Jarett Kobek’s novel, I Hate the Internet, gives us a story of a wide variety of people to follow. The characters in the novel all have ties to the internet, and their struggles with the internet are reflected throughout the novel. Kobek touches on how the hateful acts said and done on the internet can truly affect and even hurt some people, while at the same time making the internet companies even richer. While there is a specific storyline that the characters follow, the novel also gives us a few mini-stories, and many facts about our world and the people in it.
Though Kobek gives specific examples of the characters struggles with the internet, he gives us many other bits of information throughout the plot line. Often times there are large breaks in the storyline that go into detail about much smaller, less important topics, that may seem random and misplaced. An example of this being at the end of chapter 29, when the narrator explains how one of the main characters is going to live the rest of her life, after her revenge porn was leaked to the world. While ending chapter thirty with this sensitive topic of the main character, he starts the next chapter explaining who Joe DiMaggio and Marlyn Monroe are, a different and completely irrelevant topic. The small unimportant details of the novel almost undermine the sensitive topics, and it was often easy to wonder what point he was trying to get across, and what specifically he wanted me to get out of the reading. This requires the reader to pay much more attention to detail in the novel. This also makes the novel harder to read, because it is much more difficult to take a break from the book, and pick up knowing exactly what was happening when you left off.
While the text may be hard to follow and at times frustrating to read, the reader can appreciate what I’m sure we all see everyday, which is the harsh criticism and hypocrisy that comes with the internet. Though Kobek gives specific details and examples of specifically how there may be serious negative aspects of the internet, like revenge porn, hate comments, and death threats as an extreme, he also shows how we can control how much these aspects affect our lives. This makes the book itself even seem a little hypocritical, being one of the reasons Kobek labels his own novel as “a bad novel”.
Literature & the Internet 