Constant Reader Book of the Month March 2024: Meme by Aaron Starmer

 

If you have read my columns – not just book reviews but also film and television – you know that I am not the kind of person who tries to find a deeper meaning into anything he reads or watches. If there is a deeper meaning beneath the story I am taking in, fine; but I care far more about being entertained by the surface level. For me, a cigar is just a cigar.

However after devouring Meme in the course of less than a week, it became clear to me very quickly there is a deeper subtext beneath the surface. Some of is clear to the reader while it’s going on, but the more you read it you realize that author Aaron Starmer may be writing one of the darkest and most biting political satires that you will read anywhere. And considering that this is an election year, it makes a lot more sense to read the novel then just because it’s a brilliant thriller.

Now don’t get me wrong: you can read Meme, pretend there are no real world connotations and still get a lot of pleasure from it. The novel certainly grabs you with its very first sentence:

“We buried Cole Weston last night, on the hundred acres behind Meeka’s house.”

The ‘we’ in this case are four high school seniors: Grayson, Holly, Logan and Meeka. Cole was once all of their friends but he was Meeka’s boyfriend. In the first chapter we learn just how horrible their relationship was. Cole and Meeka had been together for years and their relationship turned toxic.

Cole never knew his father and his mother was a drug addict who died of an overdose. Cole had no one left in the world and dropped out of school to take care of himself. Meeka was friends with Cole’s mother and she’s been taking care of Cole, which is how they’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship. They were planning to get together but things started to get abusive. There was the possibility of a pregnancy and then Meeka miscarried. Eventually he became so problematic to Meeka that the four of them agreed to get rid of him.

The way they agreed to it was that they stripped naked in front of each other and took an oath that they were going to do this that they recorded. They arranged things so it would look like Cole OD’d on drugs, then buried him on Meeka’s property. Then they recorded their confessions as an oath and swore that they would never tell a soul.

The novel unfolds from the alternating perspectives of Grayson, Holly and Logan in the aftermath of Cole’s death. But we quickly realize that at best the three of them are unreliable narrators and the reasons they claimed to have done it – that they were trying to protect their friend – begin to burn up within a few pages. After it happens they start reaction. Holly and Logan feel guilty – not about taking Cole’s life, they never feel anything close to remorse for that – but their certainty that this will get them caught and they will go to prison. Grayson, who may have initiated the idea (we never know for sure) is by far the most angry. He wanted to personally shoot or beat Cole to death, and even while Cole was overdosing, he bragged that they were the ones who did this to him. Grayson is never sympathetic in the novel, and he actually becomes more contemptuous with each chapter.

About a week after Cole’s death (everyone just thinks he’s missing at the time) all four of them receive a meme which has a picture of the four of them naked from their confession. Within hours everyone in the school has seen it but no one understands the context. They are trying to figure out how things have gone wrong and then they try to figure out where it came from. They eventually decide to search Cole’s trailer and they find out that they shared the video on Cole’s server. They find it but they can’t decide whether to keep it because they are terrified the cops will come and there will be evidence of them stealing.

All of them start to spiral. Grayson becomes certain that Gus, Cole’s only real friend, is responsible for this because he chose to blackmail them. Holly becomes certain that Cole is actually still alive and is using this to blackmail them. Logan who was clearly already stressing before this, begins to start trying to learn the history of memes and starts going down on an internet rabbit hole. Eventually he comes to believe that the ghost of Cole is stalking them from beyond the grave.

All of this is disturbing as well as, oddly enough, darkly funny. It’s clear the longer things go on that none of these smart kids are clueless when it comes to cleaning up after themselves and have no understanding of how the internet works. They all have to be told what a cloud is, they have no idea what memes are and when they try to clean up after themselves, their ridiculous paranoia contributes to their own problems. One of the sicker jokes in Meme comes after a long and progressive period of stalking someone she thinks is responsible for everything that happens, Holly realizes that she has been fooled because she didn’t have the slightest idea that two sites could have the same web domain.

What makes me believe in the satirical political message created by Starmer is when the novel takes place. To be clear Starmer makes it more than obvious we are aware of the dates: Cole dies on October 29^th, two days later they get together in a Halloween party and much of the action takes place a week afterwards. But most of the major madness of the novel takes place on November 8^th 2016. In other words, the day of Donald Trump’s election and, according to a certain level of media, the day the world stopped making sense.

One of the funniest jokes of Meme is that every major teenager in the novel is living through what so many in the media called the most significant election in history – and none of them even acknowledge its going on. At one point Logan, who is the most connected to politics, turns on NPR and then turns it off because he doesn’t like hearing about politics. At one point three of the characters meet in a restaurant and don’t understand why its so crowded and what everybody could be talking about. Logan is actually told the day’s date at one point and he can’t for the life of him understand why that date is so important.

And once you know that there are so many references that you can see the subtext. The novel takes place in Vermont which is, of course, a blue state. Logan, Grayson, Holly and Meeka are all about to turn eighteen and all of them are children of very wealthy people. Logan runs a charity that is the pet project of his father, who wants to be sure he is doing good work. Greyson is in artist who works primarily in metal shop.  Holly is a star soccer player who when the meme breaks is on the verge of setting the state record for most goals in a season. Meeka’s parents are by far the wealthiest and they are involved in numerous charitable exercises engaged in raising money for the underprivileged. Meeka was adopted by them and Holly met her when her parents through a lavish party for her in second grade. Clearly they were trying to buy friends for her.

Cole, remember, is the child of a drug addict who hasn’t seen his father in years and whose mother died of an overdose. Not only does he deal drugs but the only thing he cares about is online media. One of the reasons that his friends become dissatisfied with him is because of how much they hate his online choices. In other words, he’s a deplorable in waiting. There’s a very real possibility that they might have hesitated if Cole was part of their circle but because he was ‘white trash’, they felt no problem in killing him.

It actually gets better because all of the narrators of privilege who are among the most popular kids in their school look down on everyone else – not just their poorer classmates or even their teammates, but their teachers and even their own families. Holly has no patience for her parents or her two younger siblings. Grayson barely listens to his father when he tries to tell him a story. Logan is clearly loved by his parents but he is more concerned with the good he can do for people mainly because he thinks that so many people are worse off and lesser than him. None of them know the first thing about the internet or how it works but because they think they are superior to everyone else, they refuse to accept help  - including from Esther, a computer expert – and try to handle things themselves. In one of the funniest segments in the book Logan ends up going down the kind of paranoid rabbit hole and comes across the kind of hair-brained conspiracy theory that so many right-wing media is fond of. Then when he thinks he is caught, he decides to embezzle from his own charity and make a ridiculously complicated ‘escape plan’ so he can get to South America. He thinks $50,000 will last him years in Argentina and that he’ll continue his good work there: “Maybe even start a GPO.”

There is an argument that all three of the leads have, much like Walter White in Breaking Bad,  let this event reveal the truly awful people they were all along. Grayson becomes increasingly violent as the novel progresses, threatening Gus with a power saw in metal shop, trying to beat him to death in his father’s sugarhouse and eventually getting a gun to shoot him. We learn that Holly bought the fentanyl from Cole that she used to kill him in case of an injury during the season which might endanger her from being seated and breaking the record. Late in the novel, we learn she has never been a team player and in one game was willing to beat up her own teammates in order for her to get four goals. At one point she is willing to kick Gus until his ribs break and shows no compassion for him when he tries to escape. Logan increasingly doesn’t trust anybody and near the end of the novel may very well have gone insane. By the end of the novel, you are almost certain that Cole died simply because they were all jealous of the hold he had over Meeka and they had no use for him.

The final section of the novel is narrated by Meeka. Throughout the book she appears as a side character in most of the other chapters but it is not until the end of the book that she finally speaks for him. Her perspective not only reveals everything that has happened since the body was buried but completely throws a light on just how monstrous her ‘friends’ were. You might feel sympathy for her, because throughout the novel she has constantly been denied a voice in any aspect of what has happened and no one has listened to her throughout the book. But you might also think at best she is self-serving because at best she watched what happened both to Cole and her friends’ degeneration and did nothing to stop it. At the end of the day she’s also not really upset Cole is dead, just that everyone else tried to do things without asking her.

I think the most sympathetic character in the book is Gus. Gus was, at one point, the victim of a meme himself that went viral and did must to destroy him. He moved to Washington and was still unpopular – Cole was his only real friend. Throughout the novel he is the only person who cares at all about Cole and misses him. By the time the book ends he has been threatened multiple times, beaten bloody and with a rib cracked, has been held at gunpoint  - and worse may be ahead. Gus is the only person in the novel who genuinely misses and mourns Greg’s loss.

All of the characters in the book never feel a moment of sympathy for him – not even Meeka, who in the final chapter calls him a pathetic loser, that everything Cole and he worked on together was a waste of time, and that his little fandom was pathetic. Even at the end she tells him (in her head) to ‘continue his pathetic memesturbatory alt-right revolution”. I don’t care.”

Cole and Gus were for the record, both outsiders in their community, who were dismissed as losers by society. The only reason they created their website was because they wanted attention and only went political because that was the way to get hits.. They were never the kind of political bad actors everyone sees them is, they were just completely dismissed by society – certainly by the protagonists of this novel who have no problem calling them scapegoats for their troubles at best and inflicting violence on them at worst. It doesn’t excuse what they did, of course, but it’s an explanation – and it’s a far more sympathetic one that those that so many progressive or other news media will give them.

I certainly read enough articles online to see that at the end of the day, there are far too many people like the narrators of Meme who might applaud the actions these teenagers take – and who might read this book and  still come away with the conclusion that Cole deserved to die. The characters say over and over that what they did was for the greater good – at one point Grayson actually thinks Cole’s mother if she were still alive wouldn’t have  really minded if he was killed. These are the kind of teenagers who, under normal circumstances, would have the privilege to get whatever university they want, get the best jobs possible and become our future leaders. Similarly many would look at the story of Cole and Gus and so many of the other teenagers in this novel and say that they are the destruction of our society no matter what the circumstances of their life. The fact that at the end of the day these teenagers are capable of far more violence than the ‘future incels’ is one of the blackest jokes of the novel.

We are entering yet another chaotic election year and much of the focus will be on the youth vote. Both parties will be attempting to woo the same kind of protagonists that will be at the center of Meme – privileged college age kids who have no true picture of how the world works, who have nothing but contempt from people around them who are older, and who have no real-life skills to get them through the world. Meme was written in 2020, but its lessons are just as applicable here as it demonstrates that there is less separating the so-called educated children of privilege from the uneducated white trash then you would think – or want to believe.