Uncomfortable Imaginations
How do writers convey the unnerving? Where do tenderness and grief fit in?
This is the second section of Chase’s 2023 Reading in Review, a series of posts where Chase reflects on books read in 2023. The first is here. The reviews don’t assume you have read the works, and don’t spoil their experiences. This post talks about suicide. This section primarily discusses:
Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women
Ben Marcus’s Notes from the Fog
Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home
Full list of works discussed here.
One of the most ambitious strange books I read this year was Ben Marcus's Notable American Women. Set in post-apocalyptic Ohio, the story feels opaque. The language is alien. Characters have inscrutable motivations. You don’t have any sense of the bigger picture of the world, or the smaller picture always of what/why/how. Yet, the story also has the Kafkaesque feature where the the raw emotions are so heightened and serious, the situations with the main family so dark and fraught and important, that it bursts right through questions about logistically what is happening (my go-to reference for this is the scene in Kafka's The Trial where he is waiting in the ante-room of the lawyer's office flirting / arguing / begging for his life with the lawyer's assistant. It’s silly but it feels serious because of the stakes). You can’t tell what or why everything is happening, but you feel the stakes anyway. Like in Kafka, it doesn't matter why the characters don't "behave" "rationally" if their intense irrational feelings are so. recognizable, which they are.
Part of the effect comes from how often the world feels grotesque and alien. The future will feel alien, and what Marcus understands well is that so would the language of the future. (This is even better in Marcus's first book, The Age of Wire and String, which likewise has "dictionary sections" that define terms. But the definitions are thick and unfamiliar, useless. It is exciting when later in the prose, you encounter a word that was defined for you and you get it, you see a meaning that you wouldn't have gotten if the word hadn't been defined for you, suddenly those definitions were not useless! It’s one things if it never works, it’s different if it sometimes works).
The idea is that these characters are acting out scenarios whose emotional notes are recognizable to us (e.g., he’s surviving the torture of the cult occupying his house), even if it's not important that they are embedded in a "reason" "why" (e.g., why doesn’t he run away? What does the cult want? Why are these people in the cult in the first place?). I’m thinking of Andrew Martin's Wellness review again, in which he notes that Nathan Hill has to provide reasons for every behavior, or in Greenwood where Jace can only inherit the island if it's her birthright. What if she just took it, even if she didn't "deserve" it? Is that too radical?
This is fiction in a Bertolt Brecht way, puppets acting things out. We know they are not real people. There is no illusion of getting lost in a dream. We know it's a novel because the language is thick and the words have to be pulled off of the pages. But it doesn't make it less meaningful or less of an experience.
Another good touchpoint here is Richard Brody's excellent review of Barbie, where he notes, a century after Brecht, we should remember his lessons better. We don't need a sign flashing over every scene to remember this is fiction. Thinking of Barbie or Ken as fully 3D real people is wrong: they are not real people (i.e., they are characters in a movie) and even there, they are not real people (i.e., they're dolls, or imaginations of dolls). Dolls (like characters in movies) are played with, people position them, the stories they go through are written and enacted by the psychology of someone real, likely a little girl.
What kind of presuppositions about the world might a little girl have, and what kind of evolution would that undergo over time? There is something very sad about the "utopia" of Barbieland, precisely because we know it is unrealistic and internally inconsistent. What will happen to the unseen young psyche who constructed it when she sees the inequality of the real world? The more fantastical Barbieland is, the bigger the gap between it and the imagined future world our girl will have to face. The movie says this explicitly. Thinking of characters not as people, but as vessels for exploration and thought (allegory!): Notable American Women does this also.
There’s more of this in the other Brechtian movie with Margot Robbie this year: Asteroid City, my favorite movie of 2023.
A question that came when I was reading Marcus's Notable American Women: how would you edit this? If writing is about nurturing the thing inside of you that has ideas, how do you go back and fix? What do you do to improve a work-in-progress if understandability isn't the goal? Give it to people and record their reactions?
I had this thought as well this year reading Joan Didion's twin grief memoirs: The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. When you're Joan Didion, and you're writing something this raw about the end of your love and life, how do you reshape those words? How do you make it right? That is clearly a wrong question. Democracy, the other Didion I read this year, came off as overedited, like she set out to write one story and ended up adding authorial inserts and asides. I find it funny that the Joan Didion who I always think of as the counter-counter-culture, reactionary, the big hater, writes such form-forward works.
Another great read this year that uses opaqueness: Olga Ravn's The Employees. There are visceral details in the snippets of the crew of a space ship who encounter something(s) to take aboard their ship. Those details give you a good sense of the experience of what they have (its textures, its colors, their feelings about it) without ever giving you any "big picture" sense of what it is. It never stops feeling alien. Words have the ability to stay open even as they are ruthlessly specific (I thought this also while this watching the film adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen, in which the most visceral impactful moments all come through language. Eileen's father pointing his gun at school children as they walk in front of his home is so much more disturbing in words than if they had shown it, equally so for the central monologue of the movie in which a mother describes a terror that happened in her house. It wouldn't work in visual, has to be words!)
Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera (I've enjoyed everything he's written) also uses opaque words to keep the stories mysterious. There's Borges and Calvino all over this, and Herrera earns that comparison. The stories are good. Herrera's speculative worlds are sometimes totally alien (one story concerns an extraterrestrial species who view a visitor learning their language as theft, offensive that he would do it) and sometimes familiar (my favorite is called “The Objects”, about a woman wandering a neighborhood late at night, struggling to navigate the simple space because of technical troubles with her weird GPS. Or, is the neighborhood territory itself dangerous and the device is right?). One of his most effective techniques is his repetition across stories. Multiple stories in this collection have the same title. Many have lines reused. There's a sense of deja vu to re-encountering it, and also a bit of resistance: it makes it harder to index or categorize the stories because you can't refer to them by just their titles.
Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis (one of three dissimilar books I read with "dog" in the title this year, along with Dog Symphony by Sam Munson and Black Dogs by Ian McEwan) was an imaginative pleasure. I love his use of “fifteen” in the title and its role as a clock: we know the story won't be done until we meet and learn the fate of all fifteen dogs. The way each dog embodies a different way of seeing the world reminded me of the allegory in Herman Hesse in Siddhartha or Damien, also often of The Lion King (on the other two dog books: I enjoyed Dog Symphony's great ugly images of meat and its dead-end academic plot even if its speculative creepy twist wasn't as interesting, and Black Dogs was a great grief novel in a year I read a lot of great grief novels).
Another speculative work read this year was first novel Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah whose short story collection Friday Black is exceptional. Chain Gang focuses with great speculative imagination on its concept (though it has great prose too, I particularly like the way he writes the voice of a character who was subject to mind-bending torture). It's being celebrated this year, deservedly. Violent and with good social commentary (also it’s romantic), Adjei-Brenyah writes about a world where prisoners fight in televised death matches to earn their freedom. It evokes, above anything, anime (the dark tournament of Yu Yu Hakusho, any of Dragonball's tournament arcs, the novel/manga/film Battle Royale). Maybe some of the novelty to the establishment is because people aren't watching enough anime!
On a gradient of traditional to experimental, Ben Marcus's Notable American Women and Age of Wire and String are the most experimental things I read this year, and it's funny to have also read his most recent publication, Notes from the Fog, and find it the most traditional of this set (still far from Dickens, not Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead which was probably the most traditional novel I read this year, more than Balzac's Pere Goriot, more than Henry James's Washington Square).
How and why did Ben Marcus go from writing opaque word-play works to something comfortably published in The New Yorker (as Notes from the Fog's opening story was)? I don't know, as his response to the "difficult writing" Franzen conversation in Harpers suggested a commitment to more opaque projects. He argued well for doing the kind of work he had been doing.
But it was still maybe the best thing I read this year alongside Dillard.
Each of Marcus's stories holds something that he paints as cavernous, creepy, mysterious. The child of "Cold Little Bird" (the New Yorker one) who tells his parents he doesn't love them has all the Freudian/Kafkaesque family disturbingness as Notable American Women, but the difference is we have a POV in the story equally as confused as we are. We can latch onto the boy's father, who is relatable and not opaque. There is a peephole to see the strangeness through.
The best three stories each do this. "Precious Precious" starts with a good sci-fi "pomo" concept of a cure-all pill that has strange unexplainable side effects (sometimes you expel the pill, undigested, leading to great DeLillo-y questioning of what the pill was doing). But the climax of the story ends up being much less conceptual. While visiting a nursing home for her father, our narrator Ida is loitering in the yard and considering leaving when she is approached by a nurse.
The nurse is too confrontational: like Notable American Women, it's not "realistic" that a stranger would go out of her way to be so abrasive, judgmental. But just like how an event that is low probability yet high impact (e.g., developing a terrible rare disease) can have still net out to a high expectation, still linger in the mind, the nurse's confrontation is so damning it wipes away concerns of believability. I think this is a good writing lesson: sometimes, words that are too subtle sell less.
Here's the opening of that scene:
A nurse approached Ida just as she was reaching for her keys.
“You here to see your father?”
“Yes I am. How are you today?”
Maybe if she showered this person with kindness, something would unlock in the tough, ungiving dispositions of the nurses, and maybe they’d look after her dad better when she wasn’t around.
“If you’re here to see him, why are you outside?”
“I just came out for some air.”
“There’s air inside. There’s air everywhere. That’s what the world is.”
“I know.”
“He can’t see you if you’re out here. You can’t see him. You might as well be at home.”
“I’m going back in.”
“You weren’t, though. You were going to leave.”
“No.”
“Don’t tell me. I see your face. I can read your thoughts. You think I can’t?”
That last line is very well articulated: the nurse's bully-comment "You think I can't?" pre-empts questions. A nurse that tells a stranger she can read her thoughts is silly, but a nurse that adds that last question is dangerous!
Her dismissive "there's air everywhere" is also cutting. Look at how easily Marcus uses short, simple sentences to give the nurse's words bite. This is not someone firing off words without thought. I don't know if someone could write this way unless they also did the diligent work of doing his Riddley-Walker/Clockwork-Orange first two novels.
After this, Ida tries to share more about her experience and the nurse is brutal and efficient at reducing Ida's story down to meaninglessness (think of a shorter, better way to communicate the nurse's dismissiveness--you can't!):
For no reason that she could think of, Ida told the nurse that her mother was also in a home.
“Everybody’s somewhere,” said the nurse.
“She’s at the Sullivan Gardens.”
“That’s a place.”
“I go back and forth.”
“How else would you do it?”
“My mother and my father.”
“I don’t imagine you’d visit any other kind of person in a place like that.”
“No, I guess not.”
Like in Kafka's “The Judgement”, the story ends with a surprise of an unexpected character delivering harsh judgement onto the protagonist. The ruling is swift and unrelenting and cruel. The nurse gives this following disturbing speech right after noting that Ida's father will likely die soon:
“You’ll get a phone call. It might be me calling you. It might be someone else. I make the phone calls when I’m here, but I’m not always here. If I’m here, I’ll call you. We have your number. Your number is first. You’re the emergency contact. But it won’t be an emergency. The emergency will have already happened. It will have come and gone. I’ll say hello, and I’ll ask to speak to you. You’ll probably say that it’s you on the phone. Some people, fancy people, say This is she, or This is he. And that’s when I say, It’s about your father. That’s how the call will go up to that point.”
“Okay, well, I guess it’s good to know this. I appreciate the information. May I ask your name?”
“It’s Lorraine.”
Ida took the nurse’s hand. “Lorraine,” she said. “I am really pleased to meet you.”
The nurse pulled back her hand. “Don’t be pleased. If you get a phone call, and the person says that it’s Lorraine from Sweethill Village, then it’s me calling, and you should never be happy to hear from me.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t be happy when I call.”
“I won’t be,” said Ida. “I promise.”
This scene with the nurse is both more approachable and more alienating than the cryptic future worlds of Marcus's first two works. Look at the handholding, the intimacy of two people connecting, the honesty of their conversation which feels fresh and sincere compared to the chatter Ida had been experiencing with her peers so far in the story. But it's so dark! She's promising not to be happy! This is emotionally complex, great writing.
In my favorite story in the collection, "George and Elizabeth," George is undergoing some interesting psycho-sexual family drama with his father's passing, a new relationship with his dead father's girlfriend, and some back-and-forth mental gymnastics with his therapist. Then the story introduces George's estranged sister. Her name is Elizabeth, but she goes by her middle name, Pattern (a great name for a character).
Pattern is where Marcus best uses his understanding of how to use unnatural speculative details to unnerve and undermine the otherwise "real" world of his story. Pattern is a hyper-billionaire, and she's built her fortune and reputation doing a vague yet clearly-evil exploitation of some natural phenomenon. Her wealth and power is conveyed through funny scenes where she matter-of-factly gestures to what she knows and can do with the world. The scene begins with Pattern's staff calling George, but he gets uncomfortable waiting and hangs up (the way that it's staff that calls George, and not Pattern herself, is a great powerful introduction to a powerful character).
The phone rings later, and it’s Pattern now.
“Jesus, George, what the hell? You hung up on my staff?”
“First of all, hello,” he said. “Secondly, let’s take a look at the transcript and I’ll show you exactly what happened. Your team could use some human behavior training. But forget all that. What on earth is new, big sister?”
She wanted to see him, she said, and she’d found a way for that to be possible. They had things to discuss.
“No shit,” said George. He couldn’t believe he was actually talking to her.
“Wait, so where are you?” she asked. “I don’t have my thing with me.”
“What thing?”
“I mean I don’t know where you are.”
“And your thing would have told you? Have you been tracking me?”
“Oh c’mon, you asshole.”
“I’m in New York.”
She laughed.
“What?”
“No, it’s just funny. I mean it’s funny that you still call it that.”
“What would I call it?”
“No, nothing, forget it. I’m sorry. I’m just on a different, it’s, I’m thinking of something else. Forget it.”
Like with the nurse, Pattern's speech has direct, short, efficient comments that upend us and make us nervous: her "thing" (i.e., she has some technology of which we and George know nothing, but which makes tracking George totally matter-of-fact for her) and the idea that New York has a secret new name. This is familiar (sad George) and unfamiliar (the hyper-billionaire tech and knowledge Pattern has). Later, Pattern and George meet in a building that is invisible, the walls made of smoke which is derived from pork. Another greatly efficient detail: something familiar, which has been used for millennia by humans (pork) is apparently able to be turned into glass, it's alienating, it suggests a futurity that we cannot comprehend.
If all Marcus did was unnerve us, it would be enough, but the story builds into a poignant sad climax. Pattern goes to George to say goodbye. Her situation is ambiguous: her global, world-altering, vague crimes have caught up to her. She tells George that something uncertain is going to happen. Maybe she will have to flee and hide from the retribution and punishment which is coming for her, in which case she will not contact him again. Or, she will be caught by that unnamed force, which she creepily explains here:
"My options won’t be the same. Freedom.”
“Jail time?” asked George.
“It’s not exactly jail for someone like me. But it’s fine if you imagined it that way. That would be nice.”
The fact that it's not jail is creepier than if she described it: what kind of torture awaits Pattern?
Like with the nurse, Marcus cuts right to the heart of sincerity, he has tender, honest speech which is unnerving perhaps because of how ironic and distanced other speech has been (note the same tactic as with the nurse, when Pattern goes on the offensive and dismisses George's words to generalities):
“Do you think I can be in your life?” George asked. “I’m not sure why but it feels scary to ask you that.”
He tried to laugh.
“Oh, you are, George,” said Pattern. “Here you are. In my life right now. Closer to me than anyone else on the planet.”
“You know what I mean. How can I reach you?” He didn’t particularly want to say goodbye to her.
“I always know where you are, Georgie. I do. Trust me.”
“But I don’t know that. I don’t really feel that. It doesn’t feel like you’re even out there. When you’re not here it’s like you never were here at all.”
“No, no,” she whispered. “I don’t believe that. That’s not true.”
“Is something going to happen to you? I don’t know what to believe.”
“Well,” she said. “Something already has. Something has happened to all of us, right?”
“Please don’t make a joke or be clever, Elizabeth. I can’t stand it. There’s nobody left but you. What if I don’t see you again? What will I do?”
“Oh Georgie, I am right here. I am right here with you now.”
I don't think this is a tactic that's new to Notes from the Fog: there are moments like this in Notable American Women (e.g., tender scenes between the boy and his mother) and in Age of Wire and String (I think the encounter with words that have been defined for us has the same kind of "light between dark clouds" effect). But it's something that is maybe more achievable when you are writing in the semi-realist format that Marcus chose for these stories.
The other standout story in Notes from the Fog is the title story. There's a great moment where Marcus emotionally pulls the rug out. it starts in therapy, where our narrator Jay is being mocked by his wife Gin (another great name) and their therapist. Jay is then fired from school ("They took my kids away," Jay summarizes to Gin). Gin responds by mocking him and suggesting that she is a hired hand, a unloving performer paid to simulate comfort for him, asking, "Where's my money?" It's all been a humiliating, sad story for Jay so far.
But Marcus twists it in a paragraph and a jump. Jay takes Gin’s request for money literally. What we get next is great, notice how Marcus puts ambiguity, lack of detail into the dollar bill while also putting in strange tenderness. It’s sincere but there’s something distant, something dangerous:
What I did a few days later was to take a special twenty-dollar bill that I’d been given and that I’d saved forever, I don’t know why. A mother might have given it to me long ago, I can’t remember. I didn’t earn it, I know that. It was a gift. A person handed it to me and I had never at that point seen so much money in my life. I just always kept it in my shaving kit, and it had stayed crisp somehow. It was still new money and I probably thought that it had magic, which embarrasses me to admit because mostly I can’t stand that kind of talk. I put it in an envelope for Gin and left it on her dresser. Once I used to collect gin bottles, just for their labels, and I’d steam them off and then scissor out her name, Gin and Gin and Gin. I pasted one of these to the envelope so she’d know it was for her. I wanted to write a note and I thought a lot about what I might say. I wrote it all out in my mind. But there was no easy way to get it out of me. I didn’t know how to extract it. It was all in there, in me, but I couldn’t prove it.
“From me,” I wrote, “for you. Because you are very nice.”
The next section opens brutally, efficiently, magically:
After Gin died, the children went to live with their aunt in Maroyo County.
Oh no!
He does it again here: the dying Gin apparently asked, in order to save their meager funds, that she simply be taken to a field and dropped off there to die. It's the kind of sad alien thing that might happen in Notable American Women or The Age of Wire in String. And Jay does it! We see the scene:
We drove out to the field and I got her set up on the blanket and poured her out a bowl of soup. The day was fair and we didn’t think she’d be too cold. How many nights would she last? It was something we didn’t want to discuss. I asked her was there anything else and she just put her head on me. It was small and cold. When I held it I didn’t feel like I was holding her... I stood up after a while to say goodbye. You have been a good wife, I told her. I am sure I did not deserve you, and I am sure you do not deserve this. We hugged without tears and I went back to the car.
But again, the irony, the distance, this kind of inhuman alien act (no one would actually ditch their dying loved one in a field, right????) is subverted to a very powerful tender effect, in great few words:
We both knew this wasn’t really happening. We must have. Some things, just a very few things, don’t have to be real if you don’t want them to. When she suddenly stirred and looked around—for me, I thought, I hoped—when she struggled to try to stand, I ran to her and picked her up and took her home. And that was the end of that kind of talk.
I found this moving, and it’s echoed in another moving favorite of the year: Lorrie Moore's excellent novel I am Homeless if This is Not My Home.
Moore sets most of the story with Finn, starting in a familiar New York (she tells us the Chelsea cookware bombs were a month before, meaning it's the pre-Trump October 2016. I know this because I lived on the block of the Chelsea cookware bombs when they happened). Her details of the city streets, trash, trucks, noise, feels real.
We meet Finn as a loser, and it only gets worse. The majority of his opening scene is set in the hospice room of his dying brother Max.
Three great things about this scene. The first is the craft of the writing, the way the dialogue is naturalistic, the details she includes, this is clearly written by someone who is masterfully commanding her words. The second is the clock it starts: Max is dying, he may die soon, we are given clear context that Finn needs to be here for the next few days to say goodbye to his brother.
The third is the stakes. We get that Finn is a loser. He is in a disgraced state with his job at his school (like Jay) partly because he has been teaching conspiracy theories to them in history class instead of history. We get that he is ashamed to tell Max this. We get that he and Max have a shared real history that will evaporate into loneliness when Max dies. No one shares the memories with Finn that Max shares. And we get the biographical details of a mentally unstable ex Lily, who Finn clearly loves, and who has struggled over and over with suicide. We get the sense that Lily might not have much time left either.
Then one of Lily's friends contacts Finn that something is urgent with Lily and he should drive far away from New York to attend their book group meeting (vague and interesting). Finn says goodbye to Max, relinquishing precious time with his brother to go to Lily.
Moore does the right stuff: she makes the journey difficult for Finn. It's clear he cannot teleport there and back, he has unstable transportation, the terrain is messy.
And then the plot starts: he arrives at the book group and finds only Lily's friend:
“The group is not coming tonight.”
“OK.”
“Lily has finally done it,” Sigrid said.
“Oh, my god,” he babbled again. He dropped his face into his hands.
“She had taken a turn again and was not doing well.”
He pulled his hands away. He knew Lily like the backs of them—that is, he never looked closely, too busy reading his own palm. But he had loved her always in that necessary, twisted, hurting way. The actual end of her, though he had imagined it, he hadn’t imagined thoroughly. “How? How?” His tears became icicles now frozen mid- drip.
“As I said, she was not doing well.”
“Why wasn’t she in a hospital?”
“She was. Jack took her there. But once she was there she refused to have visitors.”
“But how did she get out?”
“She didn’t. The doctors wouldn’t allow it.”
He didn’t know why this had been turned into a guessing game. It caused him to stand, his coat still on. “She jumped from the roof,” he said.
“No.”
Here's some of the same funny irony of Gin and Jay, the "guessing game" of how Lily killed herself. But like the way Marcus puts Gin's death between paragraphs, the effect of the structure here is that it fucks with our sense of time: Lily wasn't actively dead, she was "supposed to be" "close to" suicide. And now instead of a dying Lily, we get a dead Lily. This subverts expectations, and it immediately detonates the idea that keeps burning for the bulk of the novel: that just like Finn missed his chance to say goodbye to Lily, he is missing his chance to say goodbye to Max.
The rest of the story hinges on this tension: what does saying goodbye to a loved one mean, what do we carry from them after their death, and what kind of relationship do we have with the dead after they die? (the story takes this literally, in a speculative element that is the core plot of the novel but which I won't spoil. This element also fucks with our sense of time).
I was surprised to find a similar element in another novel I read this year: Melissa Broder's Death Valley (I really like Melissa Broder). In this story, our protagonist goes on a roadtrip while two sick/dying people in her life are left behind. Like with Lorrie Moore and Finn, there is tension that her loved ones will die before she returns. In one of these two books, they do, and in another, they don't.
Two other stories I felt played with these themes well: Paul Auster's Baumgartner (Paul Auster is maybe my favorite writer, and his recent cancer diagnosis looms over this book) features a character who is left to interpret his own life and the life of his late wife following her sudden death. It has an uncomfortable strange ending which takes Baumgartner on snowy drive tinged with doom, remining me of the book and film I'm Thinking of Ending Things (as did both Fog and Homeless and I’m thinking also of Anna Kavan's excellent Ice, mentioned in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, her powerful depiction of cold evil in a deteriorating world). The other is the aforementioned Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, in which our protag becomes the keeper for the anxieties and memories of his wife's parents during and after their deaths.
So much is alien! If all the stories did was feel unnerving, they wouldn’t have the same effect. It’s that they simultaneously show warmth as well as coldness that the tension feels stronger.
Click here for the third post of 2023 Reading in Review when it’s posted and subscribe below to get email alerts for new posts. Full list of works discussed here.