The protagonist of Sheena Patel’s corrosive, sensible debut, a 30-year-old arts freelancer residing in south London, is fanatical about two people: “the person I need to be with” and “the girl I'm obsessive about”, who can also be having an affair with “the person I need to be with”. The protagonist’s relationship with “the person I need to be with”, a extremely esteemed artist, began off with a fan letter she despatched him. Years later, she nonetheless can't extricate herself from the asymmetrical affair that has developed – one through which she needs him sufficient to obliterate most different facets of her life, and he holds her at arm’s size.
This isn't the sort of relationship the place the gamers stay wilfully blind to its caustic nature. The protagonist faces into the flames. She tells herself: “By the very fact of his gender you might be basically dismissed and since you are asking for his vulnerability, you change into the enemy, you might be handled as a hostile invader, with suspicion, surveyed as a relentless high-level menace and you can be suppressed or defeated.” It units up a well-known sort of energy dynamic, one established alongside gender traces. To forestall the terrible chance of his personal debasement, “the person I need to be with” – serially untrue, far older than the protagonist – requires that she undergo him, that she stays nothing greater than a vessel by way of which his personal company can circulation.
Patel additionally provides one other very up to date lens by which to evaluate interpersonal energy dynamics. For each relationship within the novel, there may be the fan and there may be their object of devotion. A few of these dynamics play out on social media, some within the flesh. It will be a disservice to name I’m a Fan a social-media novel, as a result of the plot is a lot extra ramified and very important than the chilly flat floor of a display screen would permit for. The objects of devotion want their followers like a fireplace wants gas. The followers love their objects of devotion as a result of they need to be them; they need to cannibalise them. However it's a extra complicated matrix than that. For fandom intersects in distinctive methods with different pervasive structural techniques, particularly race and gender. A person with energy carries extra clout than a lady with energy; a white feminine movie star can simply obtain larger status than Black or ethnic-minority celebrities.
Daily, the protagonist spends hours scrutinising the manicured Instagram of “the girl I'm obsessive about”, a white American influencer with a shiny life and a six-figure guide advance. This infatuation offers Patel with the chance to critique the best way whiteness operates on social media platforms. “The nearer you might be to whiteness,” says her protagonist, “the higher, extra lovely you might be regarded, the extra suited to energy you might be.” On this respect, I’m a Fan has shut parallels with Jasmine Lee-Jones’s debut play Seven Strategies of Killing Kylie Jenner. As a substitute of Instagram, Lee-Jones makes use of Twitter because the medium for the play’s younger Black protagonist, Cleo, to carry out her ecstatic outrage in response to the information that Jenner, that virtually famous-from-birth white movie star, was declared the “world’s youngest self-made billionaire” by Forbes journal.
The protagonist additionally has her personal one-man fanbase: the long-term boyfriend she has lived with throughout her secret affair, who's adoring and trustworthy, even though she admits to “publicly mock[ing] his incapability to fuck me, to dominate me the best way I need him to”. And he or she understands that she’s going to wish a complete load extra followers if she’s to make any headway in her desired profession as a author. For, as a second-generation immigrant, she should search favour in a “cultural system which excludes us” by the use of “an algorithm not constructed by us, for a platform not designed for us”.
The narrative is split into quick chapters whose fatuous titles – “i'd look harmless however i screenshot lots” or “viennetta actually is the epitome of luxurious” – work purposefully towards the seriousness of the narrative and the protagonist’s enraged and churning inside state. The determined, cornered power of the narrative voice in I’m a Fan is like nothing else I’ve learn. Each phrase is fought for, its potential for violence acknowledged: if the protagonist doesn't use them to harm others, they may find yourself destroying her.
Patel affords no manner out from the brutal area of fandom into which she organises human life. However what makes I’m a Fanso profitable is the protagonist’s capability to interpret and critique the toxicity of those constructions at the same time as she is caught inside them. She recognises, with shattering readability, that if she goes on like this she may “transform the person I need to be with in all of the methods I don’t need to be”.
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