Nada Alic’s "Bad Thoughts"
by Blake Levario
The characters in Nada Alic’s Bad Thoughts just want to feel something. They simulate home invasions. They leave their jobs. They live with their exes and try to find enlightenment. They give up, they check email, attempt to convince themselves of something, anything. They judge everything around them and, somehow, remind you that you aren’t so different. They hold up a mirror to you.
The 14 stories in Alic’s collection are full of the social ills that come with living online. A paragraph will have you feeling dread, loneliness, and alienation, only to make you laugh after a character watches a YouTube video where the creator tells them to like and subscribe. In the story “Tug, Release, Spin,” the protagonist asks herself if hell is the constant reviewing of one’s own social media profile to remind yourself that you exist. And then the character goes on to say that they, “...liked being contained safely inside a grid, a living avatar of a self.” It’s a hellscape, and the main characters can’t help but fall prey to it—you want to reach in and save the protagonists from themselves, even though you realize you're occupying the same space.
Between most of the stories are small sections that read like a series of Tweets or poems. The statements feel like microcosms of the stories themselves: just a series of bad thoughts, one after the other. They do an excellent job of capturing that feeling of a fleeting attention span when you scroll through social media—you speak in quips and you do your little bits and then you keep moving on with your life.
I think Alic was able to capture the dark authenticity of the worst of our thoughts, and still remain sincere and funny. The characters don’t attempt to be likable, but that makes them feel real. I was reminded of character’s in Lorrie Moore stories when reading this collection—the way that they are sharp and say things that are so painfully true that it’s funny in that weird devastating kind of way. The humor is devastating and the devastation is palpable. It feels good to read something that doesn’t try to be prescriptive of the times we’re living in—it just tells you how it is, and then it lets you sit in that feeling.
Blake Levario writes poems and exists. Follow him on Twitter @based_sicilian