You don’t need me to tell you that the past couple of weeks have been terrible for a multitude of reasons including climate disaster, mass destruction by the Trump administration, and regular old end of January blues. But over the past two weekends I was able to tune out the chaos of the world for a while to watch the first two episodes of season two of Apple TV’s series Severance with my whole brain, no eye on news alerts.
Severance isn’t your typical escapist pleasure watch. In fact, its setting is dreary, its tone is paranoid, and its corporate drones are tortured (literally). But it is also fast paced and well-acted and immersive in the best way. It’s the kind of particularly well told story that makes me forget that I have a body or a phone, which is really all I’m seeking right now.
How terrible yet edifying to admit that for me, escapist art is anything that makes me forget about my phone for a while.
We’re in a moment (another one) when escapism looks more appealing than ever, and I’m often asked for escapist book recommendations. They usually come in a few varieties: you’ve got your fantasy novels (The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman is so lovely to get lost in) your space operas in which you can envision other worlds and other lives far from our home planet (can’t go wrong with Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice series), your rom-coms (there is never a bad time to read Jasmine Guillory) in which a happy ending is guaranteed, your page-turning thrillers (Sara Sligar’s Vantage Point is sending me).
What I encourage you to do is follow your bliss. Find the art that will take you out of the confines of your present moment but don’t get mired down in categories.
And there are beach reads, that amorphous term for the kind of novel in which nothing too tragic happens, or tragic things happen but the narrative still ends on a hopeful note (Margot’s Got Money Problems by Rufi Thorpe is a perfect example, as is Four Squares by Bobby Finger). These categories are tried and true for a reason: they take me out of myself, and you may feel the same.
But I’m still surprised when I find myself escaping into the kinds of books that are overtly political and don’t shy away from realistically showing the world in all its cruelty. These are not sci-fi dystopias, just slices of the fucked up world we live in. I’m thinking particularly of how wrapped up I was in Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted, a novel that focuses on the struggles of a group of employees of a big box store that feels a lot like Target. I’m also thinking of my favorite novel of 2023, Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad’s devastating yet entirely gripping novel about a group of Arab actors putting on a production of Hamlet in the West Bank.
I’ve also found myself gravitating towards books that blend fact and fiction (but not in an autofictional way). These novels aren’t set on different planets and they’re more complicated than straight historical fiction; they take place in worlds that seem very similar to our own, but with a few alterations that skew the reader’s perceptions in a discomfiting but captivating way. 2023 had a spate of books that were epic in scope but rooted in reality: Ed Park’s Same Bed, Different Dreams, Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, Justin Torres’s Blackouts, and Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac (and also his previous novel, When We Cease To Understand the World) among others. They make my social media feeds feel entirely irrelevant, which is a compliment of the highest order.
What I encourage you to do is follow your bliss. Find the art that will take you out of the confines of your present moment but don’t get mired down in categories. Escapism looks like different things to different people, and sometimes what invigorates me is darker and moodier than the fare that has been traditionally touted as escapist literature. You might feel the same.
We have so much work we must do in the current moment. There is mutual aid to be administered, neighbors to be protected and senators to be pestered. When you have some time to devote to smoothing out the wrinkles in your brain, you deserve to find art that astounds and beguiles you, so much so that you can tune out any other distractions, at least for a little while.
