Instead of doomscrolling, have a laugh at these Black Mirror-esque stories

SATIRE
Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere
Alex Cothren
Pink Shorts Press, $32.99

In his novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Vladimir Nabokov spoke of “parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest regions of serious emotion”. When a writer takes a worn-out or dead style and reanimates it through the fun of formal play and subversion, they combine their instinct for mockery with pathos (Nabokov described this approach as a “clown developing wings”).

My ideal parodist charms with a spirited voice and funny representations, before gradually revealing the seriousness behind their burlesques. What separates the satirist from the comedian is the texture of the laughter invoked, found not in just punchlines and observational digs, but in the equally amusing and horrifying lens through the world is portrayed.

Australian writer Alex Cothren’s short-story collection Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere arises from the American satirical tradition, whose most visible practitioners are George Saunders and Thomas Pynchon. Like Cothren, these writers combine jaunty, sparkling surfaces with a darkly ironic commentary. They render injustice and suffering through cartoonish exaggerations and flights of fancy. And although the satirist wields the grotesque and the unreal, these distortions have the strange effect of making their critique more acutely felt.

Cothren’s satirical sketches use the springboard of parody to better understand the follies of vice. In this collection, Cothren contorts various aspects of contemporary Australia so that they are both recognisable and monstrous. They often synergise their subjects — environmental decline, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, the paranoid imagination — with form by adopting false documents to explore these absurdist premises.

In The Royal Commission into the Koala Repopulation Scheme, a transcript documents a hilarious back-and-forth between a policy adviser and commissioner regarding an abusive proposal, worthy of Jonathan Swift, to avoid the imminent extinction of koalas.

Author Alex Cothren uses parody to better understand the follies of vice.Credit: Maria Isabel Suarez Ospina

Similarly, the titular Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere cannibalises the language and structure of an academic essay to report how several deaths at an unnamed Australian university affect its casual workforce and symbolises the “toxic work conditions created by the neoliberalist turn in tertiary education”. By drawing from legitimate research alongside the uncomfortable admission that the casual staff members jostling for a full-time job saw the deaths “not as tragedies but instead welcome opportunities for advancement:, Cothren imbues the story with a sense of sociopolitical engagement beyond the surface-level frivolity.

When it was first published in Overland, Cothren’s takedown of Melbourne pokies rooms, Ocean Paradise was accompanied by an image of a supposedly real gaming staff report from which the story adopts its opening. In Cothren’s hands, this gaming report becomes a haunting, in which the forsaken victims of greedy managers and crooked machines return to avenge themselves.

Satire has a long crossover with speculative fiction. Many famous dystopias, for example, amplify whichever anxieties about the technological, ecological, or sociopolitical nightmares that were keeping their writers up at night. Satire, in other words, evokes dread as much as laughter.

Cothren’s stories often imagine near futures in which, for example, a dead mother becomes a holographic (and creepy) presence in a grieving family home, or a widower lives in isolation, dependent on drone deliveries to keep him alive.

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But of all the speculative stories, Empathy International is my pick. It begins with a Sydneysider visiting a type of neuro-technology company that allows her to vicariously experience the life of a famine-stricken woman in Africa. All of this is done to jumpstart her empathy, whittled down by the oversaturation of spectacles of atrocity.

What makes Empathy International so lasting in my mind, is twofold: it represents an ironic battle against “compassion fatigue” by middle-class Sydneysiders who make themselves feel better by witnessing suffering, but this privileged access to suffering at a distance also makes no contribution to actually improving the lives of those with whom they link.

It’s worth acknowledging that Cothren’s collection has been released by new indie publisher Pink Shorts Press, from South Australia. This is particularly noteworthy given the malaise surrounding Australian publishing, with the recent buying up of Australian publishers by larger transnational corporations.

Our reading is influenced by these market forces, by the negotiations and predictions occurring in the wings, out of sight of the everyday reader. Satire, as a counter-logic that forces us to confront aspects of ourselves, is always a risky business. So it’s heartening to see a publisher still willing to take those risks.

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