Losing touch with Oakland
Welcome to Week 2 of Touch Week. That’s right—we’re extending last week’s theme in our “Six Senses of Oakland” membership drive. Read more about the drive here. Check out other Six Senses stories here. Caress that subscribe button here.
Early in ORB’s formation, we started asking: What is The Novel of Oakland? Is there a Great Oakland Novel? I’m not sure we have an answer; I’m not sure there is an answer. But in the meantime, we decided to flip it and ask an easier question: What is the Oakland of novels?
I chose Jenny Xie’s 2023 novel, Holding Pattern, from the “Novels Set in Oakland” Wikipedia page, not quite at random, but almost. In part, because it’s not really about Oakland, even though most of it is set here. The protagonist moved here as a child, grew up and went to college from here, and then—in the novel—returns here to help her mother prepare to get married (so she can then leave here). But because I’m more interested in the uses that “here” is being put to than in the plot proper, I’m going to be a bad reader of the novel, and this is not, in that sense, a review. Even though the climactic final act of the novel takes place in Vegas—where the protagonists go to, in order to more or less figure their shit out—how they figure their shit out is the least interesting part of the novel to me, despite it being what is most interesting to Jenny Xie’s novel Holding Pattern. (Apologies to Jenny Xie’s novel Holding Pattern.)
What I am interested in is how being not really about Oakland but set here actually is a way of being about Oakland, a way of construing what Oakland is and is for. This is something that we are likely to immediately understand with “Las Vegas,” a sense of place that gets constructed as a symbolic shorthand and backdrop in movies or novels like this one, as a place where characters from other places can go to figure their shit out, before returning to the place they are really from. As such, Vegas ceases to be a place where people live, now, and becomes a dream, a sojourn, a babylon, a myth. It becomes—precisely as the Vegas industrial Complex would like it to be—a place solely construed by the service it provides to a particular kind of consumer tourist.
The Oakland that the protagonist of this novel grew up in and returns to—but will not, one feels safe in presuming, live in—no longer has much there, there, and less of it every day. It’s a place to go back to and find transformed (or the place you transform yourself in order to leave): “The Laurel District of my childhood, sleepy and residential, was already disappearing,” as she notes, in a passage that captures the vibe, “making way for farm-to-table brunch spots and craft beer dens populated by hip parents and their well-dressed babies.” Oakland is a past place, or passed, a repository of memories of what used to be there from your childhood. When actual locations are evoked, the reference point is usually the ghosts of what it was: a building “that had once been coworking offices” is also the place where, “in high school, I’d peed in the front courtyard out of desperation after leaving a show on Telegraph Avenue.” Or a storefront “with brown butcher paper taped to the windows” on which “the number of the psychic who used to occupy the building was still painted on the glass” is typical, just as “a West Oakland co-op” is likely to be described as “converted from a former packing warehouse for Dolly’s Sweets, a now-defunct cookie company.”
The place the protagonist returns to, then, is always lodged in a past that is nevertheless gone. Berkeley, Marin, and Patagonia-fleeceland in the greater Silicon Valley are all gently caricatured, but they come into sharper visual focus as a consequence of that attention; the novel’s Oakland, by contrast, is always indistinct, caught between being being gone and lost to memory or one of the last few things that is still unchanged by time, and thus identical with memories: the Victorians, the ivy, or some cans no one cleans up (until someone cleans them up, as they soon surely will).
On its own terms, Holding Pattern is a social realist novel about intergenerational diasporic family trauma being transcended into forgiveness, using “touch” as its guiding metaphor. To put it much too simply, and kind of wrongly, but I don’t care: It’s a kind of Hamlet where the father wasn’t so much murdered as just lives in another city post-divorce, and where the ending wasn’t so much everybody getting murdered as “what if parent and child had a conversation and achieved some measure of understanding.” It is not, in that sense, very much like Hamlet, except insofar as all stories are like Hamlet when they are the story of a grown child coming home to find the mother remarrying, feeling weird about that, and vacillating about what to do for a really long time before finally taking action. That is what this story is about: She has returned to California from her East Coast school—freshly broken up with her East Coast boyfriend—to help her long-divorced mother get ready to marry a tech CEO, and also, in a variety of ways, to get away from Oakland. And so, they go to Marin to buy dresses, to the Outer Sunset for a barbecue with tech executives, and eventually to Vegas for a bachelorette party. After the Big Sur wedding, her mother will “leave the neighborhood for good,” and it bothers our protagonist that her mother’s remarriage really does seem like it’s for the good. Like Hamlet, she doesn’t want it to be. When she finds both her mother and Oakland much changed, she is naturally, initially unsettled by (and resistant to) the idea that these changes are for the better.
Now, this is all well and good. But I started to get mad at the novel—and I started to get defensive about it, as a local-identifying reader—when I decided that it was not only positioning her as essentially wrong to feel this way, but that it also tracks her progress and healing in her process of getting over it.
“Oakland” is the name of the thing you remember from growing up in it, but which gets increasingly lost and isolated in that memory, as it becomes a there that is less and less there, now.
The California our protagonist returns to, in Oakland, is a place of a new technological discipline. She finds this unsettling. For example, her mother has a self-improvement gadget which shocks her when she reaches for food—literally gives her an electric shock—the kind of very specifically dystopian reflection of a kind of consumer tech that we are all well aware of, here and now (even if the protagonist recognizes that it mirrors her mother’s “rationed childhood in Shanghai,” in a way that disturbs her, and us). That a childhood trauma in the old country has become an adult’s empowered choice in the new, techified Bay Area is not a welcome discovery for the protagonist, just as she is disturbed and unsettled to find her mother so at home in the foreign place that post-tech boom Oakland has become. By the same token, she is not happy that her mother’s Claudius—a genial fella named Brian—turns out to be an utterly harmonious and positive presence in her life. He has not only helped her stop drinking, but he threatens to make her happy and secure. In this sense, when it bothers our protagonist that her mother has stopped drinking and gotten in shape with Brian—that her mother has become shockingly fit and healthy, and happy—this distress eventually comes into focus as an essentially selfish response that she needs to get over (and does). As the novel unspools her issues (and eventually resolves them), she finds her mother’s happiness with Brian to reflect the distressing thought that she was never enough for her mother, when they were unhappy together, when she was growing up, in Oakland. This becomes the problem she works to solve, an attachment to a childhood place she must, it turns out, give up.
The 1990s Oakland of her childhood memories (after she and her mother left Anaheim behind with her philandering father) is soundtracked by the Backstreet Boys and Alanis Morissette, and the last moment before The Internet came to feel like it defined the place’s specificity. To come “back home,” then, is not only to find mom literally fucking a tech guy, and being improved by it, but to find the Bay Area’s techification “fixing” her childhood home out of existence. And in that sense, it’s a very familiar, even archetypal problem: the child who leaves home, for school and self-realization, only to belatedly discover that their parent, too, will begin growing up and changing. That this unsettles the narcissistic child squatting at the core of any adult, who desires, deep down, to believe the other is just an expression of you and your needs. This is the Hamlet of it all: It’s good for you to become independent of your parents, but for the parents to become independent of you? That’s something else.
In this novel’s version of that archetype, “Oakland” is the name of the thing you remember from growing up in it, but which gets increasingly lost and isolated in that memory, as it becomes a there that is less and less there, now. In this novel, the name of that change is “tech,” though more specifically it’s a capitalist structure which profits by commodifying touch and affection. The novel gets us there by portraying the influencer economy of pet content producers (a subplot I found pretty tedious), but also through a “cuddle app,” called Midas Touch in the novel, but which turns out to be similar to a kind of not-quite-sex-work that author herself has done, and which she has been fascinated with for a long time, as she has written elsewhere. To address “skin hunger, a famine exacerbated by technology and Americans’ near criminalization of touch,” as the novel’s protagonist somewhat advertorially explains, what if there were, basically, a nonsexual DoorDash-but-for-cuddling?
It would, it turns out, mostly be a bad thing. It would be the kind of mistake that grief or wounded attachments predictably lead a person to make. After all, grief is a kind of mistake, in hyperrationalist terms—why haven’t you gotten over it yet? being the demand of five-stages discourse—but, of course, it’s a mistake that no one really blames you for making, that grieving people are, in a sense, unable to avoid making. “Recovery” is the name for the process by which you become a person who no longer needs to recover, after all, but you do need to recover, first, in order to get there. Similarly, the cuddle app in the novel—not all that different from any other hookup app, even if the payoff is less explicitly sexual than a simple desire for security and companionship—is presented as exactly the kind of sympathetic, inevitable “wrong turn” one might make, in a moment of emotional vulnerability, as when the protagonist fucks some random, fairly unappealing dude at a random, fairly unappealing West Oakland party. There is no shame, here, as such. But it is presented as a kind of (again, Hamlet-esque) playacting by a protagonist who can’t seem to get over the loss of the thing being grieved, who is stuck, and who should, who will need to, and who will.
In this sense, it’s not a good thing, per se, that there’s no there there in Oakland. It’s sad. But it’s also something whose reality the protagonist must grow to accept, and grow by learning to accept. At its emotional core, the book is about attachments to things you must learn to live without: the husband you rightly divorced, the boyfriend who broke up with you, or the wife whose death is an unavoidable and permanent reality. But while the reader might expect these people to enter the narrative at some point, it might also be exactly the point that they do not. The ex-boyfriend defies Chekhov and remains offscreen (though on the screens of her Instagram, where she struggles to stop stalking him); the father only briefly pops up in a disappointingly insubstantial phone call, and otherwise stays in Anaheim. They are not coming back, and, in their absence, you perhaps use other things as temporary substitutes, until you no longer need to. Growth, healing, and togetherness are to be found in that acceptance.
Because the novel is not really about Oakland, “Oakland” remains the kind of backdrop the book requires to be projected onto the world by the needs of the characters. This narcissistic ahistoricity makes it a little hard to figure out when it takes place, somewhat appropriately. There’s no trace of the pandemic in it, and Lime scooters are briefly referenced (the company pulled out in 2021 but returned last year), which makes it, vaguely, in and of the late 20-teens, a time when tech was not nearly as obviously fascist as it is now. I think it’s basically whenever it was that those people who put “I bought it before Elon went crazy” stickers on their Teslas imagine they are referring to. As such, the protagonist can scroll Twitter without compunction, since it is not yet X, The Über Alles App. And it makes sense that a book published in 2023 (and obviously written earlier) sees the ascendance of Big Tech as a mixed bag, but not an apocalyptic one. But reading it in 2026 makes the benign gentleness of Big Tech as glaring as it makes the overly caricatured hegemony of the Woke Bay Area something devoutly to be wished for. This is a novel that sees liberals as a little embarrassing—a friend is described as “teaching yoga and drums at a camp in Berkeley for children with names like Rainer and Truth”—but also sees “tech” as essentially coextensive with those very same woke liberals.
That complacency means that it only “critiques” Big Tech in the most toothless ways. We are all on our phones now, as the novel reminds us that we already know, so that’s why we have a new phone thing for skin hunger. And, okay, sure, but it’s a little on the nose, just like Burning Man, Patagonia fleeces, disruption, and all the other 2015 tropes are strangely unaged, unchanged by the completion of the (subsequent) fascist turn. In this sense, even if the novel is spiritually located in the late-teens boom times, it doesn’t quite take place during the first Trump administration. Instead, because it was finished and published during the Biden administration—when tech fascism could seem to have receded, making its absence from the novel unremarkable—the tech stepdad can actually just be a basically good dude. The protagonist daughter’s work with the cuddle app—a kind of superficially desexualized sex work—even mirrors the mother’s arrangement with Brian (in the way that parents never tell their children about how they actually fuck their new spouse). It’s a neat parallel, if too neat: There is no trace of how the tech sector might fuck you back.
Brian’s app, by the way, is called Wayfindr, and it helps “people discover hidden gems on their way from point A to point B, which supports local businesses and ultimately strengthens the community.” Our protagonist notes that it’s “a flippant way of describing gentrification,” and it clearly is, but when she describes how it “leverages personal data and real-time location to herd people into buying lattes or visiting the zoo,” this feels as benign as Brian himself. He’s not a Palantir executive, nor filling the world with AI sludge; he’s just a guy making an app, asking you to support local businesses, and making your mother happier than you ever could.
Perhaps the efficiency of his app is what should be more unsettling about it (and what unsettlingly isn’t). It’s an app whose purpose is to render unnecessary the in-between spaces one might otherwise wander and get lost in. In this sense, by the way, the Lake Merritt section of the novel is the most Oakland part of it, a hungover run that the daughter goes on with her mother’s husband-to-be where they talk about apps and community. And they rather mysteriously wake up in the house in the Laurel and then start their run four miles away, at the lake. In terms of narrative efficiency, it makes sense to blur the space between: Xie is telling a story about madeup characters, and it’s more efficient to put the lake directly adjacent to the childhood home (just as Brian’s app “redraw[s] the map” to boost sales of local Starbucks). That these places are not close to each other in reality would matter only if this were a novel about the reality of this place, which it is not. And isn’t this exactly how we remember the geographies of our childhood? Isn’t that exactly how the forgettable spaces between the places—that you actually cathect onto—recede and vanish?
It’s also how Oakland disappears in this novel, an Oakland which—as Alexis Madrigal has most recently described—has always been economically, politically, and even environmentally constructed through its infrastructural adjacency: “The Pacific Circuit” is a way of situating Oakland, as a built and lived place, by reference to the chains of commerce and shipping and manufacture that connected it to the world, and still do. Oakland is where the railroad ends and the Pacific begins, but it’s particularly the place where the people who mind the machinery and drive the trucks live. It’s this sense of place that disappears—whether by seeing Oakland as a place where the there no longer is, or by seeing like an app, through which what is becomes a placeholder for the efficient economy that will replace it—in a novel set in an Oakland composed as background.
And in a way, I think the novel knows it, even if it has to officially forget it. After her run, after the talk and the exercise and the experience of Oakland, as an actual, lived place, the narrator throws up. “I was a conduit, a hose of poison,” she says. “When I was empty, I flushed it away.” As Oakland becomes a place you return to and find not just changed but flushed away, empty, it becomes a site for memories that, in their gone-ness, represent precisely all the lost love objects that must be given up and grieved. Healing, in these terms, is the process by which you grow to no longer want what no longer is. It’s how you learn to stop worrying and love gentrification (before you move back to New York, for good).
Holding Pattern, by Jennie Xie. Penguin Publishing Group; 288 pp.; June 2024.