Journalist and humorist Jessica M. Goldstein whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vulture, Marie Claire, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her first novel, Retro, arrives in stores this week.
An out-of-work actress gets a job as a tour guide for an ultra-luxury time travel company—only to discover her trips to the past could upend her present—in this sharp, speculative debut novel.
When Ash spots an ad for Retro during a depressing Instagram scroll—she’s in debt and unemployed; everyone else is, evidently, thriving—she’s surprised the algorithm sent it her way. She’s heard of recreational time travel, but it’s way out of her budget. Then she sees the caption: Come away with us! We’re hiring.
So begins Ash’s life as a Time Travel Agent, leading wealthy tourists on vacations to historical hotspots. She takes bachelorette parties to live out their cowboy-romance fantasies in the Old West and throws “’20s for your twenties” birthday bashes at speakeasies; she smiles politely as rich Wall Street guys give prospecting a shot in the Gold Rush. It’s all thrilling, outrageous, and totally surreal. Bygone America is just a Retro Metro ride away.
Despite Ash’s tendency toward cynicism, she finds herself swept up in her dazzling new job. Sure, Ash isn’t the actress she always dreamed she’d be. But isn’t this so much better? It’s like Ash’s life is a movie, complete with an impossible love triangle. How is she supposed to choose between her mysterious office crush and the handsome private eye pursuing her in 1937?
For the first time in years, Ash’s life feels enviable—so she’d really rather not pay attention to the strange things happening to her memory and relationships outside Retro. But as her trips threaten to unravel her real life, she confronts an unsettling truth: “escaping” into the past was never really an escape at all.
Jessica was kind enough to share an original piece discussing her love/hate for nostalgia.
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Would you want to work at a time travel agency? In my debut novel, Retro, a megalomaniacal tech billionaire has invented a time machine and is putting it toward its most lucrative use: taking wealthy tourists on vacations to the past. Ash, a struggling actress, stumbles on an ad for Retro during a depressing Instagram scroll. She cannot believe the algorithm sent it her way—time travel is wildly expensive; she is in debt and unemployed—until she sees the caption: Retro is hiring.
To apply for a job as a Time Travel Agent, Ash doesn’t have to fill out a typical application. Instead, she is tasked with answering some strange, open-ended questions, one of which is: “At Retro, we always say that ‘everyone is nostalgic.’ What are YOU nostalgic for?”
As you might expect, I spent a lot of time thinking about nostalgia as I worked on this novel. To me, one of the funniest quirks of this universal yearning for what feels (in hindsight, from the safe vantage point of the present) like simpler, easier times is that we are often nostalgic for the things that, while we were stuck with them, we found incredibly annoying. It reminds me of that great Brian Eno line from A Year of Swollen Appendices: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”
I was a child of the nineties and an adolescent of the early aughts. I do not remember thinking, even for a moment, that I would crave the technology of those years; I remember aching for everything to get faster, smoother, sleeker. Now I have the whole world in my palm whenever I cradle my iPhone in my hands and I dream, almost daily, of chucking said iPhone into the ocean. I yearn for landline times!
These are my top five technologies I found DEEPLY annoying at the time and now I am so nostalgic for them I could cry!
- My Razor-style flip phone – I’ve gone back and forth on this one. Would it be better to have no cell phone at all? But I actually think this phone was the Platonic ideal: It was actually small enough to slide into a jeans pocket; it could hold a charge for three days and survive being run over by a car. I never got into T-9 texting but I was SO good at the classic mode (pressing 7 four times to get one letter S) that I could safely text and drive because I never needed to look down. I was reachable in an emergency, I could flirt and gossip, but I did not have that feeling I have now—that gross compulsion—to check it all the time, like a Tamagotchi I’ve been tasked with keeping alive.
- The Walkman – I deliberated on this one as well because with CDs comes skipping and scratching. They were never great for, say, going on a run or even, as the name would suggest, a walk. But the limits were actually freeing: You’d pick a CD and that was it! It wasn’t this endless streaming scrolling situation where you could technically listen to anything but then somehow you wind up listening to the same things, but with no texture? Also I loved to flip through someone’s Caselogic, like if you were riding shotgun and they were driving and they’d ask you to pick the music. You could really get a feel for someone’s whole world that way. So intimate! So delightful!
- A good old GLOSSY MAGAZINE – God I looooved to flip through a glossy magazine in a waiting room or a nail salon or at a slumber party. I loved to pick up CosmoGIRL and study it as if there were going to be some major final exam on its contents, like if I did not master the day-to-night look I would never really be an adult; I would be three frauds in a trenchcoat (which, hot tip, is a great piece for taking your outfit from day-to-night). And I loved cutting them up like an old-timey ransom-note writer to make elaborate collages. I think at the time I was very dismissive of magazines, even as I luxuriated in them. I thought they were frivolous. I didn’t know what I had!
- Linear television and classic cable – I think streaming was a mistake! Every time I hear about a new streamer I think of that tweet about how “It’s on Tubo” or whatever. We are paying more for less and no one who makes any of these shows or movies is getting paid like they used to. It’s a scam! Also: You know what we accidentally lost here? Flipping the channels and landing on a movie you would never have picked for yourself—usually something a little older—and thus building out the cultural catalog in your mind in ways beyond your total control. Of course as a kid I dreamed of being able to watch whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Now with the wisdom of adulthood I know that the way things were, in this department, was by far superior to the way things are.
- Okay, hear me out: Dial-up internet – I HATED dial-up. I was so desperate to get onto AIM and chat with my friends or set up my away message or whatever else I was doing online at the time. And obviously I found that garbage-disposal screeching-sound to be SO obnoxious, a snitch in my own home telling my parents I was going online when I was supposed to be going to bed. Now I think: This was the correct pace for a person to access the world wide web, and we should’ve kept it at just this speed: agonizingly slow. I didn’t even know things could be agonizingly fast but that does appear to be where we’ve landed.
As Retro would ask: What are YOU nostalgic for? Check out Retro to get inspired, and bask in the best of bygone culture with me in my newsletter, The Retro Report, where I share vintage recs for what to watch, read, listen to, and obsess over.
RETRO by Jessica M. Goldstein arrives in bookstores and
e-tailers on Tuesday June 23 from Ballantine Books.
Visit retrotheagency.com
