Joel Cox: 'It's fine to have jerks in stories, but you have to have something that makes the reader keep reading'

About this episode

Joel Cox discusses his short story 'Variable Rewards' and the themes of disconnection in modern suburban life influenced by social media and AI.

We've heard from Diana Evans and Bruna Martini already in this Spring series of podcasts, and we'll be welcoming Takiguchi Yūshō and the translator Jesse Kirkwood, and Holly Edwards over the next couple of weeks. But this podcast is devoted to Joel Cox and Variable Rewards. Cox explains that this short story came out of his own move to the suburbs and his love for Richard Yates's novel Revolutionary Road. "A few months into living in the suburbs," he recalls, "I was thinking this story sounds really familiar." But while Yates's characters were all members of the Rotary club and hanging out at cocktail parties, in the 21st century the suburbs have become far more fragmented. "I couldn't tell you the name of our neighbours, probably for the last ten years," Cox admits. "So you're living in this strange world where you're in a village, or the simulation of a New York village, that's in the middle of nowhere, where you don't know anyone." This sense of disconnection is amplified by social media, he continues, which allows people to "project the image of the life you want to live, even if you're not really living it". And it's intensified by the wave of redundancies, as companies…

People in this episode

Guest: Joel Cox

Topics covered

• suburban life
• disconnection
• social media
• AI impact
• storytelling
• character development

Keywords

• suburbs
• disconnection
• social media
• AI
• storytelling
• Revolutionary Road
• character
• fragmentation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: AI

Books & works: Revolutionary Road

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