Six Clicks Away
By Bonnie Rozanski
Copyright © 2010
200 pages
$2.99 at Kindle
A fictional parallel to Facebook called MyFace links the geographically diverse lives in Bonnie Rozanski’s Six Clicks Away. The action begins at Xavier College in New Jersey with the lovely and superficial Rachel who is obsessed with accumulating as many MyFace friends as possible. She reluctantly teams up with Jeremy—an arrogant but bright nerd she can’t stand—for a Sociology class assignment inspired by Stanley Milgram’s Six Degrees of Separation theory. Thick-skinned Jeremy adores Rachel and puts up with her verbal abuse. He provides the technical expertise needed to meet her two goals: her personal one of acquiring the most friends in the world, and her academic one of discovering how many connections it takes to connect to one in particular, the Dalai Lama.
A simple chain letter approach proves to work well. In fact, too well as it becomes difficult for Rachel to manually keep up with all the responses. So Jeremy automates the inviting and accepting of friends on Rachel’s account by hacking into MyFace. Then he finds a way to make the accounts Rachel’s invitations reach automatically accept and spread the electronic word. Now Rachel can simply watch the numbers increase as her project ensnares the other characters whose lives make up this story.
The first of these is Julia, a writer from Toronto overwhelmed by the frustrations of dealing with the business side of her vocation. Rachel’s quest connects her to Kevin, a man she had a fling with a long time ago. A downsized Microsoft manager struggling financially, Kevin is dealing with a collection agency. Fortunately for him, the agent he’s dealing with, Antara Jamakhandi from Bangalore. Fortunately for him, Antara’s easy to fend off. She has too much sympathy for her clients, particularly Kevin. They become MyFace friends. And at the risk of losing her precious job, she decides to help Kevin. Through MyFace again, she reaches her cousin, Raj, in New York City, who is a whiz at rearranging mortgages, as well as being a renowned Bollywood producer.
Each chapter is narrated in close third-person by each of the above characters and several others; the story collects characters as one might collect friends on a social network site. Unfortunately the personal dramas of the characters—and the author has a knack for creating subtly engaging ones—get bogged down by background exposition rather than elevated by action. Considering the superficiality of social networking sites, that may have been unavoidable, even intentional.
One irritant is the inadvertent centering of text at the end of chapters, especially on page 72. It’s possible the problem was with the pdf file I was given; nevertheless I considered stopping reading more than once because of it. I also didn’t care for the left justification of the text.
Still, the story has promise and how it exposes the impact of social networking, collection agencies, the mortgage crisis, tossing fish at Pike’s Place Market, among other things, is often poignant. I just wish more had been done to tighten the prose and give it a higher degree of sophistication to match. For example:
She asked how the writing had been going, and Julia told her it was good. Then Rose asked about that old boyfriend she had contacted. Somehow, that woman seemed to be able to get into her mind. Was she that transparent? In any case, one thing led to another, and Julia ended up showing her the whole back-and-
forth exchange she had saved on her own wall.
Rose didn’t say anything, just looking at her in the way she did: kindly and wise. And, of course, that made it worse, and Julia ended up blubbering on her shoulder about how she had never loved anyone else and she never would love anyone else, and what an idiot she had been to let him go, what a stupid young idiot.
For me, such a passage would read better if dramatized, if it is important, or cut, if not. It just seems glossed over and distant, especially when compared to other parts of the book.
Such as the Raj story, which is by far the most compelling and dramatically developed. A scene with his daughter stands out. She is about to perform in her school’s Bollywood-style production. Her director had requested the well-known Raj to give the introduction, ideally along with a famous Bollywood actor, Hrithik Rashan. But that’s changed now that Raj is on house arrest for mortgage fraud.
“I am coming tonight, you know.”
“I don’t want you there.”
“Nevertheless, I am coming, whether you want me there or not, and I am giving the introduction to your show.”
“You are uninvited,” she said, wrenching herself free from his grasp. “Mr. Rangarajan doesn’t want you to give the introduction. All he ever wanted anyway was Hrithik Rashan.”
It hurt him that she said those things, but he wasn’t going to let it stop him.
“Nevertheless,” he replied. “I wouldn’t miss your starring role.”
“What is the matter with you?” Tanvi shouted, her face a mask of misery.
“You’re still living in your dream world, where you’re rich and respected and your family is perfect in every way. Well, not everyone can be what you want them to be. I’m no good. I can’t sing. Mr. Rangarajan said so before everyone. He said he never would have chosen me, if it weren’t for your connections.”
That statement, even though he had suspected it, hurt him more than everything she had said before. He wondered, maybe for the first time, what Tanvi herself had been going through these few weeks. Kids in high school can be so cruel.
“I’d like to beat his head in for that statement. He’s just getting back at me. You are very talented, Tanvi. A beautiful dancer and actress.”
She shook her head, one tear slowly trickling down her face.
“But will you let me come?” he pressed, putting a hand on her shoulder.
She didn’t shrug it off.
“I want to come, Tanvi,” he said, squeezing her shoulder.
She sighed, nodding toward the cuff on his leg. “But what about that?”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ve made arrangements. It’s not as if I’m leaving the country.”
”Okay, come.” She turned to go, then turned back. “But Mr. Rangarajan won’t let you give the introduction. Please don’t make a scene, Papa.”
It was the first time in three weeks that she had called him Papa. He wanted only to enfold her into his arms and tell her everything would be all right, but he no longer had that in his power. Instead he caressed her cheek. “No one will even know that I am there,” he said.
The plotting had no discernible pattern or consistency. The Rachel-Jeremy story has prominence at first but then falls to the background for long stretches. As does the Julia-Kevin-Antara thread while Raj’s story—the strongest of the bunch—takes over. We do return to Rachel-Jeremy for the rewards and consequences of their Facebook manipulations. But the ending involving Julia seemed a rushed add-on, relying on too many coincidences in too brief a period. There were several inconsistencies in the story too. Such as when computer-illiterate Rachel compares Kevin’s altering Facebook code to changing Linux. Or when at one point Kevin reads a wall note from Julia, yet earlier, in her chapter, he had responded and cut her off.
In the end, I couldn’t escape the sense that Six Clicks Away is an amalgamation of several distinct story ideas at various stages of development reshaped to fit the social networking theme. Then again, if this is intended to be a metaphor for Facebook, a literalized pastiche of the social networking experience, its looseness and casualness might have merit.