At the start of Nice Places, Vincent Chu’s debut novel, twenty-something Georgie loses his job at a soulless corporation. Instead of coming clean about his lack of future plans, and despite having never gone anywhere on his own, Georgie tells his colleagues he is quitting to travel the world—and promptly starts an Instagram account to document his adventures. The problem is, he never gets outside his hometown of Panhandle, the middle-American coastal city in which the novel takes place. 

It would have been easy to turn this premise into a tongue-in-cheek satire of social media and corporate life. Instead Chu meanders into the school of New Sincerity, with its emphasis on earnest vulnerability, in a fulfilling and resonant way, peeling back the curtain on contemporary culture’s obsession with gratification and travel voyeurism to reveal an inherent loneliness.

Armed with a passport, little money, and no immediate prospects, Georgie intends to follow in the footsteps of social media travel influencers, like his cousin Eugene, who are featured in an online magazine called Sad Vagabond. Georgie has a minimal following and gets almost no traction in his Instagram posts of his life at home in the Panhandle. The rest of his family, particularly his mother, a Taiwanese immigrant, is sceptical. She warns Georgie not to take after his absent father, reminding him that “he was not a rolling stone, he was a tumbling loser!”

Before beginning his journey, Georgie does what any good traveller does: he buys expensive luggage and other critical gear he’s read about on travel blogs. He purchases a plane ticket and sets out for the airport. But before his trip begins, he meets a woman in Buddhist robes who solicits a donation after slipping prayer beads onto Georgie’s wrist. When he confronts her about her manipulative behavior, she invites him to a secluded spot so they can meditate together. He closes his eyes and breathes, following her guidance until he discovers she’s made off with all of his possessions, including his passport and credit cards. 

Downtrodden, injured while chasing the faux-monk, and unwilling to admit defeat, Georgie ends up in a guesthouse in a run-down but culturally diverse part of the Panhandle. Here he is granted shelter and a shift to earn his keep by Josef, a worldly Polish fellow known for taking in strays.  Soon enough, it’s time to eat. Georgie has done most of his “research” and preparation for travel via YouTube, he’s at a loss. He decides to follow his nose, which guides him to a Thai restaurant. There, he makes an Instagram post of his dinner and cheekily tags his location as Thailand. Thus begins Georgie’s time as a would-be global nomad, without ever leaving home. 

The blandness of modern life pervades the novel, with identical products from a handful of faceless corporations found on every corner of the globe. When Georgie recognizes an IKEA bookshelf in the guesthouse as identical to the one in his apartment, he thinks the “economy is making it so that we all lived the same, dressed the same, ate the same, thought the same.” 

This melange of disillusionment and connectedness defines much of Georgie’s mindset. He is losing his sense of the distance between representation and reality, helped along by the smoothly deceptive veneer of curated social media posts. If these dangers are familiar, Chu presents them in a fresh and eye-opening way. In the back alley of the Thai restaurant, Georgie stages a photo with a reproduction tuk-tuk, which a real Thai person would recognize as a phony in an instant. 

As the novel progresses, slowly at times but surely, its close third-person perspective grants the reader a window into Georgie’s confusion, loneliness, and search for meaning. Georgie continues his fictional trip, manufacturing adventures and staging photographs around the Panhandle to reflect places he might be, if he had ever left. The trip becomes a project when he meets a photography graduate student named Ant who sees greater value and power to his false start. Together, they agree to continue the “trip” until they get caught or complete it. 

Ant provides a philosophical foil to Georgie, who attacks the phoniness of online culture while remaining earnestly interested in new experiences. As their social media posts gain online traction, Ant and Georgie stretch the limits of their creativity in their joint attempt to be believable. Using other posts and the internet to scout out the next legs of his nonexistent vacation, they plot a course through Asia heading toward Europe. Eventually, an Instagram photo of Georgie and Ant in a railcar goes viral, notching up the scrutiny and standards they’ve set for themselves with the project. 

In a world full of egos, especially online, Georgie and Ant feel that they are tackling the wave of “postcultural cringe” that dominates social media. Documenting their manufactured adventure, Chu raises important questions about cultural appropriation, the wastefulness of travel, and the essential emptiness of most tourism. 

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Vincent Chu is author of the story collection Like a Champion (7.13 Books, 2018). His fiction has appeared in Muumuu House, STILL Magazine, Pithead Chapel, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. Vincent is a Hambidge Fellow, former Headlands Center for the Arts Affiliate Artist, and Pushcart Prize nominee. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from UCLA. Vincent lives with his wife and son in Oakland, California.

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R. Allen Abshire is a Louisiana native whose first book, an environmental history of the local bottlenose dolphin population, is under contract at Louisiana State University Press. His short fiction has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Moon City Review, and BULL.