Reboot: A Novel

by Justin Taylor

Overview

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

A raucous and wickedly smart satire of Hollywood, toxic fandom, and our chronically online culture, following a washed-up actor on his quest to revive the cult TV show that catapulted him to teenage fame

"A performance of wit and rigor"—New York Times Book Review

David Crader is a has-been. A former child actor from the hit teen drama Rev Beach, he now rotates between his new roles as deadbeat dad, recovering alcoholic, and occasional videogame voice actor. But when David is summoned to Los Angeles by Grace, his ex-wife and former co-star, he suddenly sees an opportunity for a reboot—not just of the show that made him famous, but also of his listless existence.

Hollywood, the Internet, and a fractured nation have other plans, however, and David soon drinks himself to a realization: This seemingly innocuous revival of an old Buffy rip-off could be the spark that sets ablaze a nation gripped by far-right conspiracy, climate catastrophe, and mass violence.

Reboot is a madcap speculative comedy for our era of glass-eyed doom-scrolling and Millennial nostalgia—and yet it’s still full of heart. It’s a tale of former teen heartthrobs, striving parents, internet edgelords, and fish-faced cryptids, for anyone who has looked back on their life and wanted—even if but for a moment—to hit “reset.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780553387629
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/23/2024
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.80(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

JUSTIN TAYLOR is the author of the novel The Gospel of Anarchy, the story collections Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and Flings; and the memoir Riding with the Ghost, His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Bookforum, and the Oxford American. He is a contributing writer to The Washington Post Book World and the director of the Sewanee School of Letters. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Editorial Reviews

[Taylor’s] book is, in part, a performance of culture, a mirror of America complete with its own highly imagined myths . . . . It’s a performance of wit and rigor freed of the familiar polarizing semantics, making legible . . . just how much conspiracy theory and pop culture have fused. Not just QAnon and Russiagate, but Kate Middleton and Birds Aren’t Real.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Taylor also demonstrates the broader public costs of living inside narratives, especially the most polluted ones — antisemitism, QAnon, lizard people. . . . Though ‘funnier than Don DeLillo’ may seem like faint praise, Reboot wrings brilliant laughs from the absurdity of David’s predicament, and the way Hollywood and internet language can seem like foreign tongues, something human-adjacent but not quite human . . . . What are we missing while we marinate in this nonsense? That’s Taylor’s sharpest joke.”
—Washington Post

“Justin Taylor has a knack for depicting our modern moment with a wisdom that often only comes from hindsight....David's situation asks big questions about who we are as a culture, what we value, and the things that bring us together and tear us apart. You know, like teen soaps.”
—Town and Country Magazine

"Taylor’s fluency, intellectual nimbleness, and playful sense of humor call to mind the work of David Foster Wallace; the reader can easily imagine David Crader’s video game adaptation of Infinite Jest. An affecting character study and excoriating indictment of the way we live now."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Justin Taylor’s apocalyptic Reboot pulls off a feat few novels of our online present manage: reading it actually feels like tapping into the internet’s best celeb gossip, fiercest fandom outrages, and wildest conspiratorial rabbit holes."
—Publishers Weekly

"An introspective literary look at contemporary entertainment, families, culture, and the never-ending search for connection.”
—Booklist

"Reboot is a hilarious and thoughtful romp through our culture of endless rebooting—with detours into toxic online fandom, climate change, conspiracy theories, and more..."
—Lincoln Michel, author of The Body Scout

“For all the talk of an Other America—that underground country whose president is Trump and whose capital is Florida—we have precious few novels of its condition, and none as powerful, passionate, whacked-out, and pathic as Justin Taylor’s Reboot.” —Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus

“A hilarious portrait of how our culture’s insistence on making everything a reference to something else has destabilized reality and our ability to make meaning.” —Isaac Butler, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of The Method

“A laugh-out-loud, bingeable romp, that rare, bang-up novel as big-hearted as it is ambitious, written by a writer at the height of his wild gifts.”—Tracy O’Neill, author of Quotients

“Justin Taylor is cursed with equal portions of modesty and genius. What inevitably results is a multilayered masterpiece about a paradox.” —Nell Zink, author of Avalon

“Reboot is the perfect 21st century novel—ecstatically funny and heartbreaking.” —Daniel Hornsby, author of Sucker and Via Negativa

From the Publisher

★ 2024-01-20
A former child actor sees possibilities for reinvention in a media landscape dominated by recycled intellectual property.

David Crader experienced a measure of success as an actor when, as a teen, he co-starred on Rev Beach, a supernatural-tinged TV drama that, despite a lack of critical appreciation, attracted a cult audience. Now approaching middle age, David has struggled with alcoholism in the intervening years and is the twice-divorced father of a young son, Henry. Adrift and unhappy, he gets by doing voiceover work for video games and half-heartedly running a bar. When Rev Beach unexpectedly becomes a hot commodity again—it was a fluke streaming sensation during the pandemic lockdown—David receives an offer from his old co-star (and first ex-wife), Grace Travis, to reboot the series, provided he can convince Rev Beach lead actor and current superstar Shayne Glade to participate. While there’s plenty of plot (the story also concerns another Rev Beach actor’s political career, various natural disasters, the machinations of radicalized Internet subcultures, and David’s fraught family drama), the narrative also overflows with witty and incisive ideas. The theme of rebooting animates every thread—characters strive to reinvent themselves, start new families and careers, and rewrite their histories while an all-consuming media vortex endlessly recycles and recombines content (Shayne stars in “the stage musical adaptation of David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis”). Taylor’s prose is unfailingly engaging as David’s internal monologue cycles through sophisticated pop cultural analysis, rueful self-reflection, and sundry conspiracy theories (Hollow Earthers and lizard people get an airing), and there is true poignancy in David’s interactions with his child and in his fumbling attempts at redemption. Taylor’s fluency, intellectual nimbleness, and playful sense of humor call to mind the work of David Foster Wallace; the reader can easily imagine David Crader’s video game adaptation of Infinite Jest.

An affecting character study and excoriating indictment of the way we live now.

Kirkus Reviews