The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor

College dropout David works a job at a phone survey call center. You know this office from countless fictional depictions: drab, lifeless, cubicle walls “flecked with colored bits like tiny festive mistakes.” But unlike other fictional office spaces, there’s no comedy here. It works purely on the metaphorical level: David talks to no one except the people who respond to the survey, and they can hardly tolerate him.

After finally reaching his upper limit of self-disgust—he almost makes an old woman cry in a botched survey call—he tosses his computer into his bathtub, putting an end to his Internet porn addiction. Soon after he runs into Thomas, an old friend who’s out dumpster-diving, and who introduces him to the anarchist squat house Fishgut. The occupants of Fishgut exist at that parental-nightmare-nexus where hippies and punks coexist in a glory of hygiene flouting. David enters the Fishgut vortex, where he finds a freedom on the opposite pole from this survey job, engages in the occasional threesome and finds surprising beauty in the house’s homemade religion.

The narrative moves among a few of Fishgut’s freegans, and in each Taylor finds a singular humanity. It would be easy for a less empathic writer to simply attribute an alternative lifestyle to some commonplace loneliness, a condescending sense that the characters are just “lost.” And though Taylor occasionally allows himself to romanticize the hippie/punk commune, the devoutness with which his characters take on their “gospel” mirrors his own seriousness in his treatment of their lives. As in his story collection, Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, Taylor has a natural sense for what makes intelligent young people tick and, occasionally, drop out.