A short review of “Log Off” by Kristen Felicetti

Dial-up and Jesus Fish necklaces

While the streets and screens of 2024 are covered in unearthed Y2K fashion trends, it seems like we haven’t had many new artistic portals into the tender, blogging underbelly of that era, especially in print. Kristen Felicitti’s debut novel Log Off, narrated through a series of LiveJournal posts, felt like that portal.

 

Starting a blog is one of modern life’s great encounters with the void. With the possible exception of this very platform, where right now my feed is full of inaugural posts, readers are rarely there for the launch. Log Off puts us in that seat from the outset.

Hello, people of the Internet. Let it be known the today, 9/5/Y2K, my legal guardian Brian finally joined the modern world and connected our computer to the great World Wide Web. I told him I needed the Internet for school, which was true, but my primary motivator was getting a LiveJournal. No way I could start one at the library. Whenever I logged on, there was always some old lady librarian hovering around, waiting for the inevitable moment I surfed my way to a big ol’ porn site or downloaded some malicious virus that would crash the entire public computer system.

We’re now on the stoop of teenager Ellora Gao’s daily processing tool. We’re a subscriber. An interloper in her community, which is, as she tells us, mostly Fiona Apple fans from a mailing list. We watch the trials of her junior year of high school, a year which begins with the 2000 presidential election and ends with 9/11, play out in real time. 

We want to look up every song she shares as her Current Music. We’re curious or concerned when she doesn’t post one at the end of each entry. We want to tell her Hey! we too, live in a place where the regional grocery store chain also serves as the nexus of our larger social world. We shake our heads at the shortcomings of adults, but we also get it. 

Log Off’s minor characters are dimensional and their lives are changing as much as Ellora’s. There are no parents drawn in Peanut-speak floating on the edge of scenes. The novel begins in the long wake of Ellora’s mother abandoning her. She now lives with her new legal guardian Brian, an alcoholic who is deep in a couch funk, equally (but separately) crushed by his partner’s departure. 

In one crucial scene, Ellora arrives home in a car full of friends to see someone she knows to be Brian passed out on the front steps: She brushes it off, pretends it’s another friendly neighborhood vagrant, and slips inside to wait until her friends leave to deal with her incapacitated caretaker. Her savviness is a product of maturity beyond her age, perhaps, but the scene is an also representation of the unfair pressures Ellora is tasked with bearing in her otherwise suburban student routine. 

Ellora encounters pressures of a different, arguably more alienating kind at a food service job that puts her face-to-face with the other-ing members of her town, who feel that it’s normal to try and get to the bottom of someone’s racial makeup while waiting in line to order food. “No, but where are you really from?” This arena is where Ellora’s character is forced to juggle her constrictions all at once. The tall demands set upon a high-functioning student who works after school creep in at inopportune moments:

Angie took orders at the register next to mine and I could see her look over every time I asked customers to repeat themselves.

“The combo meal,” a man said, his wife and their kids in tow. Even his children were staring at me like I was an idiot.

I needed to get more sleep. It was possibly my fault that I was sleep-deprived, because I often stayed up too late on the Internet, but wasn’t it also the world’s fault? School began at 7:30 a.m., which was an unnatural start time for my body, and then I had a long strenuous day of AP classes, and then sometimes play rehearsal, and then sometimes this job, and everything involved talking to people, which was so draining. I imagined lying down in a large open field for hours, with no sensory stimulation except the occasional cool breeze.

“We want the combo meal,”the man shouted. “It’s not $9.99, it’s $8.99. I was just in here last week.”

“That’s what it’s saying,” I said weakly.

“Are you trying to tell me the price changed in a week?”

I wanted to scream or say, “Fuck you.” I was able to stop myself, but not without making a weird agonized “AhHhHHhh” noise of frustration. The man stared at me like I was a freak.

At times, I wanted the book to be messier somehow, the language more blurred by angst or rage, but I also believed that I was reading the life of a teenager who is scared of losing control. The above scene is one of very few moments when Ellora’s outward presentation seems to fray. A novel in the voice of a teenager constantly on the verge would probably be unreadable, anyway.

In general Log Off achieves what I’ve always thought important to do, which is to un-trivialize teenage-hood. It respects the very teenage need to feel unrestricted by your age, to form an identity in the larger culture, outside of school and outside of your town limits, even if your circumstances might make that place feel unreachable. It’s a reminder of the more positive, truly connective possibilities of the Internet, which were less exploited in the year 2000, when algorithmic news feeds weren’t the home page.

There’s more coinage to be found here than just recognizing life online at the turn-of-the-millennium, though. I think this novel is an antidote to the minced attention that our current version of the Internet can create. Instead of relying on brevity, braiding, internet shorthand, or any number of literary poses to catch our attention, Felicetti trusts that the dailyness of the LiveJournal form is what will keep us present and reading. And she’s right.