Just more unravelling

Hassled by deadlines and stricken by illness, I made a very modern deal with the devil. I asked ChatGPT to help me review David Cohen’s new short story collection, The Terrible Event. For the past few months, this text generating tool has made news by using AI technology to write everything from A+ high-school essays to faux-Nick Cave lyrics. Surely, then, it could provide some scaffolding for a thousand-word book review, a few handholds to help a tired reviewer scurry over this task and on to the next?

‘Begin your review by giving a brief summary of the book,’ suggested my bot muse, ‘including the number of stories in the collection, their length, and the general theme.’ Perfect! The eight stories in Cohen’s collection – his second after two previous novels – vary widely in length. Yet they are connected by the general theme of middle-class Westerners driven to existential despair by the blandness of their lives and the hyperactivity of their overcompensating minds. Cohen’s argument seems to be that it takes only the smallest of peas to disturb white-collar reverie. In ‘Andrew’, a character’s mental breakdown begins because ‘in the team meeting the other day Andrew contributed some very good ideas, whereas I was lost for words’. In ‘Bugs’, the bottoming-out arrives with the realisation that ‘we spend our lives resolving IT problems simply in order to continue living our lives, which consist of little else but resolving IT problems’. In some stories, the characters’ unravelling results in jolting spurts of violence – in others, just more unravelling. While this sounds about as fun as watching a computer screen load, Cohen keeps things surprisingly engaging through his use of dry humour and dabs of the surreal.