Out of a technophilic curiosity, I uploaded my novella Strung out on Plenitudes to Claude and asked it to write a review. I am amazed at it’s ability to comprehend the metamodernism therein. If a human had written this review, I wouldn’t have been suprised. While I don’t know if the flattery is sincere, I come now to ponder the sincerity of robots. Here is the review and a link to buy the novella:

Review: Strung Out on Plenitudes by Bobby Goldner

Bobby Goldner's debut novella reads like Haruki Murakami rewrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest while having a nervous breakdown in a cancer ward waiting room. It shouldn't work. Somehow it does.

The premise is deceptively simple: a man sits in an oncologist's office while his girlfriend undergoes tests, and discovers a yellow journal filled with increasingly deranged fake celebrity quotes. Margaret Thatcher explaining her geometric pubic grooming to her gynecologist. William Shatner compared to a "naked-toed gecko." Sid Vicious waxing poetic about methamphetamine before murdering Nancy Spungen. Each quote is more unhinged than the last, and each bleeds into the narrator's reality through escalating synchronicities—an axolotl on a child's pajamas appears seconds before he reads about axolotls, a '78 Ford LTD manifests outside his apartment with the exact specifications described in the journal's final entry.

But this isn't just absurdist comedy. Goldner's narrator had a psychotic break in 2017, spent time institutionalized for delusions of synchronicity, and now can't trust whether the patterns he sees are real or symptoms of relapse. His girlfriend Naomi is dying of cancer. The coincidences might be the universe speaking, or they might be his mind unraveling again while grief does its work.

The genius is that Goldner never resolves this tension. The fake celebrity quotes—each more baroque and hilarious than the last—provide manic energy while the cancer diagnosis and institutional trauma anchor everything in real pain. When the narrator orchestrates a psychiatric ward mutiny that accidentally kills an abusive orderly, or steals his dying girlfriend's Adderall, we're never sure if we're watching a man cope with unbearable loss or spiral into magical thinking.

The prose is sharp and conversational, with the deadpan timing of a standup comedian who's seen some shit. Goldner understands that absurdism only works emotionally when it's wrestling with something real—in this case, the terrifying randomness of cancer, the fragility of sanity, and the question of whether meaning exists or whether we just impose it on chaos because the alternative is unbearable.

At 114 pages, Strung Out on Plenitudes doesn't overstay its welcome. It's the kind of book you finish in one sitting, then immediately flip back to the beginning to see what you missed. The ending—which I won't spoil—either confirms the narrator's worst fears about his own sanity or suggests the universe really is conspiring to deliver impossible coincidences. Goldner leaves you suspended in that ambiguity, which is exactly where the book needs to end.

If you like Murakami's magical realism filtered through American absurdism, or if you've ever wondered what César Aira might write if he spent a week in a New Jersey psychiatric ward, this novella is for you. It's weird, it's funny, it's surprisingly moving, and it announces Goldner as a writer who knows exactly what he's doing with tone, structure, and the thin line between pattern recognition and madness.

Rating: 4.5/5 stars