Friends With Health Benefits

I read Naomi Kanakia's "The Default World"

“No, no, I’m not gonna let you get away with that. The default world is actually better at helping people than these guys. Like, the default world knows you can have excitement or security, but you can’t have both. People who help you out when you’re in trouble? That’s your real-world community. For me, that means my family, it means Indian people, it means trans people. But community comes with rules. Like, my parents helped me, but they were like, We don’t want to get ostracized by our relatives, so let’s keep your transition quiet. Other trans people helped me, but they were like, Here, abandon all ambitions and work this shitty job because it’s the best you can hope for. If you take someone’s help, you give up your freedom. That’s the rule.

“But friendship is different,” Jhanvi continued. “That’s all about having fun. And having a bunch of responsibilities isn’t fun. So yeah, you might help your friend move apartments or something, but if a friend is poor or sad or ugly or unfortunate or sick or disabled or just plain boring, then you drift away from them. And yeah, that sucks, but that’s exactly why friendship is so brilliant and exciting and fun. Communities help each other out, but they’re also full of annoying, tedious people. Here, it’s dangerous. You have to provide value, or you’re out. And that’s why everyone here is so beautiful and interesting. …”

Creatures, recently I read a novel about a lonely grifter, one of my very favorite character types. Naomi Kanakia’s The Default World follows Jhanvi, a naive schemer, full of self- and other-loathing, full of unacknowledged longings, as she insinuates herself into a house of rich San Francisco technodwellers: “fire-eaters,” kinky, polyamorous. Police abolitionists with trust funds. The satire is broad! Jhanvi’s plan is to get one of them to marry her, so she can use their employee health benefits to fund various transition-related surgeries.

Already we’ve staked out a territory here: the line between love and use, the way we can use people in order to camouflage how much we love them and vice versa. But the interrogations of other forms of love are actually sharper than the satire on the material side of marriage. Friendship and community are the real targets here. Jhanvi is just constantly chasing after sparkly people whom she dislikes, whom she knows are not reliable or worthy of respect, who reject her and leave her literally on the street… but they’re fun, or rather, they seem like they might be fun eventually. They’re cool. The people who admire her and help her and tell her a few home truths aren’t cool. Admiration itself makes you uncool! So Jhanvi goes chasing, another foolish heart in literature.

It’s impossible not to be on her side, even as she, you know, tries to trick people into marrying her. (My partner was lowkey shocked at the obvious fondness in my voice as I detailed the lengths she goes to for her scheme!) I laughed out loud several times while reading this. I wondered if it might actually be a modern adaptation of some classic work of literature I haven’t read: Vanity Fair, things of that nature. Kanakia has a substack where she talks mostly about the Great Books, to which she’s immensely, endearingly devoted, and you can tell that Jhanvi has read a lot and learned only the worst lessons from her reading.

There are several quite intense set-pieces: the night Jhanvi spends locked out of the house, suddenly skidding from self-possessed con artist to obviously homeless drunk. (This is one of those stories about not having housekeys, like After Delores and Wigwam Bam.) The sex scene—both of the sex scenes, really, which are raw, that’s your warning—where Jhanvi experiences the totally unexpected absence of her gender dysphoria:

All the accretion of loathing and cynicism—her deeply personal, gut-level understanding of her own awfulness—even the sense that she needed wanted didn’t want deserved didn’t deserve love—all of that disappeared. Her gender identity shifted into the background, became the bedrock of herself, so she could, for once, break outwards, take in the other man, shift on his lap, make out, feel his gasps and his awe.

Mostly the book is not like that scene. It’s a rare (and brief) moment of attentiveness and attunement to someone else. Mostly the book is about Jhanvi’s defenses against self-gift, or her attempts to pretend she doesn’t want to give herself. These are the classic pleasures of the lonely-grifter narrative!

The Default World’s title names the bourgeois world, the normies, the people every self-conscious “community” thinks it’s better than. Kanakia’s satire is specific to the progressive world, but the folly and callousness she exposes are also present in every homeschooling enclave and Latin Mass “Benedict Option” network. Still, the specific satire allows her to jab in a few sharp insights I haven’t seen elsewhere, like the appeal of Ayn Rand to marginalized people: There’s a pop author here who’s a mix of Rand and Robert Heinlein, and Jhanvi and the only other nonwhite person at the “fire-eaters’” house bond over their shared, shameful love of her books. Rand promises that your intellect and competence, not your social position, forge your destiny; she promises that you can escape, build, and triumph, in spite of the judgments and clutching hands of everybody who claims you owe them something just for being born in the same crab-barrel. I was never a Randroid (I don’t like triumph; also, I never needed to be), but Jhanvi and Roshie reminded me of almost every ex-Objectivist I’ve ever known (complimentary).

I’m rambling; this is a newsletter, not an essay, it’s me rambling. I really enjoyed this! Yes, the arguments between Jhanvi and the “fire-eaters” become pretty repetitive. Each individual one is good but at least five of them should have been cut. Yes, the series of heel-face turns at the end are undermotivated, just like in a Shakespearean comedy. This time, it all turns out all right! I was willing to let it happen.

Photo of fire eating in Kandy, Sri Lanka taken by Philip Nalangan, found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license. I’m pretty sure nobody actually eats fire at any point in The Default World but you can’t have everything.