"A Short Film About Disappointment" is the 2018 debut novel by Joshua Mattson. It is an absurdist science-fiction novel, set in a near future that might be called a dystopia. It reminded me of some of Kurt Vonnegut's works, especially 1970s novels like Breakfast of Champions or Slapstick.
The book revolves around a gimmick, of sorts. The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Noah Body, is a movie reviewer for a content aggregator, and each chapter is a movie review. This makes the book easy to read--the chapters are mostly around 2 to 4 pages. Noah Body often describes the movies in paragraphs, and the rest of the chapter is a rant or complaint about his own life, living in what turns out to be a post-apocalyptic Chicago. Someone used a virus to crash the internet, global warming has displaced populations, and the US is ruled(?) by something called The Transit Authority. Bizarre art films seem to be one of society's main pastimes. At least, that seems to be the situation, it is hard to tell because the world building is confined to asides as Noah Body complains about being what is, more or less, a millennial gig worker. The format seems to remind me of another literary precedent: the filmography of James O Incandenza in infinite jest, where a list of absurd movies is used, obliquely, to fill the reader in on backstory to the novel's plot and world.
When I first saw this book at The Dollar Tree, I think during the course of a trip to the bank to get some quarters so I could do my laundry, I thought "This book is for me!". After all, writing reviews that are actually snippets of my own life is kind of my shtick, especially when they show the life of a shiftless gig economy worker. So I liked the premise. My problem with the book is I feel it should have gone more one way or the other. The gimmick of only describing movies is disrupted by descriptions of Noah Body's life, but also, those descriptions are not quite clear enough to follow what is going on, or care about the characters. There are many things mentioned in the book, and it isn't clear whether they are part of the book's plot, social commentary, or just fanciful jokes. So while I thought the premise of the book was engaging and novel, I was not totally sold on the execution.