THE DEFAULT WORLD, like the title, the story repays more introspective thought

THE DEFAULT WORLD
NAOMI KANAKIA
Amethyst Editions (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A trans woman sets out to exploit a group of wealthy roommates, only to fall under the spell of their glamorous, hedonistic lifestyle in tech-bubble San Francisco.

Years after fleeing San Francisco and getting sober, Jhanvi has made a life for herself working at a grocery co-op and saving for her surgeries. But when her friend (and sometimes more) Henry mentions that he and his techie festival-goer friends spent $100,000 to transform a warehouse basement into a sex dungeon, Jhanvi starts wondering if there’s a way to exploit these gullible idiots. She returns to San Francisco, hatching a plan to marry Henry for his company’s generous healthcare benefits.

Jhanvi enters a world of beautiful, decadent fire eaters and their lavish sex parties. But as her pretensions to cynicism and control start to fade, she develops a Gatsbyesque attraction to these happy young people and their bold claims of unconditional love. But do any of her privileged new friends really like or accept her? Her financial needs expose the limits of a community built on limitless self-expression, and soon she has to choose between doing what’s right, and doing what’s right for her.

This darkly funny novel skewers privileged leftist millennial tech culture, and asks whether "found family" is just another of the 21st-century's broken promises.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Goals and aspirations are like morals and principles: without them you're adrift, with them you're at risk, under their spell you're doomed. Stop introspecting and examining yourself, your mental construct, your inner dialogue, and see how fast the fall from the moral high ground comes.

Surfaces aren't very pretty after you've experienced what Jhanvi has. All that energy to become a surface version of a fantasy she's had locked in her head until it's eaten every other thought in there. Like Saltburn, like The Talented Mr. Ripley, this is open to a facile reading of "how awful these rich scum are" followed by "what a prick this grifter is."

Don't stop there.

How horrible a world do we live in when this kind of grift is the only way to get what that very world has conditioned you to think you want?

The dimwitted techies are awful; Jhanvi is horrible; but who here hasn't bought into the surface glamour of the world as it points its skeletal finger directly at your core of lack and absence, to say "fill that this way to be truly full at last?" It's seductive because it sounds easy and we want it to be true. It's neither. This is the beating heart of Author Kanakia's story.

The sheer chutzpah of writing across race and class and hotness boundaries about the things that both cross and reinforce those boundaries in such a direct narrative voice! That it comes out of a deeply unreliable narrator's mind. That it's entitled "The Default World." That Jhanvi's completely sure she's Right. That she never tips her hand...you can read Author Kanakia's story on any level you meet it at, come away sure that's The Right Way to see it, and no one can tell you otherwise. That is craft at an unusually high level.

Beware of Being Right. It is addictive and destructive and utterly blindingly grotesquely wrong.

I'm aware that a lot of people found this a challenging story to accept. I think that's excellent. I assure you Jhanvi is only fictionalized, not fictional. She's alive and well and grifting her heart out in reality more certainly now than ever when trans folk are under attack in 2025-Felonious-Yam Murruhkuh. I say, good on ya babay and more power to you in the quest to become yourself.

The big problem for the Jhanvis of the world, the Henrys and Katies of the world is discovering you *are* yourself already, and you don't like that person.

So why didn't I finish the book off with the rest of that fifth star? Because setting the story in the Aughties felt like Author Kanakia wanted to be safe, putting it at a distance. That was uncharacteristically cheap. But there's nothing to say others will feel that way.