The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is due out in 2017
Yesterday, Arundhati Roy announced the long awaited followup to her 1997 debut novel, the Booker-winning The God of Small Things. According to her publisher, Hamish Hamilton, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness will be out sometime in 2017. In a joint PR statement, Simon Prosser, of Hamish Hamilton UK, and Meru Gokhale, of Penguin Random House India, showered the novel with glowing preliminary praise, lauding both the “extrodinary” writing and characters who are “brought to life with…generosity and empathy…joyfully reminding us that words are alive too.” For her part, Roy said that she was “glad to report that the mad souls (even the wicked ones) in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness have found a way into the world.”
Fans of Roy may owe a “thank you” to John Berger. According to The Guardian’s report, the English writer urged Roy to focus intensely on completing the novel back in 2011. Roy remarked that she was “with John at his home, and he said: ‘You open your computer now and you read to me whatever fiction you are writing.’ He is perhaps the only person in the world that could have the guts to say that to me. And I read a bit to him and he said: ‘You just go back to Delhi and you finish that book.’ So I said ‘OK’.”
That isn’t to say Roy wasn’t busy writing over the last twenty years — she certainly was. Her riveting political non-fiction pieces, which cover issues in India and abroad, display the stunning prose and keen insights that won her fiction critical acclaim. In case you missed or forgot them, we’ve collected some of our favorites below:
“Gandhi, But with Guns” (in person reporting on the Maoist guerrilla forces deep in the Indian forrest)
“Not Again” (a critical analysis of the U.S. invasion of Iraq written in 2002)
Carlos Fonseca’s biography is marked not only by constant territorial displacements — he was born in Costa Rica in 1987, grew up in Puerto Rico, did his studies in the United States and now lives in London — but also by the multiple literary traditions that interest him. Despite his young age, he has already accumulated a vast series of influences, ranging all the way from Latin American to European authors without eluding the United States. Reading his works, one feels the presence of voices as disparate as those of W.G. Sebald, Alexander Von Humboldt, Simón Bolívar and Roberto Bolaño, among others. Fonseca is, without a doubt, a cosmopolitan offspring of cultural globalization as well as an attentive inheritor of both literary and cultural history.
In 2015, the prestigious Spanish publisher Anagrama published his debut novel Coronel Lágrimas, a novel that was praised both by the Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia as well as by the legendary editor Jorge Herralde for its singularity, experimentation, intrigue and elegance. It couldn’t have been better described. Lágrimas is a novel inspired by the life of stateless mathematician and hermit Alexander Grothendieck. Through an attentive and rigorous attention to detail, Fonseca is able to construct a collage where the mathematician’s life finds its ultimate meaning amidst a series of series of historical, metaphysical and poetic fragments that end up giving shape to a fascinating literary artifact that shines like an eclectic mosaic.
After its extraordinary critical reception in Latin America and Spain, unusual for a debut novel, Fonseca has established himself as one of the most promising and interesting new voices of his generation.
In a typical cloudy afternoon in London — with Bloomsbury’s literary landscape as backdrop — I sat to talk with the author about the publication of the English translation of his novel, Colonel Lágrimas, which is out today from Brooklyn-based publisher Restless Books.
— Tomás Peters
Tomás Peters: From the very beginning of Colonel Lágrimas, your writing reminded me of the cinematic strategy Aleksandr Sokurov used in his movie Russian Ark, filmed in a single unedited shot. Russian Ark recounts the history of Russia through the halls of the Hermitage Museum, as well as some biographical elements from the narrator’s life and that of his companion, “the European.” There is something similar in your novel. Throughout the book, there is a narrator and a historical character who, without ever encountering each other, traverse historical events, emotional fallouts, and biographical details. How did you come up with such a narrative (and film-like) strategy of this kind?
Carlos Fonseca: I guess I imagined the novel sort of as the story of a man — the colonel — situated at a point in time that some have called the end of history. One could say that the museum is the backdrop to the historical logic of this end-of-time. In other words, I think that nowadays, history runs the risk of becoming like a large museum, whose halls exhibit an enormous archive of what has ensued, but within which it is impossible for something new to happen. Inside of the museum, so to speak, happenings are forbidden. In Colonel Lágrimas, I tried to portray both the allure and danger of that final museum, the dead end that characterizes our current era of information decadence. Like Borges, like Bouvard and Pécuchet, the colonel is a man trapped inside a labyrinth of information: a labyrinth that leads to the indiscriminate and pleasurable consumption of data. In that sense, I like your comparison to Sokurov’s Russian Ark, a movie that I loved when I saw it. I think in both cases there is an attempt to rethink and critique the ways in which we currently live the past. In my novel, the cinematic prose is also related to another fiction that has permeated modern society: the reality show. The false perception that we see everything in the present, from a privileged perch from which we can issue a moral judgment of the characters. I like to think that the novel works, to a certain extent, like a reality show about the private world of an old Borgesian protagonist, who is unable to act. If there is politics in the novel, it would be there, in the way that the novel critiques his passiveness and inaction.
TP: I think Colonel Lágrimas is a novel that showcases the craft of writing. Throughout its pages, it becomes apparent that its writerly resources are managed with a certain fluency and experimentation but, at the same time, with notable confidence. Considering that this is your first novel, do you think that you managed this narrative technique as part of your professional craft or did the story itself demand this sort of writerly treatment?
CF: I have always believed that literature is something that occurs primarily in the act of writing. When Faulkner sat down, in The Sound and the Fury or in As I Lay Dying, to narrate the same event from multiple different perspectives, he did so, in my understanding, with the full conviction that writing is everything: the event cannot take shape if the narrator does not describe it. In that sense, I like novels that deal with tricky environments, stories that stay away from predefined formats and in that sense force us to rethink the way we write. It is not a matter, of course, of beautiful storytelling. On the contrary, it’s a matter of twisting the rote usages of words until they become malleable enough for what you want to narrate. In that sense, I believe that biographies are woven around that malleable fiction that we call a private life.
TP: How do you take on the craft of writing in the literary context of Latin America, which is so full of biographical stories?
CF: When I was writing Colonel Lágrimas, I was conscious of this issue regarding biographical novels or novels of self-fiction, as they call them nowadays. The colonel is, ultimately, a man that sits down one day to tell the story of his life. From the very beginning, the question was: What does it mean to chronicle a life? What does it mean to narrate a biography beyond merely giving an account of what has happened to someone? There are as many lives as ways to narrate them. This idea tortures the colonel, forcing him to rewrite his private life in an attempt to restructure what has happened and what could have happened.
On the other hand, I have a friend who tells me, half in jest, that the novel is really autobiographical, that I am the colonel. Even though I find that take on the novel absurd, I like it a lot, because it forces me to think.
TP: It seems today as though the accumulation and cataloguing of historical archives and fragments has become an obsession of our age. In Colonel Lágrimas, without giving too much away, this is quite evident. Essentially, the historical remnants shape a story in which the recollections and secrets of the colonel — a character inspired by the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck — and the universal history intermingle. What do the figures of archives and memory mean to you?
CF: I could not agree more. As I see it, we see three decisive literary figures at the turn of the twenty-first century, whose novels provide different aesthetic responses to these questions: Roberto Bolaño, W.G. Sebald, and David Foster Wallace. All three, of course, were ardent fans of Borges. And all three died relatively young. I think we are now in an age where archival fiction enjoys the particularity of not being intruded upon by memory. In other words, if ten, or fifteen, years ago, archives were mediated by the subjective voice of testimony, marked by the memory of witnesses, nowadays, it seems like archives appear simply as they are: in their pure embodiment, with neither support nor intrusion. The aesthetic gesture would therefore consist of the arrangement, cataloging, and exhibition of the archive. This is not, however, something new. It is something we have inherited from the historical avant-garde and its ready-mades, its collages, its cut-ups. If there is politics in our archival fiction, it is related to the way in which nowadays, we are rethinking the logic of assembly and framing. In this sense, our task therefore has a great deal in common with Pierre Menard’s absurd odyssey. We owe everything to Duchamp.
Our task therefore has a great deal in common with Pierre Menard’s absurd odyssey. We owe everything to Duchamp.
TP: A year ago, in Argentina, there was some controversy surrounding the writer Pablo Katchadjian and his book El Aleph Engordado. His case has not only sparked debate related to the literary space of Latin America — due, in part, to the legal allegation by Borges’ widow, María Kodama — but also a broader discussion pertaining to the art world in general. Essentially, Katchadjian’s gesture would seem to be a contemporary ready-made. I would like to hear what you think of this case and, concretely, ask you how Colonel Lágrimas also plays a role in the stories and works of others.
CF: I have to tread carefully here, because it seems like nobody is safe from María Kodama’s ambition. Citations, plagiarism, ready-mades: all of the resources that are the hallmark of Borges’ work set the stage for a critique of private ownership. In this sense, Kodama’s gesture is paradoxical and absurd. If we follow her logic, we would have to put Pierre Menard on trial. The whole affair seems unfortunate to me, but at the same time, fascinating. I have always been interested in moments when art goes on trial, not merely aesthetically speaking, but also legally, because it entails the breakdown of an essential distinction: that which gives a certain autonomy and freedom to art, understood as an aesthetic space beyond the legal realm. I even read that one of the witnesses who will testify on behalf of Katchadjian will be Cesar Aira. That’s incredible! The collision of two up-until-now incompatible realms of judgment: the aesthetic and the legal. I am very interested in the disconnect between these two realms. I should probably be scared to say that the character of the colonel has a lot of Borges in him, lest Kodama take offense. But it is very clear: the colonel carries the Borgesian argument to its extreme, because he sets out to tell the story of his own life by stealing anecdotes from the “story of others.” The life of the colonel therefore consists, to a certain degree, of stolen identities. If Kodama is upset because someone stole, smartly, a few lines from her ex-husband, imagine what she would say to someone who plagiarizes an entire life. Nor is that idea so new: it is exactly what the French artist Sophie Calle did for a while.
TP: Latin American literature has lost some ground internationally, but it continues to stay alive. Every year, dozens of novels–and collections of short stories–are published, both by “prestigious” and independent publishing houses. However, the space to receive these publishing efforts is increasingly diffuse. In a context of instability along the literary circuits of Latin America and among readers, what does the political-critical mean nowadays in art and literature?
CF: I think far from seeing the lack of acceptance as a problem, it would be more positive to look at it is an opportunity to change the political-critical stance. When poetry was anchored to its duty of telling stories in a memorable way, it was unable to find the autonomy necessary for the formal experiments we saw in the avant-gardes. Similarly, I think that as long as the novel was tied down, for much of the nineteenth century, to its sociological function, it was unable to achieve the autonomy necessary to lay out a political critique beyond a social critique with moralist overtones. At the end of the nineteenth century then, we see the first great liberation. The novel becomes unshackled from the need for a large audience and in so doing gains an autonomous political stance. I would like to think that something like this could happen and is happening in Latin America. Now that Latin American literature does not have to epitomize the essence of “Latin America” to foreign eyes, it can afford to try something different. It can afford, so to speak, to play with different political-critical stances that move away from the representational. In that sense, I like the word that you use: bending. To some degree, in order to fulfill its political-critical role, literature needs that bending moment, that moment when, like Melville’s character Bartleby, it manages to pull away from its immediate reality in order to have a stronger impact on it.
Now that Latin American literature does not have to epitomize the essence of “Latin America” to foreign eyes, it can afford to try something different.
TP: London, where you currently live, has not generally been known as the essential destination for Latin American writers. In the past, Paris or Barcelona were the places to be, and now it’s all about New York, Mexico City, or Berlin. As a Latin American writer educated in the United States, what does London have to offer for Latin American literature?
CF: For biographical reasons, I have always experienced some sense of dislocation. I was born in Costa Rica, but at a very young age, I moved to Puerto Rico. This displacement left an impression on me that still persists to this day. Because I was a Costa Rican in Puerto Rico and a Puerto Rican in Costa Rica, I always felt somewhat foreign wherever I went. The same happened to me when I moved to California and again in New York. However, in the United States, there is a tendency to view Latin Americans through the lens of certain stereotypes. London is completely different, in that way. Latin America does not play a preconceived role in its political or social worldview. Being from Latin America, to a Londoner, is something really strange. It’s not exactly exotic. More like being a blank page. If the poetics of Latin American minorities in the United States sometimes end up demonstrating that we are not the stereotypes they have drawn onto us, in London, the political position is something perhaps even more radical: the outline of a territory entirely unknown to them. To me, however, I like that sensation of a vacuum, that sensation of distance and abstraction that allows one to imagine traditions that might seem, from a national or continent perspective, incongruous. And of course, then you start to meet Latin American authors that, for one reason or another, have also ended up in the city.
About the Conversationalists
Tomás Peters is a cultural sociologist based in Santiago, Chile. His main areas of research include cultural studies, sociology of art, Latin American studies and cultural policy. Currently he works at the University of Chile. He holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the School of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London.
Carlos Fonseca Suárez was born in Costa Rica in 1987 and grew up in Puerto Rico. His work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, BOMB, The White Review and Asymptote. He currently teaches at the University of Cambridge and lives in London. Colonel Lágrimas is his first novel.
Marcus Tullius Cicero may have been silenced by a body-splitting sword slash from Mark Antony’s henchman during the proscriptions of the Second Triumvirate, but his thoughts on elocution remain very much intact. “No language will inflame the mind,” he tells us, “unless the Speaker himself first catches the ardor, and glows with the importance of his subject.” To put it another way: how one says something is as important as what one says. Language works best when it carries a certain heat. Good oratory practices were Cicero’s main concern, but I’d argue his theory holds true for written words as well. Good prose, too, ripples with flames.
A Caveat
Achieving symbiosis between subject and style, however, is easier said than, well…well said. As Cicero also notes with undying universal applicability: “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.”
As Cicero also notes with undying universal applicability: “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.”
My Parents Raised Me Better Than This
I got into writing for all the wrong reasons: for the drugs, cash flow, sexual favors, discounted sushi platters, immortality, and — worst of all — for the ego boost. These benefits, however, are not as frequently distributed among writers as I was led to believe. And, in accordance with Thomas Mann: “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
Signs of Salvation
I got into writing for the wrong reasons, but I would like to believe I have stayed for the right ones, which largely coalesce around a love of style, of the sensation of breathing life into words, the alchemic pleasure of fusing an idea with execution.
More on Style
Speaking on her writing process, Margaret Drabble says: “Sometimes whole paragraphs or pages come out absolutely fine, and they come out very fast, which I’m sure is how Dickens used to write, just very, very fast.” This speedy, gushy, approach to writing isn’t often discussed in an era of literary Craft. Perhaps this is because it’s hard to explain. Even harder to teach. Organic, immaculate expression has a hint of the metaphysical. One can’t help but think of witchcraft. One can’t help but imagine the raw material of human emotion and experience stewing in the cauldron of the mind until it bubbles into form, bursts into language. “Style is nothing but the mere silhouette of thought,” says Arthur Schopenhauer, and what is a silhouette but an image born from a moment of sun: ephemeral and bright?
This speedy, gushy, approach to writing isn’t often discussed in an era of literary Craft.
Take it Down a Notch
What Schopenhauer calls a silhouette, a grammarian like Virginia Tufte might call “syntactic symbolism.” Syntax is, of course, largely without meaning on its own (as are symbols, I suppose). Syntactical constructions are bones without flesh; symbols are flesh without bones. How to make them quiver and dance? According to Tufte, “A skilled writer may use the same structures in a way that mimics the particular actions a sentence describes.” In other words, content and communication are bound, inseparable. And, just as a body is not built part by part — but develops from a single embryo — eloquent language, it seems, should also emerge from the mind as a pre-formed and pre-fused thing. Otherwise we find ourselves facing Frankenstein.
Can a Person Die of Carpal Tunnel?
“It’s all longhand,” says Cynthia Ozick of her writing process. “I can’t read it, I write so fast… It makes me feel like I’m thinking with my hands.” I connect with Ozick on her preference for longhand. When composing, I write messily and wildly, scribbling across the page, sometimes up and down the sides. This physicality, I’ve come to believe, can energize sentences and elevate style: the tension of sitting contorted in a chair, legs twisted, arm flexed, hand dashing and smearing forward. Isn’t this how sentences work, after all? We corral the kinetic potential of individual words within punctuation and paragraphs? Words are a feral species, alive and charged by their own history. “They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries,” according to Virginia Woolf.
This physicality can energize sentences and elevate style: the tension of sitting contorted in a chair, legs twisted, arm flexed, hand dashing and smearing forward.
Just as a person cannot be reduced to an ID badge, a word cannot be reduced to a dictionary definition; like a person, a word carries with it a constellation of experience. “Look again at the dictionary,” Woolf tells us, where one will find thousands upon thousands of words laid out in alphabetical order, pinned down like butterflies for our inspection. Presumably within these pages are “plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra.” One only need go about “finding the right words and putting them in the right order.” And yet writing splendid plays, poems, tweets, isn’t so simple — otherwise we’d have more. If dictionaries do not house the true nature of words, how can we expect to conjure style from those pages? Words are inherently unruly and evolving, yet we use them as the building blocks of expression because we believe that they can be adequately tamed. If “words live in the mind,” as Woolf says, so the mind must be the source of style, or at least, the rodeo arena.
Meditation, or “I Almost Went to Art School”
I write longhand, in part because it feels like drawing, and drawing has always been for me a meditative practice. Before I was seduced by the perks of writing (the drugs, cash-flow, sexual favors, discounted sushi platters…) I studied visual art. Drawing — like writing — is a triangulation between the draftsperson, the page, and the subject. To quote David Hockney, it “makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still.” This is, in part, because the process involves the whole self. When drawing, “the image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory — where it stays — it’s transmitted by your hands.” Technique is meaningless without an ability to see, and the ability to see is meaningless without technique. What we might call an “eloquent” drawing is a work born from the fusion of both: an image that seems to have sprung effortlessly onto the page.
Drawing — like writing — is a triangulation between the draftsperson, the page, and the subject.
Another Caveat
But, for me, writing has never been effortless (and neither has drawing, for that matter). As much as I believe in the sanctity of the first draft, in the initial outpouring of words, I am also a compulsive reviser. So is Ozick, it turns out. “When I look at my manuscript,” she says, “there are so many cross-outs.” Likewise this essay, even as I write it, is struck through with cross-outs and the snaking point of arrows and the black stars of asterisks. Such revision, however, also takes on physicality akin to working with a sculpture. It likewise starts with an initial form. And, to further defend against impending accusations of hypocrisy: revision involves taking that embryonic prose and feeding it, clothing it, nurturing it, and, in many instances, literally taking it to school.
Conclusion
“Brevity is a great charm of eloquence,” said Cicero, and in that spirit I will wrap up this essay. How to we make ourselves heard in the clamor of the modern forum? In the text-drenched Internet or on overcrowded bookshelves, spines jostling for space? Sheer volume — of both sound and mass — will only get one so far. The esteem of others also helps. But to “inflame” the minds of others demands, more than anything, that the speaker already be burning, that the speaker be willing to stoke the hot coals of an unruly language and watch its tonguing dance as it roars and takes us alive.
It’s been almost 50 years since Roland Barthes proclaimed the “The Death of the Author,” but readers have never stopped gawking at the corpse. If anything, readers demand ever more of authors today, expecting social media interactions and increasing access (even as author incomes have dwindled). In this environment, Elena Ferrante’s desire to remain anonymous feels almost radical. Even as she grew to international literary stardom, Ferrante refused to provide the reader with anything more — beyond an interview here or there — than the text. The words are all you need.
But readers rarely care about the wishes of authors much less dead French literary critics, so, along with magazines, they have been speculating about Ferrante’s true identity for years. Over the weekend, an article by Claudio Gatti in the New York Review of Books(and other newspapers around the globe) announced the most plausible case yet: Anita Raja, a translator who has worked for Ferrante’s Italian publisher Edizioni E/O and whose earnings and real estate holdings have skyrocketed alongside Ferrante’s international sales.
The reaction in the literary world — at least here in the US — was near universal condemnation. In the New Republic, Malcolm Harris questioned the journalistic value of the outing: “To report on a private person without invitation isn’t just unseemly, it’s poor journalism.” At Lit Hub, David L. Ulin wished we would just “leave Elena Ferrante alone”: “She’s not a superhero — or, for that matter, the presidential nominee of a major party who refuses to release his tax returns.” In the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz looked at the gender politics of a male journalist defying a female author’s wishes:
Certainly Gatti does not explain why he feels so free to interpret Ferrante’s “no” as his “yes.” But he has hit on something crucial to the whole debate: the question of an author’s right not to be known, and the particular resonance of that question when the author concerned is, presumably, female.
In less measured tones, my own social media feeds were filled with adjectives like “disgusting” “reprehensible” and “unethical,” and threats to never read New York Review of Books again. I only saw a handful of people defend the article, most of them qualifying it by saying that while it is a little slimy it was inevitable: Ferrante and her publisher openly used the mystery of her identity to further sales, stirring interest in unmasking her.. For my own part, I wrote back in spring about how we should leave well enough alone with Ferrante: “If anonymity helps Ferrante create the books you love, maybe that’s reason enough to let her be.” Nevertheless, I am surprised at the overwhelming condemnation of the article. This is hardly the first time in literary history that a pen name has been unmasked, nor the first time that holes in an author’s non-fiction — Gatti’s article references the forthcoming translation of her autobiographical essays, interviews, and essays — have been exposed. Moreover, Anita Raja has long been a leading candidate for Ferrante’s real identity and Gatti’s piece is far from the first time an outlet has claimed it was her.
“If anonymity helps Ferrante create the books you love, maybe that’s reason enough to let her be.”
The articles I link above delve into the ethical questions with the outing better than I can. I encourage you to read them. What strikes me the most about the whole kerfuffle is the question of what readers hope to gain from knowing.
Does Knowing Let Us Know Anything?
Despite agreeing that Ferrante should have just been left alone, I have to admit I was at least heartened by the revelation (assuming Gatti is correct) that the Neapolitan Novels are — shock! — actually works of fiction and not memoir with a different label. Gatti notes that Raja is not the daughter of an Italian working class family who grew up in Naples, but rather the daughter of a German-born mother and Neapolitan magistrate who has lived in Rome since she was a toddler.
The particulars of Raja or Ferrante’s life don’t matter to me, but I’m just glad that this strikes a blow to the persistent believe that fiction — especially important literary fiction — is really non-fiction.
This principle has guided past literary detectives who tried to expose Ferrante. Earlier this year, many of the same venues now condemning Gatti’s article reported on the claims by an Italian professor that Ferrante was really a Neapolitan history professor named Marcella Marmo. His evidence? Pretty much just that Marmo and the fictional character Elena Greco the same very rough biographies.
In my essay earlier this year about the Marmo claim, I noted how odd it was for Americans in particular to care about the identity since the answer was certainly to be some Italian academic or writer that they’ve never heard of before. Ferrante was never going to secretly be Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith. In short, the “gossip” factor of the revelation was inevitably going to pretty much nil for anyone not living in Italy (and probably for most living there too).
So what is gained from learning her “true” name is there isn’t even really any salacious value? What does knowing let us know? Well, the answer is, I think, that so many people still have a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that fiction is, well, fiction. They think that learning the author’s identify will help them understand the work. Certainly that is the literary scholars argument in favor of revealing her identify.
Non-writers would likely be surprised at how often people assume that a work of fiction — especially one that is realist in any way — is thinly veiled autobiography. This impulse isn’t limited to readers. I’ll give you two examples from my own modest career. Twice, I have had editors ask me if they could publish my short stories as memoir instead, assuming my stories were actually “true” (they weren’t at all). Another time, a professor of literature taught a critical essay I wrote about David Shields’s Reality Hunger — a literary manifesto arguing for blurring the lines between non-fiction and fiction — and had his or her students email me to ask me about my childhood and how that could explain why I disliked Shields’s arguments. (What my childhood could possibly have to do with a literary criticism book about the definitions of “fiction” and “non-fiction” is beyond me). Both of those instances are amusing, but far from unusual. Many authors I know have told me about readers or editors making the assumption their work was non-fiction, and, it is probably worth pointing out here, that this assumption is especially common for women writers. There is a sexist belief that men can write from their great imaginations while women must only write about their lives.
Even when we don’t assume fiction must secretly be, in some sense, non-fiction, people believe that understanding the details of the author’s life will allow them to decode their art. Sure, Kafka didn’t really turn into a bug himself, but surely his relationship with his father or his romantic failures or his Jewishness or this or that must explain the true meaning of art. I have no doubt that critical essays on Ferrante will in the future shift arguments, perhaps saying that it wasn’t her class consciousness that inspired Elena Greco’s life but Raja’s feelings of being an outsider as a German-Jew in Italy or some such. But as plausible as these interpretations might be, they will all be limited ways to read the books and will shrink instead of enlarge our understanding her work.
Sure, Kafka didn’t really turn into a bug himself, but surely his relationship with his father or his romantic failures or his Jewishness or this or that must explain the true meaning of The Metamorphosis.
What Barthes was getting at back in the 1960s is that what (should) matter is the work of art itself. The author’s biographical details don’t explain art, all they do in Barthes’s mind is “impose a limit on that text.” Yes, it’s much easier to teach a limited, biographical view of art, but that isn’t the best way to experience art. Great fiction has multiple meanings, it isn’t a puzzle box that you can unlock with some biographical key. Art is not a mystery to be solved. Art is supposed to open up the mysterious inside you.
“I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors,” Ferrante has said.The mystery of Ferrante’s identity also served to shield her books from those limiting impulses. It served to expand the books in her readers’ minds, to open them up to meaning. Even if it was inevitable that her secret would shattered at some point, it’s a shame to see it go.
David Szalay examines the plight of the male from all sides in All That Man Is, hisloosely collected novel-in-stories. All That Man Is follows a cast of mostly displaced characters from ages 17 to 73, as they try to navigate relationships and make connections. Szalay’s work echoes the existential malaise of many writers who came before; he acknowledges the connection for his characters who fancy themselves academics and amateur philosophers. Though All That Man Is lacks meaningful female characters, it is a considered study of male ennui; Szalay writes — beautifully — the discontent that travels alongside a man through each stage of his life’s journey, as each man discovers that “life is not a joke.”
Szalay’s stories are slow in pace, and the author builds scenes of boredom and self-interrogation into each tale. Many of his characters are academics, or want to be. His young backpacking travelers crave legitimacy they think they can find in the pages of the stories they carry. “They are in love with Eliot,” Szalay tells us:
with his melodious pessimism. They are in awe of Joyce. He is what they want to be, a monument like him. These are the writers whose works made them friends. And Shakespeare’s tragedies. And L’Etranger. And the plight of Vladimir and Estrogen, which they like to think of as their own.”
This sets the tone for what will become one of the linking features of many of his stories. Absent confidence and self-assurance, Szalay’s characters look to the past and to literature to lend their lives — lives which feel empty and lacking a kind of verisimilitude — legitimacy. Where Szalay’s characters cannot find fulfillment in romantic relationships, or in jobs that offer credibility, they search literature and history for their own meaning.
The past makes more sense than the present to most of Szalay’s characters. They are scholars, tabloid reporters, people who gather facts and make a narrative out of them. Often they have more trouble dealing with the facts of their own lives. “The whole appeal of medieval studies,” one character says,
the languages, the literature, the history, the art and architecture — to immerse oneself in that world. That other world. Safely other. Other in almost every way, except that it was here. Look at those fields on either side of the motorway. Those low hills. It was here. They were here, as we are here now. And this too shall pass.
Though he is trying to make sense of a younger girlfriend’s pregnancy, his reliance on the past for solace becomes an obsession and then an avoidance of the present. Szalay’s characters are often blind to what is in front of them; they miss opportunities because they are sitting around waiting for life to bring them a boon.
Szalay’s stories start off with younger protagonists and move toward the more aged. In general, they arch toward hope for absolution over obsolescence. But there is a sense — and one passage echoes Hemingway’s preoccupation with bullfighting — that these characters in strange lands are just passing the time until old age. One character observes the fights:
…in the middle of it all, slaughter. Slaughter. Slaughter as a spectacle for sport, entertainment. What is sadder than the exhaustion of the bull? The bull’s failure to understand, even at the very end, that his death is inevitable, and always has been? Is just part of a show.
All That Man Is is part of the show, and whether we see Szalay’s men falling in love with prostitutes or sleeping in dingy hotels, we come to understand that they are part of the larger time-wasting exercise of living. “I am not young,” one of the men says, “sitting there in the hotel with is hands in his lap, staring at the floor. When did that happen?”
Szalay’s scenes are deftly conceived, and imbue a quiet, delicate elegance. His men range in age and financial station, but always the message — the oppressiveness and weight of time — remains the same. If there is one thing that is lacking in Szalay’s work, it’s the inclusion of female characters as fully imagined beings — Szalay’s women are largely caricatures and temptresses. They serve no purpose other than acting as catalysts upon the men. Szalay writes men of all stripes well, and when his characters are confronted with the results of their actions, they often choose to run. Szalay paints a bleak picture of All That Man Is, but there is art in the telling. Perhaps that’s all there is.
There’s a bit of me that’s felt lucky to survive D. Foy’s first two books. Characters in his 2014 debut novel, Made to Break, find themselves trapped in a cabin in the woods. Rather than detach once the narrative moved into horror genre, I felt like I was in that cabin. I got closer and closer and eventually something flipped. And this is the peculiar quality to Foy’s prose: the reader stands among other characters and is almost surprised that his own thoughts come free of dialogue tags. It’s a rare experience. It’s like if I were Robin Williams walking around a gothic reboot of What Dreams May Come — paint from the world around me getting on my hands, in my hair, because everything is fresh and not yet dry.
Today, Foy releases his second novel, Patricide (Stalking Horse Press, 2016). Describing it in emotions — shame, open-heartedness, burnt-heartedness, rage, love — would make more sense than providing a plot synopsis of how a young man named Rice orbits his father. There’s real genius in how Foy renders the elevated stakes of young adulthood. Your pulse will quicken with each transgression, or even the thought of transgression. And just like his first novel, Patricide will become your world while you’re in its pages.
I had the chance to talk with Foy in preparation for his book launch at BookCourt.
— Will Chancellor
Will Chancellor: Let’s begin at the beginning. What was the genesis of Patricide?
D. Foy: When I first began the work — and this is usually the case for me — I was just whistling in the dark, as it were. Really this book began by accident — which is also often the case for me. I’d been going over a passage in another, related project in which I’d written insufficiently about the same father who ended up as the obsession in Patricide. It was just a paragraph, not nearly what it should be, I knew, once I began to chew on it. It needed fleshing out, not a lot, I felt, but much more than was there. But once I began the work, it wouldn’t stop. I wrote five pages, then ten pages, then twenty-five pages, and by the time I’d hit seventy-five, I realized, “Goddamn, I’ve got a whole other book on my hands.” This thing was huge, a real beast, I remember thinking, too huge and too beastly, I thought, for me to grapple with. I was pretty scared, in fact. I wasn’t writer enough to match the work, I didn’t feel capable to treat it sufficiently, it was altogether beyond me. In the end, the thing that saved me was remembering and then relying on an old maxim: “The work will show you how to do it.” Rather than punch my way through the book using cleverness and willpower, I let go — to an extent — and trusted that I’d be shown the way by the work itself as it progressed.
WC: We’ve talked about this before, but you’re no stranger to manual labor. And “The work will show you how to do it,” was my takeaway from the first few shit jobs I had. Was that where you first heard this expression?
DF: I don’t remember where I heard it, to be honest. I only know that where on the whole it’s true for most things, it’s especially true with art. You set out to explore something only to learn you’ve gotten in way too deep. You can’t move on any more than you can go back, or so it seems.
The artists who fail at their work do so, in my opinion, because they didn’t give themselves the benefit of the doubt, that they have within them everything they need to accomplish their ends. What I’m talking about here is faith. Doubt may come — doubt will come — but rather than look at it as hostile, I’ve learned to see it as my guide. Doubt pushes you forward. You don’t know what you’re doing. This isn’t working. You have questions whose answers demand you move a bit this way or that to find the crack you can pry into an opening. Still, nothing’s giving. This is where faith becomes critical. Without it, this essential belief in yourself and in your quest, you’ll surrender and collapse.
WC: Did that happen with Patricide?
DF: I was just this side of that at many points in the work, a hair’s breadth off from despair. Finally, I don’t know how, I saw that if I turned my back on this thing, it would go away forever. The universe would see my weakness and strip me of any vision, I’d never have another chance, I’d be crushed. But in that same moment I saw, as well, the opposite — that if I persisted, if I stayed true to myself and my conviction, the universe would give me what I needed to see me through. So I did. Sometimes a bit of light appeared. Others I stumbled through black for days. No matter what, though, I kept going. Way in the depths of the work, I became overwhelmed with the sense that this book could actually kill me, literally, that if I didn’t watch myself, it would take me out.
WC: Because it’s such a relentlessly ambitious monster of a book?
DF: Well, relatively speaking. That might not be true for another writer, but it was for me. The book and its making became much more than just a behemoth by virtue of its subject. The Father is an entity in itself, what after a time I began to think of in the same category of Moby-Dick — this seemingly omnipresent, omniscient, insurmountable entity that no matter what I did was going to smack me down again and again, you know, like Moby-Dick crushes ships with the snap of his tail. It was this realization that led me to the next, that I’d never overcome this thing if I kept at it as I was, like a puny naked stupid man throwing himself into breach. The work made it clear, as I was saying, that I had to move around the father and The Father both, that I had to come at them from every direction — hence the variety of viewpoints and modes in the book. One way wasn’t enough. I needed every way. Meantime, I held fast and persisted and never turned away. Every day of work at a point became one of those don’t-quit-five-minutes-before-the-miracle-happens moments. Just when I felt I couldn’t go any further, I told myself to hold out just a bit more. And sure enough, every time I did this, the way appeared, and I moved on to the next impasse. And then after a thousand pages, and countless revisions and hackings and maimings and surgeries of every sort, it was over, I’d finished the thing, a book about a monster that was never born and will never die.
WC: Seems like the Anxiety of Influence is really deep in there. You’re not really giving me something familiar, “Father is a tree whose shadow blah blah blah;” or something lyrical, “Father is a carpenter, planing and joining the world in a shed . . .” Instead, if I’m reading you correctly, you’re giving me a straight up, “Father is Moby-Dick — the whale, but also the novel.”
DF: Well, it’s not that The Father isn’t a trope for something much bigger. It is. Really, given our culture for the last several millennia, dictated and determined by The Father, which is to say a psychotically overweening patriarch, we could go so far as to say The Father is The World, about as big a trope as you can ask for, I guess. I was talking about this elsewhere recently. Patricide isn’t simply a story about some kid struggling to escape a wretched father and the legacy thereof. It’s also an allegory of a world suffering its destruction by the Powers That Be — The Father — the dynamo of whose rule is a greed so profound His vision — and ours, too — is limited to His own obsessions and their effects. There’s a father in Patricide, and there’s The Father.
This is the history of mankind. Taught by The Father, ruled by the Father, punished and rewarded by The Father according The Father’s whim, The Father of course having devolved into the status of a wicked buffoon, we’re most of us ourselves a legion of fools scrapping around at the bottom of the cave The Father led us into.
I mean, it’s no coincidence — a thing, by the way, I don’t believe in — that Donald Trump has assumed such a hideously imposing stature. He is very literally THE FATHER. He is at once the product and the symbol of our time. He’s The Father at his most gluttonous, scurrilous, pathological, diabolical, idiotic, cowardly extreme, the worst of humanity distilled into a single repulsive villain, now a juggernaut, really, a stinking one-eyed fiend. And what is happening in the face of this moronic, tiny-handed, tiny-dicked Cyclops? By and large, obsequy and pandering, on a scale we haven’t seen, thankfully, for a very long time.
It’s no coincidence, either, that we’re now calling our era the Anthropocene — very literally The Time of Man. Without the least hyperbole, we could as easily call this time the Patercene. We’re living on the edge of the apocalypse, seriously, with no one to blame for how we got here but our ridiculous selves. Someone on Facebook recently posted a quote from Chris Kraus — “I think desire isn’t lack,” she says, “it’s surplus energy — a claustrophobia inside your skin.” She’s right in the first. Desire isn’t lack. But neither is it energy. It’s delusion pure and simple, and this delusion, our delusion, is the catalyst for the expenditure of our energy toward all the worst ends. It’s always been so, in the quote unquote civilized world, and exponentially more so now. We want shit we don’t need because we’re told again and again we need a lot of shit. And who is it telling us this lie that we need all this shit? The Father, no doubt, in the guise of Capitalism in the guise of the megalopolistic Corporation. And what have we done in the name of our frenzied grasping after all this shit? We all know. No one doesn’t know. The answer’s all around us. We’ve poisoned ourselves and our environment — the place we live in, our home — to the extent that it’s nearly uninhabitable. I dug into a lot of this stuff in the 1,000 pages I just mentioned, but ended up striking it in the name of the work, hoping that what remained would be infused with its essence. I could go on and on about this stuff. Just ask my wife.
We’re living on the edge of the apocalypse, seriously, with no one to blame for how we got here but our ridiculous selves.
WC: I love how you’re talking about circling the father — even little hidden circles like in the word “dynamo.” There was a similar word that stayed in my head while I was reading: radial. I’m wondering if this came from the subject matter or if you find yourself thinking in circles about everything all the time.
DF: Yes, I am a circular thinker, as opposed to a linear thinker — but this is intentional. I’ve trained myself to use intuition as a strategy and technique. The line is not the way of things. The circle is the way of things, and intuition is the way of the circle, which is the way that’s natural to us but which over time — really, since the invention of the technology of writing by the Sumerians roughly five-and-a-half-thousand years ago, and especially since the invention of the printed word back in the mid-fifteenth century — we’ve shackled ourselves to a very unnatural way of viewing the world, which is according to the logic of the line. In the face of language, written language, that is, this stands to reason. One letter follows the next to make a word, one word the next to make a sentence, and so on. And this is quite literally how we all see the world now, through the line. But that wasn’t how we saw things before, and in my art at least I strive to remember that daily. There’s more to be said, but my point is that eventually it became clear to me how stifling the logic of the line is, and once I understood this, I determined to free myself of it as best I could, if only in my thinking and my art. In any case, when we work according to intuition, whose law is the circle, digression becomes very important, or rather, I should say, it becomes inevitable. And digression in its turn is the way to vision. By vision I mean, sight, as in to see clearly.
WC: Do you ever second-guess an image in your head? Or do you just take it as a given that the story is going there?
DF: I wrote Patricide via intuition and digression, the writing itself directed by the work — a mode, actually that I call “gutter opera.” The work showed me how to see, dimly at first of course but with increasingly clarity as I progressed. I couldn’t approach it head on, I realized, but only from a variety of approaches, what amounts to a circling heteroglossia of sorts. The father was at first inscrutable. So was The Father, though it wasn’t long before I saw that He wouldn’t ever not be inscrutable. With no way to go through these entities, I had to go all around them, using every means I had. That the word “radial” was in mind as you read isn’t surprising. Everything about the book is radial. The narrative employs all three points of view, in a whirling sort of collaboration, and a slew of narrative modes, each of them slipping and spinning one from the next. The book’s structure, too, is patently, intentionally radial. It’s the structure of a tornado. A tornado continuously turns on itself such that nothing can escape it even as it moves forward according to a trajectory that for all intents and purposes is unpredictable, leaving a wake of destruction behind it. The book’s structure and approach are at once a reflection of the devastation of The Father and an act of patricide. They use the patriarchal framework within which the novel has until now largely been created to destroy that framework. The Father’s way is The Father’s death.
WC: The great thing about a circle, or anything radial, is that whenever you slice it through the center, you’re left with two equal parts. I read the chapters that way: each intuitive path you take at the beginning is a plane, a plane that’s going to split this whole fucker in two, so long as you pass through the father, who as it happens is always at the center. You could start off talking about addiction. If you hit that center, you can trust the result to be symmetric. And then there’s the center itself. To me, the Father in your book is a crushing black hole, absolutely nothing. Was this something you reminded yourself of mid-digression? Is it a view you agree with at all?
DF: Yeah, I agree with it! And that’s the paradox of this figure, isn’t it? The Father is everything and nothing, and everywhere and nowhere. I don’t think I reminded myself of this so much as it reminded me, every day I sat down to it. How do you grapple with such a thing? Can it be grappled with at all? What do you do when the strategy or approach or what have you — what’s at least given you the sense, however false, that it’s working — abruptly fails, and you’re left flailing in a void? You have to somehow find your way back and start afresh, though doubtless from a wholly different angle. The circling seemed never to end in this struggle, until it ended, of course.
WC: One of the most painful truths to experience in reading this book is to see this abusive tyrant of a father as a yes-man in his public life. It becomes a fight against our own empathy to say fuck you to the father. And, to borrow your example of the tornado, the damaging wind is our own emotion whipping around and howling. It seems like the first response is to dull it, but who’s done that successfully for long? In some ways the mock heroics, or, if we read with different eyes, the arch heroics of Quixote comes to mind as a way of putting wind to windmill, if only to have something to fight. Which is more of a menace, a publicly powerful father or a publicly impotent father?
DF: Man, that’s like asking the difference between an ape in the jungle and an ape on a chain. They’re both menaces, but in very different ways.
The publicly powerful father is The Father books are full of. He’s the man Tacitus writes about in The Histories, for example, a tome, not incidentally, I read with ultra-keen interest while working on Patricide. The Histories is many things, but foremost among them it’s probably the greatest record of mankind at its worst, indexing with brutal dispassion not only every wicked thing a person can think of doing, but also the means by which men turn those thoughts to plans and then, with diabolical prowess, actuate them.
The story Tacitus tells is the story just about any historian will tell. What we aren’t likely to see in these histories, though, is the ironic flipside of the equation, how it’s the fathers that spawn The Fathers, and vice versa.
On the whole, it seems to me, the publicly powerful Father is a direct consequence of the publicly impotent father, the father, that is, who in his humiliation and shame projects a lifetime of anguish onto his son, physically and psychically, to the extent that the son, in his own pain, dreams of power enough to take his revenge and prove himself mighty, while waiting for and searching out the means to do it.
There’s a bit about this in the book, the stories of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and the labyrinth of cruelties they were forced to navigate as children. It’s enough to make any feeling person weep. To feel compassion for these men in the aftermath of their destruction is hard, I know, but I think it crucial to remember they were once children, too — albeit children on whom the world bestowed supremely raw deals. Brutal men are almost always brutalized boys. This is the saddest thing. Every terrible act The Father commits is in the end a gesture toward the love He never got. All He ever wants is to be loved. But mangled as He is, He can’t do more than devise mangled ways to seek out that love, and in the process mangle everything He touches.
Brutal men are almost always brutalized boys.
So really the publicly powerful Father and the publicly impotent father are scourges of the same degree, diametrically opposed, the one in the mirror and the one in the world. Together they amount to a Janus of sorts who, whichever way he turns, can’t do more than wreak destruction.
WC: The boy’s mother in Patricide is frequently described as being even worse than his father. “Already my mother and shame were tantamount, Lee Harvey Oswald and assassination are tantamount, the way AIDS and death are tantamount, the way 9/11 and terrorists and war mongering and greed are tantamount.” And yet the novel isn’t called Matricide. Why does shame force acceptance rather than action for the boy? And if the mother is shame, is the father guilt?
DF: I’m not sure I’d say it’s acceptance that shame drives the boy into as much as it is dread and then, later, powerlessness so crippling and sheer that the only thing he can look to for relief, at first, at any rate, is the lie that is his hapless father. It’s only in looking back at these times that Rice, as a man, can clearly see the double bind his parents trapped him in, and, as well, the consequences of that bind. He couldn’t accept, much less admit, what he knew his father to be, he says. His knowledge simply festered. And then he tells us that no sooner had “oblivion called out with her promise” than he obeyed. His father is a drug addict. Very naturally he becomes a drug addict, too. But not only does he learn the lessons of his father, he masters them to the extent that in the end he makes his father’s detestable qualities look like virtues. This is Rice’s action, the action of no-action, the action of withdrawal, the action of submersion, the action of consciously obliterating, to the extent he can, his awareness of his life’s terrible conditions.
And, yeah, while I’d agree that the mother is, among many other things, shame, and that the father is, to whatever degree, guilt, his father is so much more than only that. Were that all that his father is, I wouldn’t have written the book. Labeling the father as guilt incarnate is too reductive, I think. Rice’s father is a swirling complex of delusion, fear, power, abuse, kindness, denial, love, avoidance, and so on and so forth, never one or the other long enough for his boy to make any sense of. He’s so radically shifty that Rice can’t understand him or his motivations from any single vantage. His father is insubstantial to the extent that to grapple with him, Rice is forced constantly to move around him in the circles we’ve been talking about.
About the Interviewer
Will Chancellor is the author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall, a novel about in between spaces, particularly those of father/son. He’s currently working on his second novel, To Test the Meaning of Certain Dreams.
If you don’t want a massive case of FOMO, come out and crawl
Do you love literature, booze, and fun? Do you live in NYC? Tomorrow, Lit Crawl returns to NYC and as this infographic shows, you’ll be missing out if you don’t go. Electric Literature is a proud media sponsor of the event, so we’ll see you there!
Will the enhanced editions of the fantasy epic mark a new wave of innovation for publishing?
Twenty years ago, George R. R. Martin published the first installment of A Song of Ice and Fire, which has become a cultural obsession thanks in part to the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones. In celebration of the book’s milestone anniversary, Martin, along with Apple and HarperCollins, announced “a new period in the history of publishing” with the introduction of the Exclusive Enhanced Edition of the first book, with the next four soon to follow suit.
According to the product page on iTunes, the digital books feature “interactive maps, author notes, glossaries, family trees, and illustrations,” which will heighten the reader’s experience and certainly help keep track of characters’ journeys throughout the whole of Westeros.
Martin is very excited about how the release will impact his readers. He says, “Anything that confuses you, anything you want to know more about, it’s right there at your fingertips. It’s an amazing next step in the world of books.” In other words, he’s thrilled people will have this resource available so they can stop bombarding him with questions.
For now, only A Game of Thrones is available on iTunes. A Clash of Kings will be released on October 27th, followed by A Storm of Swords on December 15th. A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons are respectively due in February and March of 2017. However you can go ahead and add them to your iTunes wish list as early as today.
One more note of excitement for diehard fans of the series: The enhanced edition contains an excerpt from the long awaited sixth installment, The Winds of Winter. It used to be up on Martin’s site, but now the sneak peak is exclusively in the iBook. So if the sigils, family trees, and glossaries weren’t enough, perhaps this added incentive will push you to purchase. There is still no word on an official release date for the forthcoming book, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it debuts in this avant-garde format too.
With the novel Girls on Fire, Robin Wasserman does not illuminate what compels teenagers to murder each other and commit impulsive acts of violence. She zooms in on the frenzy of ideas whirring between two girls blasting music in a Buick until their urges exceed their grasp. She empathetically captures what is at work when one person is seen by another and somebody thinks: “I don’t know why I did it, except that life was small and this seemed huge.”
Prior to Girls on Fire,Wasserman wrote for young adults, and this book addresses in the older reader the desire to have read something like this when they were young, a little distance willed between that self and the present self. Some of the novel’s darkness comes from scenes of torture and cruelty, but just as frightening is the naïveté, the poses the characters assume, the reader’s knowledge that the urgency the characters experience will wane and keep life small forever compared to their consequences.
In the rust belt wasteland of Battle Creek, Pennsylvania, high schooler Hannah Dexter wants to become what classmate Lacey Champlain sees in her. Dex, who thinks of herself as an easily railroaded nonentity, needs Lacey to affirm that there is something not invisible in her, something cool and powerful that attracts dangerous Lacey. Lacey, who thinks of herself as too much, as offensive to the sensibilities of anyone who thinks of themselves as good, needs Dex to affirm that there is something out there she can’t destroy (all the while refusing to acknowledge Dex’s fortitude, chalking Dex’s commitment up to how she herself has captivated the girl).
The vivid flashes of sex and violence may be perceived as adult material, but they are the fruits of ideas about lust and power that coalesce in the teen years when one is straining to see what one can be in another, in their eyes and in their bodies. When Lacey contemplates testing Dex’s loyalty, she does so by taking advantage of Dex’s dad and his bad boundaries. It’s inevitable as weather that an older man will look at a younger girl and want to forget who he is and become only what she sees and (he wishes) needs. Wasserman depicts it as the low blow it is and does not let Dex’s dad off the hook for how he allowed his insecurity to inform his behavior.
Without Lacey, I was incapable of wildness, that’s what he was telling me. When I had Lacey, he had a little piece of her, too, could love me more for the things she saw in me. Now that she was gone, he expected I would revert to form. I would be the good girl, his good girl, boring but safe. He was supposed to want that.
Nothing feels genuine about the way the characters interact, especially when it comes to Dex and Lacey interacting with other teenagers, and that is because those interactions are not genuine — the baiting, posturing, and acting. The characters perform in order to live up to each other’s ideas of what they’re supposed to be, and it is one of the most effective facets of the novel. It makes for a chilling and familiar experience, like coming upon a Livejournal from high school that alludes to a crime you cannot remember committing.
Nikki told us how in sixth grade she’d gotten bored with her then best friend, Lauren, and convinced all the other girls in their group to ice her out for the rest of the year. I remembered this: I had joined the I Hate Lauren club — which never existed as anything more than a membership list circulated to half the class, then left anonymously on Lauren’s desk the next morning, just as the I Hate Hannah list had the year before — not because I did hate Lauren, but because it seemed to have slipped into the zeitgeist that Lauren was hateable, and it was safer to be against than for.
As much as Girls on Fire resembles real incidents of brutality between American teenagers, it explicitly recalls the true story that inspired Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, about two high school girls desperate to get lost in each one’s idea of the other, to be seen as great and part of an epic tale, to become a piece of the art they make together. But the central characters in Heavenly Creatures, Pauline and Juliet, commit murder in order to prevent their separation and the shattering of their shared world, and as a result, they are unable to ever see each other again. Dex and Lacey feel themselves coming apart and commit murder in order to get fully lost in one another, prevented from truly being seen by anyone else ever again.
The fragmented incident that incites the climax — which sees Dex throttled through humiliation after humiliation — retrofits a current phenomenon to the novel’s Nevermind-era setting. The contemporary flavor of the brutality in the novel (readers are exposed to so many reports that sound like the events of Girls on Fire that it seems of a piece with daily events of 2016) relieves the trappings of small-town counter-culture, of corsets and lipstick and Nirvana, from being implicitly blamed as an accessory to the characters’ cruelty.
Narrating alternating chapters, Dex and Lacey get space to articulate their motivations as the humiliations accumulate — someone wakes up after a night of drinking covered in inked-on epithets, someone gets offloaded to a church — and when they take revenge, they do not pay for it. It does not feel right to characterize them as having gotten away with it, and the ambiguity is appropriate — it wouldn’t feel right to get satisfying closure from a story about violence. The reader of today knows better. The darkness and Satanic appurtenances of Girls on Fire are ornamental to the very relatable loneliness and longing that Dex and Lacey inspire in each other.
In that space, anything can happen.
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