“The Ginny Suite” where it does not belong

The Ginny Suite is a dark comedy about ­bioethics that unfolds as a malleable thought experiment. On the surface, the debut novel by writer Stacy Skolnik reads like a labyrinth of poetic and philosophical musings, peppered with cheap thrills, mediocre dates, sex, and rejection, which are all too familiar in a young New Yorker’s life. Its subplots and subchapters are poignantly horny, daring yet humiliating, and disarming with a maniacal edge. At its core, The Ginny Suite is a complex speculative fiction that edges the line of realism. It unravels questions about power and control, stereotypical gender roles, biotechnical integration, and society-induced illness while pulling loose the seams of reality.

One definition of suite in Merriam-Webster is a “musical form consisting of a series of dances in the same or related keys.” As the movements are not intrinsically related, an excerpt can be excised and moved around in its singular ­elements. The Ginny Suite’s conceptual, ­nonlinear structure moves between a present-future and the narrator’s recent past. The novel has no introduction. It jumps right into a news article with a series of interjecting advertisements, the first being: “So many clouds – one Memory ­FlashSystem® 06:33AM EDT | 19,294 VIEWS New Syndrome Remains Unexplained as First Known East Coast Cases are Reported” (p. 5). Humanity is being inundated with an unexplained deadly virus called Sunnyvale syndrome alongside early stages of full AI integration, and people are taking neither seriously. Primarily affecting heterosexual women who had surgery in recent years, the syndrome’s symptoms are akin to dissociative identity disorder and also include narcolepsy, aphasia, and catatonia. From the beginning of the book, there is a sense of humor and absurdism through a stylistic juxtaposition of flashy sales slogans with the commodification of women’s ­illnesses. Even at the edge of death, women are being sold something: “No more hiding. Feel free with luminous wrinkle-free skin” (p. 7).

In the first chapter, titled “Degenerate ­Matter,” we meet the narrator. She’s self-assured though lamentable, apathetically risk-taking, and waywardly sex-driven. An antihero whose rebellions are an antidote to a rapidly plagued world, she is noted for “her instincts, her dangerous desire for simple, pleasurable sensations (which frequently morphed into distress). Eating, getting high, coming” (p. 40). We come to know her as someone who on a first date casually has sex at work and goes to a strip club on a Tuesday afternoon to talk to strangers and write like some people would go to a coffee shop. Her name is never directly given, which furthers the novel’s primary logic: dissociation. Through first-person and third-person accounts, we encounter her as a ruminating poet and writer in a handful of chapters, such as “Degenerate Matter,” “­Arrows,” and “Something About Something.” The pro­tagonist’s own writing is woven throughout and comprises the chapters “Behind the Wheel” and “The ­Enchanted Forest” in their entirety.

Skolnik’s writing style is self-deprecating, with a flirtatious schadenfreude. She’s known for challenging works, such as the poetry performance Mrsblueeyes123, where she enlists anyone willing to engage with her (now banned) Instagram posts to become muse or pawn in her game of writing. [2] Mrsblueeyes123 examines the roles of digital autonomy, the structure of poetics, and the limits of manufactured intimacy on social media. The Ginny Suite builds on these methods of ­experimentation and autofiction. Life for the protagonist exists between interjections of memories of past selves, random hookups, failed attempts at alt-lit publishing and MFAs, subway-guy episodes, and errant scrolling into someone else’s life on social media, all while scrambling to exist in the present and write. As the book moves abruptly through eleven chapters, three news articles laden with advertisements, four medical records, and a pathology report that reads more like a case file that is pages upon pages of URLs – the divisions between these text genres become blurred. Skolnik plays with the unreliable ­narrator and the structure of omission to pull out possibilities of revelation. In each movement of the novel, there is a different dance of the dislocation or emergence of self. These moments fill up the protagonist’s experience, while the voids between these events enable personas to connect an uncanny narrative. The voids articulate the instability and dislocation of self within characters and create a slow build: there is no single protagonist, but the ways in which there are multiple are not clearly defined.

In an eponymously titled chapter, we’re introduced to the ominous Ginny through a swift shift into repetitious-aphasic epistolary style, which reads like a download of logs from a “PerfectCompanion®,” an AI stay-at-home wife/sexbot:

"There was a time, he tells me, when I loved his whispers in my ear. His breath, however, is a bug crawling into the deepest parts. Maggots are generally associated with either=her=her garbage or a dead animal, but they can readily feed on almost anything organic. How to Rid Your Garden of Maggots Once a Year. What Kills Maggots Instantly. He has access to all she is and tells her every day. Gregory is in the city and Ginny sits at her chair. But she can feel something on her edges even when alone. Her imagination?" (p. 27)

The interjections of “=her=her” outlines a schism between AI’s desire for autonomy – to have creativity and independent ­thinking outside of its handler’s commands – and heteronormative performativity, the role for which she, as a stay-at-home wife/sexbot, was purchased to perform.

Wordplay and the malleability of language are central to The Ginny Suite. Skolnik’s prose holds a poetic multistability, which generates nonsingular meanings out of singular utterances. It’s what gives depth to the novel’s protagonists and characters. Yet it also goes to a place of the spasmodic hallucinations of AI. It allows for an emergence of the protagonist’s humanness but might also allow AI to emerge in its AI-ness. Ginny exists at the interstitial point between AI and human identities. Language makes and unmakes her from all sides.

The Ginny Suite presents technology as fundamentally changing the human condition:

"For decades citizens have offered their bodies, data, and identities willingly to corporations that control our government and virtual ­networks. We must confront the reality that we have turned to, turned into, AI willingly for the sake of convenience. […] It goes without saying that every supposed advancement humanity has made can and has been weaponized against us." (p. 55)

There is a dangling of singularity and ­biotechnical integration throughout the novel – in plot, character development, and wordplay. But, this extension of humanity doesn’t provide human women stronger rights, and their AI ­counterparts don’t seem to have any: both are faced with aspects of control, lack of autonomy, and violence. From this novel laced with cinematic references, the sci-fi horror film Ex Machina (2014) comes to mind: there, a coerced, lowly employee of a tech company finds himself so consumed by the process of administering an AI threshold test to a personal companion that he cuts his arm to find out if he is, in fact, still human. Similarly, The Ginny Suite’s delineation between AI and ­Sunnyvale syndrome is not clear. Do the events propelling the novel’s murderous plot originate from a human, artificial, or illness-ridden mind? In Ex Machina, AI ultimately has the upper hand.

Alex Garland, "Ex Machina," 2014

In the world of The Ginny Suite, there is power in indirection, partial truths, and controlling the narrative, then letting it completely fall apart. There are ideas of submission as a form of subplot and soft power. There is a direct reclamation of power in The Ginny Suite’s nameless protagonist, who, as a multiplicity is not fully knowable, only referred to in the first person or as “she” or “her.” Countering static gender delineation that has historically been used as a form of power, control, and violence, this assertion of gender and concealment of identity is a form of divination of self. (In various forms of Christianity, the use of “He” is typically understood as a reference to God.) Here we traverse the intersection of God, digital companion, and sex worker.

Throughout The Ginny Suite, Skolnik moves through various cognitive states and stylistic structures. The splintering, shattering, yet largely coherent narratives or internal monologues churn the tides of language, data, information, and sensation that are always on the boundary of how the self could be defined, or undefined, or redefined. The reader finds themselves with a decentralized protagonist, where tensions, conflicts, and forces are acting upon, acting against, acting with a person. This conceptual unmooring positions the reader to contemplate the nature of mental instability and its varied causes. Trailing the protagonist who is, at times, steered by thoughts and actions with origins that can’t be placed as internal or external, we wonder: Who is at the controls? At other moments, she grabs the wheel, and says fuck it, and seeks a totalizing sense of pleasure and abandonment of self.

Desire is rich in “The Enchanted Forest,” and so is society-induced illness, with both destabilizing reality. Here, a knotting occurs when a drug trip meshes with a digitally fabricated forest, and dream states are not easily delineated from mental collapse. The narrator tells the story of a girl named Sarah, who oscillates from lying on a blanket in the backyard watching clouds pass to falling asleep in front of a computer screen. Sarah awakes in the woods among talking creatures who feed her magical beans and trick her into staying. She shares a name with the narrator’s estranged mother, mentioned throughout the novel, creating a character dislocation that centers on porosity and nonlinearity: “Unusual shadows cover the forest floor. She treats the forest like the inside of a pocket, every river or rock and every oak or pine or beech and every speck of dirt is inside the bottom of the pocket and she can’t reach out” (p. 101).

The Ginny Suite is a suite about Ginny, and Ginny herself is a suite. There is no center to Ginny – she is disparate forms that make up a person. Skolnik brings a playful rigor to examinations of selfhood and its fissures, leaving us with questions such as: To what extent is a ­near-future hybridization under technology inflicted ­dis-ease? Inasmuch as aspects of Ginny cohere in the overlaps between human and AI, the ruptures are detrimental to the protagonist’s capacity for functional engagement with daily life. She gets fired from every job she’s ever had – that’s power. As a reader, I found my mind wandering to an intertwined present: What is the utility of being human when we’re at the event horizon of some of the world’s largest corporate entities, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, declaring themselves as AI-first companies?

Within the structures of understanding data, experience, and sensation, The Ginny Suite outlines fundamental quandaries in the fidelity of being: what can be transposed, and what can be gained or lost. Amid society-induced illness at the heels of AI integration, we are faced with deciding if we will put our faith in ourselves as concrete realities or ethereal abstractions. Are we made up of our being or are we made up of our language?

Ginevra Shay is an artist and writer based in New York. [1]

Stacy Skolnik, The Ginny Suite, New York: ­Montez Press, 2024, 168 pages.

Image credit: 1. Photo Max Prediger; 2. © Alamy