntingly. You can’t skim, or lose track of names, or charge full steam ahead – the experience has to be slow and almost methodical. And then, as you read the final few stories – or maybe ‘chapters’ would be the more accurate label – the threads are all tied together: not in a neat little bow, but big long spools of twine that zig-zag and meet together at the top.

  I want to tell you about each of the stories in Rubik, to marvel at the construct of each scene, to revel in the interconnectedness of select characters, but I won’t. I will tell you that it is nothing short of an adventure: a choose-your-own where you don’t get to choose, but you do get to ride along with an octopus, a man with a very soothing voice, a woman and a pie, a boy and his piano teacher, a meme, a spambot. I will tell you that there is social commentary on the pages, stories built subtly and not-so-subtly around the creeping takeover of corporations and brands.

  I will tell you that this book is a little bit Margaret Atwood, however cliché that comparison is for a novel that is set in a world so starkly real yet bordering on dystopia, or at the very least, melancholy (after all, there is a chapter called ‘Our Future is Apathy’.) The world of Rubik isn’t going to end, but things and people come to a complete stop, others are in the middle of their dramatic arc, some are stuck and waiting to be yanked out. Tan has gleefully straddled the line between real and surreal.

  I want to tell you that Tan has drawn that melancholy, the surreal nature of some of the storylines and the stark reality of others, from her idea of Perth. But perhaps, that is just selfishness – because probably, likely, it is simply my idea of it. A city built on consumerism and privatisation and a maybe-almost-over mining boom with a clear divide between rich and poor, where artists and Facebook meme page–owners scramble through any crack of light at the surface that they can find.

  Tan’s ability to construct people that aren’t of a similar age or life experience is a true accomplishment.
  The characters of Rubik are a marvel; not just because of the storylines that they inhabit, but because they are each wildly different, a new person or two to meet each chapter. Tan’s ability to construct people that aren’t of a similar age or life experience is a true accomplishment. She pays minute attention to the details of each person’s life; never simply thrusting them into action before they are fully formed humans for the reader to become acquainted with. Kish clips her fingernails and thinks about buying pencils. Peter’s cordial has leaked through his schoolbag. April is very, very excitable.

  You will become entrenched in some of the characters’ stories and flit through others, and you will realise that the book probably isn’t what you thought it would be at all. Sometimes, you will think: this is batshit crazy, in the best way. Other times, reading Rubik will feel like a big night in on the internet, if the internet was infinitely better than it already is. It will remind you that stories don’t need to follow a clear narrative, and it will feel a bit like someone has gently blown the dust off your brain as you work through the puzzle: you are not being handed a simple package.

  It is a mish-mash of coloured cubes, held together by tiny mechanisms, daring you to put the pieces back together.
  Rubik is exhilarating; cutting through a novel landscape that is dotted with clear narratives and messages to present a work that forces you to think carefully about each and every word. It is a mish-mash of coloured cubes, held together by tiny mechanisms, daring you to put the pieces back together. It is built around Perth, but it could exist anywhere.

  Chloe Papas is a writer and journalist based in Victoria, via Perth. Her work has appeared in many different national and international publications.

• Austrailian Book Review
  https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/4400-cassandra-atherton-reviews-rubik-by-elizabeth-tan
  Word count: 322

  Cassandra Atherton reviews 'Rubik' by Elizabeth Tan
  font sizedecrease font sizeincrease font size Print EmailCommentCASSANDRA ATHERTONPublished in November 2017, no. 396
  Cassandra Atherton reviews 'Rubik' by Elizabeth Tan
  RUBIK

  by Elizabeth Tan

  Brio, $29.99 pb, 328 pp, 9781925143478

  Cassandra Atherton
  Cassandra Atherton
  Cassandra Atherton is a poet and scholar. She is a Harvard Visiting Fellow in English in 2015-2016.

  By this contributor
  Cassandra Atherton reviews 'Portable Curiosities' by Julie Koh
  Cassandra Atherton reviews 'Freeman's' edited by John Freeman
  Cassandra Atherton reviews 'Feet to the Stars' by Susan Midalia
  Cassandra Atherton reviews 'The Hazards' by Sarah Holland-Batt, 'Conversations I've Never Had' by Caitlin Maling, 'Here Be Dragons' by Dennis Greene, and 'The Guardians' by Lucy Dougan
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  Invoking the Rubik’s Cube – a puzzle where twenty-six ‘cubelets’ rotate around a core crosspiece – Rubik is less a novel and more a book of interconnected short stories exploring narcissism, neoliberalism, and consumerism. At the book’s core is Elena Rubik, who dies in the first chapter with a Homestyle Country Pie in her hand. Despite her demise, Elena remains the protagonist of the novel via her robust digital footprint: people write ‘condolence messages on her profile ... express[ing] their grief in 420 characters or less’, weekly newsletters amass in her inbox, she endures as a contact in her friend’s mobile phone directory, and her comments remain on internet forums. Elizabeth Tan responds to the cube’s solution of returning all sides to a uniformity of colour by emphasising the isolation, despair, and quotidian nihilism at the heart of contemporary society’s obsession with competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.

• Newton Review of Books
  http://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/2017/06/15/elizabeth-tan-rubik-reviewed-justine-hyde/
  Word count: 116

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• The Saturday Paper
  https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2017/04/30/rubik/14909652004418
  Word count: 459

  Elizabeth Tan
  Rubik

  The term “experimental fiction” can be used to cover a multitude of sins: an almost petulant obsession with abstraction and a disdainful disregard for the experience of the reader, among them. When it works, though, we have novels in the tradition of Kafka, Woolf and Foster Wallace. The very best experimental writers have an inspired and weird way of seeing the world that makes much realist fiction seem moribund. Elizabeth Tan’s debut novel-in-stories, Rubik, is in the latter category: it’s wonderful, brilliant and mind-bending, and a worthy heir to the experimental tradition.

  Rubik begins with the death of 25-year-old Perth woman Elena Rubik, run down by a Ford Falcon in the driveway of a service station while buying herself a chicken pie for dinner, after pocketing her change. (These details matter.) Rubik is her name because that’s what the book is: a Rubik’s cube of interconnecting and shifting possibilities of what happens next, in various realities and times. Parallel dimensions are tricky to relate in fiction. They are more common in film, and Rubik references The Matrix – with some pivotal red/blue choices, and a wandering cat – Inception and Jumanji. None of these allusions are forced, though, because Rubik is all about the way humans interact with technology and what we have gained and, mostly, lost. As part of this interaction, we are perpetually addressed as consumers, and here we see Tan at her most cutting and clever. “Luxury Replicants” is set mostly in Ampersand, a “hipster gift store that sells unisex clothes and miscellaneous quirky shit”, such as “Executive Decision Guillotine earrings”. Customers ask “if the Pantone socks come in any other shades of blue”.

  That’s the secret to Rubik’s success: Tan’s details and social commentary are terrific by themselves, and plenty to keep the reader engaged while the bigger picture slowly resolves like a Magic Eye image. The strongest story, “Coca-Cola birds sing sweetest in the morning”, is about a woman, Audrey Kwai (this detail matters), who is a repairer of mechanical birds and insects, sponsored by various corporations to replace the extinct living varieties. Conceptually a nod to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? antecedent, it’s terrific and would easily stand alone as a piece of short fiction.

  Rubik is the kind of book that demands a second read, or a third. And maybe paper and a pen for notes. Or several pens, of different colours. Regardless, it’s worth the effort. LS

  Brio, 336pp, $29.99

  This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Apr 1, 2017 as "Elizabeth Tan, Rubik". Subscribe here.

• Aplice
  https://thisissplice.co.uk/2018/04/23/slightly-rearranged-but-always-the-same-elizabeth-tans-rubik/
  Word count: 2141

  REVIEWS
  Slightly Rearranged, But Always the Same: Elizabeth Tan’s Rubik
  Splice April 23, 2018 0 Comments
  by Anna MacDonald

  Elizabeth Tan, Rubik
  Elizabeth Tan, Rubik.
  Brio Books. AUD $29.99.
  Buy direct from the publisher.

  “I have made up a totem,” Pikkoro confides to her octopus friend and protector, Tako, in one of the fan fictional threads of Elizabeth Tan’s novel-in-stories. “[I]t’s a Rubik’s cube with seven colours. … Seven colours for six faces. An unsolvable Rubik’s cube. Kind of like you, Tako. … You have more moving parts than an octopus should have. You are endlessly formful and formless. You have everything necessary to begin.”

  Like its namesake and Pikkoro’s totem, Rubik is a puzzle that is endlessly formful and formless. This imaginative novel slips between genres, borrowing from the conventions of fan fiction, speculative fiction, and surrealism. Indebted as much to film, social media, online fora and advertising as it is to literature, Rubik is perpetually shifting shape. Like the changelings, parasites and instances of metamorphoses which fascinate Tan, each story — each part of the irresolvable whole — folds into another, is looped into an apparently endless cycle of recursive events, and becomes one element of an expanding network in which these recursions form alluring, connective nodes that could be clues, but instead deepen the mystery of its unsolvable puzzle.

  Elizabeth Tan, Rubik
  Elizabeth Tan, Rubik.
  Wundor Editions. £10.
  Buy direct from the publisher.

  Rubik belongs to a posthuman universe in which systems and machines are curiously sentient, and human beings take on the characteristics of the technologies that have come to define their interface with the world. The labyrinthine IKEA floorplan wants customers to move in a particular way. A contact lens “wants to be in your eye”. For reasons unknown, mechanical birds (devised and “networked” to resolve a “disaster of first nature” not unlike the recent collapse of France’s avian populations) are compelled to migrate. A robot at the Royal Australian Mint is “seized by the eternal problem of subjectivity” and becomes shy before a crowd of tourists. A woman “finds that her brain… slips into something like one of those Windows 95 screensavers”. A man is “some low-res trial version of a film student”. To relax one’s attention is to be in “power-saving mode”. To become unconscious is to “enter off-mode”. “Light fades like a touchscreen drifting into standby.” The pervasive images of corporate branding become “implanted memories”. ‘Real life’ is “an untrustworthy universe”. But in the circuitry of fan fictions that enfold one and another and another — in an expanding network of infinite becoming where every unsatisfactory ending can be “repurposed” — you will find “everything necessary to begin” again.

  Elizabeth Tan, Rubik
  Elizabeth Tan, Rubik.
  Unnamed Press. USD $16.99.
  Buy direct from the publisher.

  A novel-in-interconnected-stories, Rubik is composed of serial beginnings. But none of these, not even the first — Elena Rubik waking in “[c]inematic untidiness” to “looped music” and “a DVD menu screen” — represents a fresh start. There is no ur-event in Tan’s novel. Elena is one part of an expanding network that is woven as much from her Facebook profile and “the Luxury Replicants fan fiction forum” as it is from the memories of her friends and associates. Long after her death, that network continues to spin-off other narrative beginnings, which loop back to Elena, to the “heartthrobs” pasted to her bedroom walls, to the Homestyle Country Pie she eats before she dies, to the 1991 Ford EA Falcon that kills her, to the corneas that are transplanted from her eyes into another’s, to her friend Jules Valentine, and to the Luxury Replicants forum. In summary, then, and in the words of Ursula Rodriquez, one of the novel’s recurring characters: Rubik is narrated from multiple perspectives via “relentless, infinite loops.”

  Repeatedly, these loops allude (self-reflexively) to a novel-within-the-novel, Seeds of Time. With a nod to John Wyndham’s 1956 short story collection of the same name and, surely, to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), “each chapter [of Seeds of Time] seems to take vast leaps forward in time; characters disappear and return in strange ways, or they do not return at all”. A schoolboy, Peter Pushkin, is one of the characters who strangely returns throughout Rubik. Reading Seeds of Time, he discovers that

  [a] seed contains (in perpetuity) all the information necessary to begin. It is an heirloom (a continuation of our conversation) (a speech act) (stories passed on).

  Every beginning, then, is already historical. (This despite the fact that in Rubik’s universe, “past, future, and present… [are just parts of a] comforting strategy for beholding existence. They aren’t real things.”) Every new story is a continuation of another. (Even if “[c]ontinuity’s a cheap trick. Everything can be repurposed.”) A seed is the promise of a beginning. But a beginning — already an heirloom, the continuation of an inherited narrative — is nothing new. Everything is, rather, “slightly rearranged, but always the same”.

  Rubik grows from the seeds of stories that have been passed on. The intertextual references run thick and fast: to The Simpsons, Lost (2004-2010), Groundhog Day (1993), The Matrix (1999), Inception (2010), Blade Runner (1982), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Jumanji (1995); to Don Delillo, George Orwell, Haruki Murakami, and David Lynch; to American Psycho (1991), Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Jack and the Beanstalk. Taking its cue from fan fiction and celebrating repurposing in all its forms — from machine parts and human organs (which, in this universe, amount to much the same thing), to characters, events, “glitches in the matrix” and so on — it should come as no surprise that this novel proclaims the (by now somewhat tired) notion that nothing is new.

  Archna Desai, or Arch, is another of Tan’s recurring characters. Editor of a student-run university magazine, she interviews Jules Valentine whose image, embodied in “the falling girl”, was used in a viral advertising campaign by a telecommunications giant called Seed. For Arch, Seed (and the tech it touts) exemplifies the illusion of the new. According to her,

  Seed missed the memo that there’s no such thing as newness anymore, no such thing as authenticity, as pureness, though bless-our-hearts we do try. Whole industries dedicated to the elusive business of making new, of defining again and again the real personality of a corporate entity — rebranding, rebadging, updating, upscaling.

  All of which are just so many ways of repurposing a narrative or one of its component parts.

  Arch’s pomo cynicism is partly tongue-in-cheek. The magazine she edits is called Lorem Ipsum, “after the nonsense faux-Latin placeholder text that designers often use to demonstrate the layout of a document”. Appropriately, the production of Lorem Ipsum often “occurs in reverse — designers create a layout and the writers match it with content”. Arch herself uses placeholder text “to clear up the thoughts in her head: If you do it just right, your eyes can skim over the whole of you and appreciate your form, your typeface, your kerning, without the distraction of having to read into things.” Or, in fact, to read anything at all. Thus, Tan playfully critiques the vacuity of certain forms of representation that privilege form over content.

  But, like every other aspect of Tan’s novel, Arch’s cynicism returns relentlessly throughout Rubik. The falling girl has become one of those “implanted memories” of the techno-savvy world. As such, she has come to

  stand for a generation, its privileges and anxieties, the tension between intent and accident, a persistent narrative that delegates control to something external and omniscient — gravity, mathematics — her image, a perfect mimesis of the forces that will make her iconic, an exercise in recursion — across her endless cultural iterations she will evade identification — for some she may even escape context, the pastiche encountered before the original…

  For Arch, in a rare moment of sincerity, the image of the falling girl is “absolutely meaningless in a way that’s actually quite frightening”. Taken from what began as a student film but became a “collaboration” with Seed — that distributor of telephones, tablets, notebooks and cameras, that creator of data from which narratives can be repurposed — with each take Jules Valentine falls again and again, her body “slightly rearranged, but always the same”. And it is as a result of her recursive, looping fall that her mind assumes the quality of a screensaver. The networked nodes that link technological recursion with the loss of critical (or any other kind of) thought are difficult to ignore. But, then, what’s new? For at least a decade, scholars have been arguing over whether the internet signals the death knell of imagination and critical thought, a proposition that recurs comically in Rubik as the Blue Screen of Death. Even the loss of human imagination and the emptying of our critical faculties are described in technical terms, as a fatal system error.

  For all its imaginative verve and virtuosic composition, I am wary of Rubik. And at the heart of my discomfort is the novel’s retreat into the virtual as a means of making sense of the “untrustworthy universe” of real life (so called, and assuming that the real and the virtual can be separated thus in our own untrustworthy universe). Mine is not a variety of unease that leads towards action, but one that flails at the “surfaces upon surfaces upon surfaces” from which the novel is composed. Rather, it leads me to wonder: under what circumstances does a work of art that satirises a social system, come instead to do the work of the system it seeks to critique?

  Since its publication in Australia in 2017, Rubik has been widely celebrated as a critique of contemporary narcissism, neoliberalism, and consumerism. Tan satirises consumer culture in a searing depiction of the chainstore, Ampersand, which specialises in unisex apparel — the Yodelicious flannel shirt ($34.95), the Darling Assassin shorts ($23.95) — and infinitely disposable objects such as the Message-in-a-Bottle Kit, the Crumple Cup (set of four), and the Oh, Buoy! Tea infuser. The stories in this novel are populated with the “safely unconventional”: Avril Lavigne is described as having “turned the rejection of packages into a package”; Ursula Rodriguez is an Ampersand ambassador whose “non-threatening brownness” is found to be “different enough to register as Other without being alienating”. At parties, people spend the evening “cycling through random Wikipedia articles” on their Seed.fons. In spam emails, customers are made empty promises: “A convenient life is arrived for you. … All the electronics, all your needs.” All of which, including the relentless way in which such promises loop, is familiar to a contemporary reader. And yet, there is a kind of recursive return to the narcissism supposedly under examination in these insular references. Tan’s social satire ultimately reads — to borrow a term from the novel itself — as “safely transgressive”. It allows us to laugh at ourselves, to nod in enthusiastic recognition of the IKEA floorplan, iPhone advertisements, and the fashion industry’s brand ambassadors while sipping tea from a Crumple Cup prepared with an Oh Buoy! infuser.

  Perhaps this is the point. But because the politics of Rubik never exceeds the network of its self-reflexive references, it feels more like a dead-end than an opportunity to begin again. This is most evident in the figure of “Corona girl”, whom Jules Valentine encounters after filming what will become the falling girl footage. Corona girl was formerly involved in making the film but, wise to Seed’s “collaboration” and the “packaging” of her own and Jules’s images, she is now convinced that it is “the spawn of fucking Satan”. When Jules dismisses her protest — “You sound like a first-year who’s discovering capitalism for the first time. Everyone is a package. Everyone knows that everyone is a package. … What you’re saying is old news” — Corona girl counters with an argument that is, to borrow from Arch, “actually quite frightening”: “But this isn’t a Fuck the Man thing! This is personal!” I’d like to believe that this statement of intent — that one must act only in the face of a personal affront — is part of Tan’s critique of contemporary narcissism and alienation. But the surfaces of this novel shift and reflect in such a way that only recursive events — those connective nodes of its narrative network — resolve with any clarity. And each of these recursive events insists that “truth is no solid thing”, that every perspective is “slightly rearranged, but always the same” and, thus, that “you have everything necessary to begin”. Again.