Supermodel

David Breskin may have written the world’s first self-contextualizing turbo-novel, or turbo-poem if you prefer. An intricate machine, Supermodel generates a wild ride: the headlong velocity and eyestunning detail of its story, the force of its situations, and the veracity of its characters will seize and pull you from front to back fast enough for thrills, chills, and bouts of epistemological whiplash. The story’s framing device--an injured supermodel stranded by a tsunami in a palm tree, her fiancé’s whereabouts unknown--uses Petra Nemcova’s famous predicament as its point of departure and its avenue of ingress into a richly invented character: a supremely beautiful woman treading her beauty’s way into the world.

Speeding at you in a single extended sentence, this story is paired, in parallel italicized couplets, with a running commentary Breskin has extracted from the endless bubbling fountain of the Internet. This cyber-Greek chorus (presenting voices ranging from the Department of Defense to the Vagina Institute, from lad mags to cosmologists) is frequently hilarious when not terrifying. Sometimes a stand-in for the noise of the world, but more often a torrent of the unexpected and the mindbogglingly apt, this flow pours into and around our heroine’s story to make a whole that is, somehow and all at once, sympathetic and satiric, profound and profane.

An intertwined and twinning lattice, in which fact and fiction outdo each other in a festival of the improbable and the unassailably so, Supermodel presents the world we know, rendered in a form we have neither seen before nor anticipated. And yet, we recognize it the instant we find it in front of us, right there, living, on the page: the first epic poem of the Internet Age.