Once upon a time, a woman went online shopping for the end of the world.
Perhaps she should have scrolled for armor, or a sword hammered from the bones of a dead god, or a palette of freeze-dried beef stroganoff.
She shopped for pants. Velour pants with a 28” inseam because she was willing to confront the forces of darkness but not with muddy cuffs. Maybe a matching sweatshirt. A complete velour tracksuit.
She sat in a parking lot, awaiting the return of her child from one of the many activities required of modern children. The woman was exhausted. She was weepy, but not beautifully so. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s So Far played.
She’d been scrolling. The scrolling disgorged the usual monsters as well as new species. Brotherhoods, Two-headed Chieftain Beasties, Keepers of Things, Couriers, and Tribunals, all bowing to His Most Blameless Majesty, while casting truth into the moat. Pactum Virorum.
(There were lesser demons, of course, that wouldn’t devour the kingdom but merely infest every corner of it. For example, those who insist on calling sandwiches “handhelds.”)
The woman had slain none of these monsters, though not for lack of trying.
She had, however, become extremely tired of them, so she looked at velour tracksuits. Then her algorithm offered up fleece capes. Fleece capes possess neither the grandeur of a cloak nor the practical advantages of withstanding a direct assault by a collapsing institution, but she could be a little comfortable. And yet, and yet, comfort is not consolation, and neither one is repair.
The woman considered this and considered her life and her algorithm. She glanced up, trying to catch a glimpse of her child at practice or rehearsal or a meet or a match or in conversation. Safe, for now. She considered this as well.
Perhaps the woman could become a witch, she thought. Not one of the beautiful witches, with their flowing black hair and rings of moonstone. A different sort. A Richard Simmons witch, if you will, but one who had all but abandoned the cardio.
She would stand before the monsters and say their true names. LIAR. COWARD. FRAUD. SANDWICH.
The woman sat in her car, waiting for her daughter, listening to music and welling up (again! still!) from loving a world determined to destroy its own better qualities. Although she was not languishing, she was tired of the monsters devouring everything and everyone, then demanding gratitude for doing so.
And so the Velour Tracksuit Witch of the Fleece Cape, wearing neither cape nor velour tracksuit, considered the many ways the kingdom described its troubles in elaborate think-pieces bewailing the decline of civility (and by all means, please ignore the dragon in the mead hall). Elegant chronicles all.
The woman had lately become inclined toward a less elegant description. Everything Is Horseshit.
Yet the Witch Woman Who Was Not a Witch, sitting in a parking lot, listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, waiting for her daughter, contemplating a fleece cape, conceded that every proper account of monsters must also acknowledge the possibility of something good surviving.
She made a comprehensive list That Which is Not Horseshit:
Who defined what a novel is? Who decided which women were monsters and why? Who takes “I’m fine” at face value? Who gets corrected and by whom? And if somebody manufactures an image of a thing and shows it to enough people, at what point does the image eat the thing?
Humans LOVE categories. We make a category, invent some rules for it, forget we invented the rules, and then act like the category and the rules came from on high. And then, because we can’t leave anything along, we peel off the little labels we’ve stuck on everything to see what’s underneath.
Don’t get me wrong, labels are useful. “Please hand me the spoon,” saves considerable time over pointing at the drawer and shouting, “Gimme the small metal thing! No, the other one! No, the other other one.” But trouble begins when we name something and decide we have thus explained it. This month I read five books about that trouble.
Even though most of them were decidedly not postmodern, they organized into some sort of postmodern union behind my back. Did I sit around this month muttering about Derrida and the instability of meaning? NOT ANY MORE THAN USUAL. I sat around muttering about skepticism, mixed forms and genres, metafiction, unreliable narration, and self-reference. Bricolage, even! What a mutter!
All five books looked at the labels we’ve stuck on things and bellowed a mighty “SAYS WHO?”
A novel has characters, plot, and narrative. It has description and meaning and metaphor and all the other things that appeared on laminated posters in my seventh-grade English classroom, right? David Markson says no. In another book he asks, “What is a novel in any case?” This Is Not a Novel seems determined to find out by getting rid of nearly all the things it is supposed to contain.
David Markson brings us a box of bones. Some are famous bones. Joyce bones. Byron bones. Beethoven bones. Some belonged to people who hated each other, slept with each other, misquoted each other, reviewed each other badly, died absurdly, died horribly, or simply died, because everyone in This Is Not a Novel is eventually going to do that. Also rattling around in the box: illnesses, insults, mistranslations, literary gossip, historical lint, quotations, coincidences, and Writer.
Writer, who is writing this book, would like us to understand that there is no character here. Writer would also like a book that is “nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.” None of the standard equipment..
DORK ALERT: It activated the part of my brain that once studied literary theory, so everybody gets to suffer now. (Still preferable to activating the part of my brain that remembers old commercial jingles.) This is Not a Novel gives Reader fragments until Reader fills them in and makes a book. There is a lot of theory about gaps in texts and Reader’s role in making meaning, and This Is Not a Novel is one enormous gap with famous dead people scattered throughout.
At first: fact, fact, insult, death, Writer, fact, death. Then, Reader’s brain starts laying track ahead of the train. Recurrences become motifs. Trivia acquires emotional weight. Writer, who is definitely not a character, looks suspiciously character-shaped.
Markson keeps handing us bones. He insists there is nothing to assemble while we are very obviously assembling this book. kneads that “between” with gusto. He removes the machinery of the novel and leaves us assembling it ourselves. We keep building the very thing he says isn’t there. By the end, even the ending reaches backward and rearranges what came before it.
Maybe it’s not a novel. Fine. But by the end I had experienced character, motif, development, rhythm, consciousness, and something I might even refer to as emotional movement.
This is a playful book. It’s funny and gossipy and strange. It has rhythm. It loses the rhythm. It finds another. I wanted, sometimes, to hear it read aloud, or set to music. Performed as poetry, performed as humor.
Do you know what humanity has NEVER had enough of? WORDS FOR WOMEN WHO ARE furious, wild, and/or who refuse. (How even dare they?!) I’m sure you can think of half a dozen off the top of your head, because we’ve got an entire historical thesaurus. Of course, at no point did anyone spitting these words at an “unacceptable” woman think, “Hey, maybe she has a point.” That’s the playground for Furies, an anthology that hands those labels to women writers and says: Please return to sender! Have fun! The strongest pieces share sense that we are still explaining something that should have been settled THREE CENTURIES AGO. (Mostly our humanity, but there you go. Is that a spoiler?).
Read it if you like your female rage peppered with linguistic reclamation.
I came to this one after hearing over and over that it was funny until it broke your heart. It did break my heart. I did not find it funny. Eleanor is strange, but at some point, laughing at her felt cruel. This is a trauma story about what happens after a child survives to adulthood and then is expected to just know how to function normally. It was a hard read for me.
Read it if you can handle a survival-by-kindness story.
The Lambert family has several problems, mostly each other. Franzen details their lives and their spectacular professional and personal disasters. Now matriarch Enid just wants everyone home for Christmas. The Corrections is enormous. The family is big, the ideas are big, the sentences are big, and it’s 500-plus pages. I didn’t LOVE LOVE LOVE it but I’d willingly surrendered to all of it again.
Reality is complicated and often ugly. Fortunately, humans invented the pseudo-event, an event created largely so it can be reported. (Think press conferences, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, staged commemoration, or a planned televised presidential debates.) The fallout is that reality itself is now sometimes indistinguishable from pseudo-events. Some of The Image has aged poorly, but an unnerving amount of it feels like Boorstin somehow got hold of the internet decades early.
Read it if you like the feeling of finding the smartest professor on campus, settling into a seat, and realizing about ten minutes in that you’d happily stay after class.
And there be the September books. Read anything good lately?
