Penn State Deluge - Vol. 2 No. 1 - Spring 2004

Nan McCarthy's trilogy Chat Connect Crash represents one of the earliest examples of fiction written in e-mail form to reach a broad audience beyond the web. The story that the "cyberseries" tells is best treated as one arc of narrative, even though the three installments were written over a period of years while the author kept her day job in the computer industry. The first thin volume appeared in 1995; the second arrived the next year; and third came out in 1998. In discussing e-mail narratives that appeared later, at least two book reviewers—Helen Rumbelow of The Times of London and Vasili Stavropoulos in the Sydney Morning Herald—cite McCarthy's work as an early venture into this particular mode of narration. The reviewers acknowledge that the trilogy is by no means the definitive tale told through e-mail messages, but at least affirm that it was one of the first, if not the first.

How the books came to be and how they found an audience corresponds with the passage of "e-pistolary" novels, as Rumbelow dubs them, from the insular world of the early internet to the broader realm of mainstream publishing. McCarthy also conceived the books under didactic considerations similar to those of Richardson two centuries earlier. In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times—published itself as a series of e-mail exchanges—McCarthy explains how the idea came about:

[In 1995] one of my friends had just gotten onto America Online, and he was real excited about how he was meeting people. [. . .] By that point I was kind of blasé about the whole thing—I'd been online for 8 years and at that point I sort of saw the Internet through his eyes—through new eyes—of all the exciting social possibilities. So [. . .] we started fantasizing about wouldn't it be neat to write a novel told entirely through e-mail messages. And the idea just kind of took hold of me. (Weathersbee)

In the same way that Richardson wrote Pamela partially with the goal of instructing people in the art of letter-writing, McCarthy typed out a series of fake e-mail messages with the aim of showing new internet users how they could "connect" with others using the new medium. Upon writing her first installment, Chat, McCarthy initially circumvented the traditional publishing world by printing the book herself and hawking it online via her personal website. Later, an old-fashioned letter exchange with syndicated newspaper humor columnist Dave Barry gave her a leg up, when her notes were posted on internet bulletin boards (Strassel). Orders for the book increased steadily. By 1998, with all three volumes written, Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, agreed to publish them as trade paperbacks in October of that year, thereby introducing Chat Connect Crash to a readership with perhaps less internet savvy.

In terms of plot, the story of Chat Connect Crash is not groundbreaking. It follows the rise and fall of an adulterous relationship. It begins innocently enough, but grows more intense when Max and Bev, the male and female correspondents, have an anonymous tryst at a computer show, and consider dropping everything to be with each other once they realize their physical partnership matched their digital and emotional one. It ends with the death of Max in a plane crash on his way to live with Bev, noted on the final page with a sterile internet news report. McCarthy depicts her characters with a few broad strokes: Max, a copywriter and online newbie, enjoys watching hockey and drinking martinis when he's not online; Bev, a book editor who studies typography for fun, seems more married to her computer than to her off-screen and off-stage husband. Based on the interview with McCarthy noted earlier, one can imagine Bev as a stand-in for the author herself and Max as McCarthy's real-life friend who had just joined AOL.

John Naughton in The Times of London calls the story "slight—a kind of Bridges of Madison County in cyberspace." Also, in a broader column about technology and communication, Susan Schwartz of The Gazette of Montreal tersely pans McCarthy's first installment: "[The] romance develops entirely through electronic messages—cheap, glib ones." Many of the early reviewers observe that Chat amounts to little more than a romance novel with a technological twist in presentation.

Whether or not McCarthy was aware of it in her writing, Chat Connect Crash presents shades of the same underlying moral that comes out of the more transparent early seduction novels written in epistolary form: An illicit relationship—in this case, a married woman and an unmarried man—conducted clandestinely via written correspondence ultimately leads to destruction and thus should be avoided. However, while Richardson filled his novels with supporting characters ready to admonish young, impressionable heroines about the dangers of seduction, McCarthy largely circumvents the moral sanctions found in earlier novels. Besides sheer geographical distance, the greatest obstacle preventing Bev and Max from being together is Bev's own guilt for betraying her husband, Gary. In the forebodingly titled third volume, Crash—a computer failure as well as a plane failure—Bev finally avows her love for Max, but he questions her hesitation. She writes back with her reasoning:

Because I felt guilty, Max. I've known for a long time that I love you, and it became even more clear to me during the weekend we spent together. But I still feel terrible about what I was doing to Gary by being with you there, and I guess I felt that if I actually said the words out loud to you it would be the final insult to Gary. (Crash 64)

When readers reach the last page and discover Max's fate—"Plane Crashes Near Lake Michigan"—they can come away with the same moral of the fatal dangers of seduction, but the justice meted out to him is almost exclusively of a cosmic nature, without any building reproach from members within Bev's or Max's families or communities, as we would have seen in the works of Richardson and his ilk. We cannot ignore that Bev is married as well as older than most epistolary-novel heroines of that time; this status diminishes the transgression, when compared with any virginal victims. Bev also falls in love and lusts after Max within a society that has lost some of its safeguards against seduction and infidelity. Their romance goes on more deeply below the social radar. In terms of novelistic forerunners, the ending also harkens back to the matter-of-fact description of Werther's death in Goethe submitted by the "editor" as a frame for that narrative. The final "News Flash" on page 117 of Crash proves that even—and perhaps especially—the "e-pistolary" form needs a frame from time to time to flesh out the story. These comparisons to the past are noteworthy for showing how the contemporary work reflects great works within the canon, but the author's decision—and the decisions by the other three authors examined later— reveals an intention to engage the trends of e-mail use at the moment they were writing.

Chat Connect Crash is, at heart, an at-work romance. The two correspondents frequently talk about work. They are both in the "words" industry—Bev in publishing and Max in advertising. Because of the way their messages connect them, they might as well be sitting in different cubicles, even though they are separated by several states. This work context also allows Bev to be able to maintain an online relationship with Max without her husband worrying as much.

E-mail was primarily a business tool for the generations who were first exposed to it within their job environments, and this narrative represents Max's introduction to the medium as a means of social interaction, and ultimately, pleasure. It captures feelings and decisions from a period in the history of computers that is gradually passing away, as more and more children from middle- and upper-class families log on from an early age and exist in a world where the internet is pervasive.

From the first page of Chat, where the main characters' "member profiles" [6] are listed, their occupations and companies shape who they are in our eyes and in theirs (Chat 1). Their fictional e-mail addresses—BevJ@frederic_gerard.com and Maximilian@miller&morris.com—include their employers' names. These companies are repeated in the heading of each message throughout the novel, and constantly remind us that this whole relationship was conducted on company time or otherwise using company-granted e-mail addresses. The characters meet in a public internet chat room called the "Writer's Forum," and Max decides to strike up a correspondence after he sees Bev there (Chat 3). What goes on in each user's workplace is one of the three main topics of discussion for the online pair, besides computers and love relationships.

Bev perceives correctly that Max is a newcomer to online interaction, and he quickly admits that he "got online a few weeks ago" (Chat 10). It remains unclear whether this statement means he was granted his work-based e-mail address only a short while ago or he just never strayed beyond the realm of work-based messaging until now. Bev takes it upon herself to teach him about online conversational acronyms and emoticons as well as general etiquette. McCarthy includes a glossary of acronyms, abbreviations, emoticons, and other symbols in the back of each installment, but Bev also explains their use to Max:

p.s. You must be new online - "BTW" stands for "by the way." People use all sorts of acronyms like that to make typing online faster and easier. The asterisks are used for emphasis, because you can't type in italics online. Some people use underscores at the beginning and end of a word or phrase (_like this_) to mean the same thing. (Chat 7)

Also known as smiley faces, or smileys, emoticons are combinations of characters that were invented to help express emotion in a sometimes sterile environment. One of the most basic emoticons is a smiling face with eyes, a nose, and a mouth, which looks like what is contained inside the following brackets: [ :-) ]. The persistence of smiley use from the early days of the internet until now may reveal an underlying concern about the adequacy of typed language. Visually minded letter writers have long embellished their missives with illustrations, but e-mail writers exhibit a particular anxiety that the emotional messages they are trying to convey may not get through, without the aid of such representative collections of printed characters. While the emoticon seems to have remained popular since its first appearance, other affectations of e-mail correspondence have morphed with time.

In the glossaries, the author chooses to print many more instances of computer shorthand than Bev and Max ultimately use in their e-mail messages to one another. Here lies the potential for such wired talk to become quickly dated. The practice of abbreviation in computer-based communication continues apace—and would probably be worthy of its own linguistic study—but a quick perusal of the abbreviations McCarthy and her alter-ego Bev so readily preach about reveals that some of these acronyms and neo-words have a short shelf life. Because the creation and development of these shortcuts are so decentralized, it remains quite a challenge to judge how long they will last and how pervasive they may be. The time Bev spends explaining things to Max may seem elementary to many adult readers, even a mere five years after publication of the last volume. Among the acronyms listed in the back of Chat, this avid reader and internet user, for example, has never encountered: FWIW ("for what it's worth"); G,D&R ("grinning, ducking & running"); GMTA ("great minds think alike"); IMA ("I might add"); OTOH ("on the other hand"); PMFJI ("pardon me for jumping in"); or TPTB ("the powers that be"). Already, these terms seem arcane, even to one who has been online since 1992. In addition, the use of asterisks or underscores to emphasize words has started to become obsolete as e-mail and instant-messaging programs have expanded their features to include bold face and italics among other more advanced text-formatting options. Such minor details of e-mail along the trajectory of its development change swiftly. We might ascertain two related motives from the use of these glossaries—one somewhat self-congratulatory and the other more visionary. McCarthy may have chosen to include the abbreviations guide as an attempt to propagate some of her favorites via her imagined readership. Perhaps she hoped that the popularity of her books would encourage people to start communicating with these slices of shorthand. On the other hand, she could have been farsighted in her inclusion of them, seeing herself more as a chronicler than as one who hopes to shape language use on the internet. Perhaps the abbreviations accompanying Chat Connect Crash were truly in vogue at the time of McCarthy's writing, and the glossaries instead offer us a snapshot from that period of e-mail exchange and live chat messaging.

Another internet practice Bev highlights in her early asides to Max is the practice of adding a disclaimer after a "flame." She writes: "Just so you know—a 'flame' is a message from someone who's pissed off and venting a lot of steam; my message is pretty mild compared to some of the flames you see online" (Chat 9). While people have continued to flame—and flame one another—in e-mail since then, it has become rarer to see any such disclaimer afterward. This is one of the potential downfalls of electronic mail that the Rand authors cited in their 1985 report, but most users today have either learned to guard against "flaming" more attentively, avoid it altogether, or not even include a disclaimer. It feels rather unnatural for Bev to insert such an explanation after she has let her emotions spill onto the keyboard. In practice, people are more likely to send highly charged messages without pausing midway and affixing a "flame alert" somewhere in the body of the text.

Despite the questionable shelf-life of Bev's shorthand lessons for Max, he takes these tips as gospel and starts using the shortcuts himself throughout the balance of their correspondence. This behavior further reflects the transition Max and a host of other Max-type computer users encountered during the 1990s as they began to see e-mail as more than just a modern memo service for the office. In the novel, Bev was born in 1959 and Max in 1963; thus, they did not come of age during a time when they were likely to have been exposed to personal computers. The use of e-mail was a skill that they had to acquire, presumably through the business world, unlike the generations that followed them, which see such skills as more natural and intrinsic parts of their communication.

In late October of the novel—after Max and Bev have unknowingly engaged in an anonymous one-night stand with each other—Max writes to Bev: "I just want to know what you get from being online. I've been thinking about it myself lately, and I'm curious as to what other people gain from this whole online thing" (Chat 100-1). If we were to replace "online" with "on the telephone," and asked the same question of someone today, they would probably think us very strange. But at this time in the development of the internet, among people of this age group in particular, such a query does not seem out of place. Bev writes that she got online because she "had to": "Several years ago I had a boss who was really into CompuServe, so we all got accounts and had to learn our way around" (Chat 101). Then she says she got hooked on the practice and mentions two common reasons for the internet's popularity: talking to people from all over the world and reading about what they are doing. She calls herself a "communications junkie," and says that the internet is the latest means for her to get that fix (Chat 102). [7] Max says he wanted to keep up with his guy friends, who began talking more about "modem speeds, RAM, and hard drives" (Chat 102).

For both characters, the choice to start using e-mail for work and play at the time was a conscious one. They adopted a technology that was becoming more prevalent each day, and started discovering a place for it in their lives. Chat Connect Crash is a period piece from a time when espousal of electronic communication was not a given. This scenario contrasts with the next novel, in which the younger narrator enters the online scene at a different place.

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[ Contents | Abstract | Intro | I | II | III | IV | V | VI ]
[ Notes | Works Cited | Appendix ]

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