Plastic
By Scott Guild
Pantheon, February 13, 2024
For fans of Interior Chinatown and American War, a surreal, hilarious, and sneakily profound debut novel that casts our current climate of gun violence and environmental destruction in a surprising new mold.
Erin is a plastic girl living in a plastic world. Every day she eats a breakfast of boiled chicken, then conveys her articulated body to Tablet Town, where she sells other figurines Smartbodies: wearable tech that allows full, physical immersion in a virtual world, a refuge from real life’s brutal wars, oppressive governmental monitoring, and omnipresent eco-terrorist insurgency. If you cut her, she will not bleed—but she and her fellow figurines can still be cracked or blown apart by gunfire or bombs, or crumble away from nuclear fallout. Erin, who’s lost her father, sister, and the love of her life, certainly knows plenty about death.
An attack at her place of work brings Erin another too-intimate experience, but it also brings her Jacob: a blind figurine whom she comforts in the aftermath, and with whom she feels an almost instant connection. For the first time in years, Erin begins to experience hope—hope that until now she’s only gleaned from watching her favorite TV show, the surrealist retro sitcom “Nuclear Family.” Exploring the wild wonders of the virtual reality landscape together, it seems that possibly, slowly, Erin and Jacob may have a chance at healing from their trauma. But then secrets from Erin’s family’s past begin to invade her carefully constructed reality, and cracks in the facade she’s constructed around her life threaten to reveal everything vulnerable beneath.
Both a crypto-comedic dystopian fantasy and a deadly serious dissection of our own farcical pre-apocalypse, Scott Guild’s debut novel is an achingly beautiful, disarmingly welcoming, and fabulously inventive look at the hollow core of modern American society—and a guide to how we might reanimate all its broken plastic pieces.
Selected Praise
"Equal parts funny and poignant, this debut is a deft examination of America and our collective humanity. Clever and wildly imaginative, Plastic has heartfelt heft." —Parini Shroff, author of The Bandit Queens
"Scott Guild is an endlessly exciting and inventive writer, morbid and funny and strange and humane, with a strange and brilliant imagination." —Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book
"Plastic is one of the most strangely tender and tenderly strange books I've ever read. Scott Guild's language is transportive, and his attention to the characters peopling his unique world is deeply moving. This book is the real deal: fresh, utterly its own, full of both humor and pathos, and so utterly human (plastic skin aside)."—Ilana Masad, author of All My Mother’s Lovers
"Few writers are more brilliant, captivating, and hilarious than Scott Guild. He is a visionary—and what he envisions is terrifying, yes, but also full of love, hope, and radiance. Plastic, with its large-hearted characters and riveting storytelling, will certainly turn out to be one of the best novels of the year."—Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8
"Plastic is a marvel, gimlet-eyed and utterly charming all at once. It’s one of those rare novels that has both big ideas and a big heart. I’m tantalized by its sci-fi grooviness but also moved by the dolls’ interiority, their assessment of their own humanity."—Timothy Schaffert, author of The Perfume Thief
About the Author
Scott Guild received his MFA from the New Writers Project at The University of Texas at Austin, and his PhD in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He served for years as assistant director of Pen City Writers, a prison writing initiative for incarcerated students. He is currently an assistant professor at Marian University in Indianapolis, where he teaches literature and creative writing. Before his degrees, Scott was the songwriter and lead guitarist for the new wave band New Collisions, which toured with the B-52s and opened for Blondie.
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