Judging from popular discourse, the novel is in serious jeopardy, perhaps even an endangered artform, having been beset by a myriad of threats that include the advent of the digital age and a correlated decline in readership, literacy, overall engagement with physical media, and now Large Language Models, or LLMs.[1] In fact, just last week, British author Will Self followed up on an article he wrote more than a decade ago entitled “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s For Real), focusing on the threat posed by LLMs in a world where “publishing conglomerates” act more like “logistic firms with a literary sideline” than actual curators of serious culture.[2] As Self puts it succinctly, LLMs “cannot sustain… style in the deeper sense: the circulation of pressure, contradiction, temporality and embodiment across an entire work,” because “each sentence arrives as a sealed semantic capsule, self-maximizing for local significance while failing to contribute to any larger pressure system of consciousness.”[3] While I found this essay interesting, I also found it interesting how it failed to mention the fact that, just this March, Hachette Book Group immediately pulled a novel from circulation it had released over a year ago, after widespread allegations and evidence surfaced that portions of the novel had been generated with the use of LLMs.[4]

For the alarmists preaching doomsday, machine-generated prose signals something far more dire than a mere shift in production methods, particularly because it strikes directly at the novel’s foundational utility as a dialectical instrument of social truth. This is, certainly, a concern that I share, especially when I also consider Georg Lukács’s claim that the novel is the artform most capable in modernity of “uncover[ing] and construct[ing] the concealed totality of life,” even if that “totality can be systematized only in abstract terms” and by “emphasiz[ing] the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of a subjective one.”[5] This is, of course, only possible because human authors write from specific historical vantage points with unique perspectives shaped by class, economic anxieties, vivid psychological lives, dreams about the future, etc. An LLM, obviously, has none of these things. Because it lacks a position or stake in a society, it cannot offer a genuine take on how society acts on the individual or vice versa. At its very best, it can only produce a hollow pantomime.

Fortunately, doomsday criers tend to exaggerate things, and so perhaps we should not be surprised that the novel is still very much alive—dare I say thriving—and that prescient novels are still being written by young authors of considerable talent, as well as published by smaller but savvier publishing outlets, even if new technologies continue to befuddle industry giants as they lurch onward in what appears to be a perpetual crisis due, in large part, to their own inertia. A good example of such a novel would be Hannah Smart’s Meat Puppets, published recently by Apocalypse Confidential, a novel that goes well beyond the regurgitation of mindless tropes to examine what it feels like to be a young person in the world today. Meat Puppets is written in a voice that is unerringly human, especially in its ability to be both serious and funny, as well as cynical and sincere, displaying a highly reflexive playfulness in form often referred to as “experimental” or “metafictional.”

The central plot of the novel can be described simply: Mitchell Larkin, a successful con-artist with an uncanny knack for singling out romantic partners who will become famous, sets up a lucrative (if rigged) gambling operation with the assistance of a stockbroker and love-interest Hayley Duker. This operation allows those in the know to gamble on the potential celebrity of various artists and actors (i.e., a “human stock trade” that allows individuals to “buy shares in pre-famous people”); the only problem is that this highly illegal secret venture becomes increasingly threatened after it adds to its portfolio of investments a certain 22-year-old named Sydney Morris. Syd, readers quickly learn, is something of a con-artist himself, as well as a highly volatile drug addict with considerable talents. Prior to the moment that Mitch comes into his life, Syd is making a living working the “private school network,” or providing false witness as a motivational speaker about how he “quit drugs and found Jesus.” This income is supplemented further by selling “avant-garde works” on Times Square made from “common office staples, which he punched into canvases in sparse crosshatchings to form abstract clumps and indeterminately humanoid shapes and general textual distortions that he thought looked ‘rad.’” Although a cast of other characters will enter the novel, it is these three that form the story at the heart of the novel’s central narrative—with a caveat, however, one that operates as “a dangling carrot,” if you will. But more on that to come.

The first few chapters of Meat Puppets read much as would your standard (read “non-experimental”) novel, with relatively short chapters written primarily in a close third-person, although careful readers will sense in the narrator’s shifting focus—between characters’ perspectives and an objective-seeming awareness that navigates these perspectives with supplementary knowledge—something more complex at work. For instance, a very short chapter “0” provides a cameo for an adolescent Syd participating in an active shooter drill in high school, setting the tone for the dark absurdity to come, as well as providing readers with a sort of skeleton key for understanding Sid, particularly his desensitization to violence and cynical detachment from others. This initial chapter is then followed by Part One, “The Stockbroker,” in which Mitch and Hayley are introduced and the prehistory and early hey-days of their illegal gambling enterprise unfolds. In these early pages, the novel grounds itself thoroughly in a contemporary United States that is recognizable to anyone alive today, a country in which violence is all-too-expected, gambling and fame mean everything, and human relationships have been reduced to zero-sum games. As the character Mitch will himself think in an attempt at self-justification at some point in these early chapters,

all relationships were “transactional” in the loosest sense of the word, so the question of whether his [Mitch’s] particular brand of transactional relationship was any less moral than the average romantic entanglement or simply less socially acceptable could probably withstand rigorous subjective debate among entire generations of ethicists without a solid conclusion ever being reached…

However, halfway through Part One, the narrative voice steps out from behind the textual curtain (or pretends to), as there appears a brief, two-page “Preface” that complicates the preceding pages and what follows, as well as grounds the narrator’s persona in a larger meta-discursive framework that inevitably twines back into the primary narrative. In this anachronic “Preface,” the narrator addresses the reader directly, introducing herself as “Hannah Smart,” then goes on to claim that the entire “novel” is actually a thinly veiled nonfiction which grew out of an assignment she accepted to write a “journalistic essay” while reporting from the set of a movie, cheekily titled Life Imitates Art. While on this set, the “narrator” Hannah Smart claims to have met Syd, the film’s breakout star, but also writes that—while this essay was ultimately rejected by the journal which commissioned it—it nevertheless formed the impetus for Meat Puppets and appears in this “novel/biography/memoir/uncategorizable bookish compendium” under the title “Art Imitates Life,” to be followed by “two ‘sequels’” (“Victims of Mitch Anonymous” and “Life Imitates the Life Art is Imitating”) inserted in later portions of the novel.

Following this anachronic Preface, Part 1 continues as before, returning to the tale of its central characters, although occasional footnotes begin to crop up written in the voice of this authorial doppelganger at the beginning of Part 2, or “The Kid”—which focuses primarily on Sid since graduating from high school and the beginning of his dubious relationship with Mitch. There are laugh-out-loud moments throughout the novel, but perhaps nowhere more here, and which—surprisingly? unsurprisingly?—feature the interrupted performance of a clown (or “klown”). And, as promised in the “Preface,” the intercalated “essays” will inevitably appear throughout the rest of the novel to expand the author’s textual doppelganger into a full character of her own, not only delivering on the meta-discursive framework established in the “Preface” but fully grounding and justifying the narrator’s hyper-reflexive voice. At the same time, via these essays, the idea of “meat puppets” will emerge to clarify the novel’s central question:

The first thing a meat puppet does is ask, “How do I act human?” He builds a whole person from scratch. His body becomes a vessel for the character. Hence, meat puppet. He allows the character to use his mortal, flesh body like a puppet.

This question can be summarized as such: Are we all meat puppets? How much do our actions in the world express a true intrinsic Self independent from the desires and expectations of others? Or, as Smart herself writes, what in each of us “exists as an independent entity or is merely a hollowed shell” that assumes “the personality” necessitated by one’s immediate environment?

Of course, one would be amiss to not mention how this meta-discursive thread, introduced via an anachronic “Preface,” strongly recalls the “Author’s Foreword” inserted into Chapter 9 of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, and in which Wallace similarly introduces a persona identified with himself to directly address the reader. Moreover, this persona will claim that The Pale King is not a work of fiction but a factual memoir concerning time previously spent working as a low-level tax examiner (or "wiggler") for the IRS in Peoria, Illinois.[6] However, whereas Wallace presumably used this insertion of an authorial persona to underscore the irrational rationalism at the core of bureaucratic systems and to show how an "irrelevant complexity" obfuscates human identity, he did not live to finish The Pale King—even if it was published posthumously—so it remains difficult  to critically examine how this meta-discursive narrative would have panned out. Smart, on the other hand, did finish Meat Puppets, and this narratological technique—while clearly indebted to Wallace’s influence— succeeds in eventually merging with the main narrative in ways that go well beyond satisfying readers’ expectations.[7] After all, it not only complicates expectations, but allows the narrative to move back and forth in the story to engage the reader on a level beyond simple plot.

Ultimately, as the "Hannah Smart" persona increasingly encroaches upon the lives of her characters, the novel reveals the tragic, hollow core of Mitch’s and Syd’s transactional existence. Yes, Mitch’s "human stock trade" and Syd’s shifting, curated personae are symptoms of late-stage capitalism, but what is most interesting is how the behaviors they adopt could be likened to something like biological algorithms. Similar to the LLMs threatening the publishing industry mentioned at the start of this review, these characters operate by scraping the societal “training data” around them, predicting the most profitable outcomes based on societal expectations to then produce what could be thought of as a sort of self-maximizing output. They act as the titular “meat puppets”—flesh-and-blood machines devoid of genuine, independent Selves, but this activity (without giving too much away) is ultimately self-destructive. Yet, this bleak portrayal of human mechanization is precisely what makes Meat Puppets such a vital defense of the novel as an artform. Theoretically, I suppose, an LLM could generate a story about a con-artist or a human stock market, but it cannot experience the existential dread of being a hollowed-out shell, nor can it recognize the absurdity of a culture that rewards such emptiness at the expense of genuine human relationships. Instead, it requires the specific, historical vantage point of a human author, one like Hannah Smart, complete with class anxieties, cynicism, and a desperate desire for authenticity, to capture the tragedy of that condition. By injecting her authorial doppelganger into the text, Smart asserts the messy, irrepressible reality of human consciousness against the cold transactions of her characters, and it is through this sort of layered consciousness and awareness that Meat Puppets fulfills Lukács’s demand for the modern novel: it successfully uncovers the concealed totality of our hyper-commodified lives.

Will Self and the doomsday criers are correct to fear the logistical flattening of literature, but as long as authors like Smart are using the novel to interrogate the limits of our own humanity, and publishing outlets like Apocalypse Confidential are out there pushing their work, the form remains not just alive but absolutely indispensable.