Blob: A Love Story
By Maggie Su
HarperCollins Publishers
In one sense, Maggie Su’s debut novel tells an old story about a young Taiwanese-American woman who creates a human companion out of a blob she finds outside a bar.
It’s a modern take on Frankenstein or of the Golem, exploring the limits of how a creator can shape a humanlike creation once it acquires agency.
In another sense, the ironically subtitled novel, Blob: A Love Story (echoing the wink in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story title) reads like the real-life stories about how AI and tech platforms are matching us with algorithmic-derived substitutes for human companionship: Like the true-story ChatGPT boyfriend/“lover” in this novelistic New York Times story by Kashmir Hill. Or the solar-powered companion for a sickly child in Kazuo Ishiguro’s prescient 2021 novel Klara and the Sun.
So a question accompanies the joyride of reading Su’s fast-paced and at times harrowing tale: Is this an old story or a new one?
The book’s protagonist, Vi, is stuck in an alienating service job at a hotel. She’s wrestling with who she is (as a child of mixed parentage), how she fits into society, and how to make meaningful connections with other people.
The blob (a “beige gelatin splotch the size of a dinner plate") that Vi discovers beside a trash can outside the dive bar gradually grows appendages and human-like senses. Vi guides Bob the Blob through personality development as it becomes her potential partner. She eventually takes it to meet the family (my favorite scene), in which Bob becomes a mirror for how Vi relates to her parents and brother. Even as she keeps Bob the Blob locked in her apartment during the day, the outside world (filtered through TV shows) brings its influences into the mix, complicating Vi’s quest to create the ideal boyfriend.
And of course, Bob the Blob can’t stay locked up forever.
Those contours of the story are predictable. The challenge in adapting time-tested narrative frames like this one lies in exploring the questions they raise in new ways. Here, Su is exploring her own experiences growing up Taiwanese-American in the Midwest, adding her voice to an evolving Asian-American literature on modern identity.
In an interview on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program, Su said she also was exploring the alienation and isolation that consumed people in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Blob began as a short story before blobbing into a novel.
“I was thinking a lot about how unlikely connections, especially romantic connections, seemed to me” at the time, Su recalled. “And I thought about what might happen if you could kind of create your own perfect partner, and what the problems that might ensue from that.”
Su said she took inspiration from the way Jordan Peele told a racial-identity and agency story through the framework of a classic horror film in Get Out.
“I like the idea of the body as being something that can be shaped and transformed and taken,” Su said. “Do we have agency over our body? Or is our body kind of subject to these power structures that we are kind of born within?”
In that sense the answer to the question — is this an old story or a new one? — is … yes. It’s both. Blob arrives at an ideal time for fiction to do its job: Help us navigate modern challenges and reflect on what makes us human through updated takes on classic literature, the way that, say, religion helps us understand the modern world by mining and updating resilient ancient stories. It explores ancient questions about humanity in the context of modern technological and ethnic evolution.
Bob the Blob is, by nature, a character of limited depth. In the end, Blob is really Vi’s story. By trying to shape another human being from a blob, Vi comes to see other people in fresh ways, through his eyes. As she seeks to construct a "real" life with Bob, her “past” life of alienation comes into focus.
At her hotel desk job, for instance, she suddenly notices her surroundings. She starts seeing the people with whom she interacts as ... people, for instance.
I have three hours alone at the desk, and for once I don't open up solitaire. I look around the hotel instead and study it like a stranger. I want to know how Bob might see the blue-and-gold-patterned carpet, the spider plants in the lobby with their greedy offshoots reaching for the windows. As the sun comes up over the pool and reflects orange and red in the water ... I think about the guests asleep in their beds. How little I know about their lives ....
During my first week, Rachel asked me if I ever got curious about the guests. We had just finished checking in a mother and daughter who were both openly crying, tears and snot running down their faces. Rachel offered them tissues as she listed off our business center hours.
“I just want to know what happened," Rachel said after they shuffled away, sniffling, to the elevator. "Don't you?" I didn't at the time. Now, I wonder.
In trying to develop Bob out of a blob, Vi ends up discovering how to make her own meaningful human connections. That requires making peace with her complex identity and learning how to become a full human being herself — in a way that a blob, or a Golem or a chatbot, ultimately cannot.
In tapping an old framework for Blob, Su may have added a new twist to the modern debate over quasi-human AI. Vi’s failed quest to create a human connection through a blob becomes her route to discovering her own humanity. That raises a new question: Can we learn humanity through interacting with technological impersonations of it? That may turn the Frankenstein roots of the chatbot nightmare trope into a more optimistic take on our potential to emerge more human, not less, from the technological assault on our attention and autonomy.
At least that’s what I wish to believe. Maggie Su’s Blob gives us reason to hold onto hope that old stories can take on new, unexpected endings.
Click on the video below to watch the full conversation with author Maggie Su on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”
