by Ed Simon
We read for many reasons – to be edified and educated, entertained and enlightened; but let’s be honest, sometimes we just want a nice, strong cup of tea. Whether there is some malignancy in my soul or not, the novels which I read over the past two months greatly indulged my not-so-secret inner energy vampire. Accounts of embarrassments, addictions, traumas, affairs and dramatic scenes. My currency through these books, all of them recently published, was that of cringe. And I loved them. Because the thing with tea is that it’s not just a little treat for the part of us that loves the spectacle of human debasement, but that there is some spiritual nourishment that comes along with it.
Nineteenth-century historian Henry Thomas Buckle said that “gossip is the lowest form of communication,” but that’s the sour grapes of a long-dead man that none of us know anything about other than that snobbish opinion. Because gossip can be fantastic. At its core, there can be a moral aspect to gossip. Yes, there is an element of judgement, as well as one of gratitude that the subject of discussion isn’t you. But there are lessons to be learned, ethical and human lessons, in stories where the individual train goes off the track. Besides, a central aspect of fiction is precisely this investigation of the contours of human behavior at its most embarrassing, it’s most desperate and ridiculous. An element of the memento mori in gossip and the literature of human interaction at its most shaky, vulnerable, and attenuated. Of human behavior at its most abjectly messy.
Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love, released in September of this year, is a consummate cup of tea. Written as a visceral first-person monologue from an anonymous narrator, a New York arts writer who has only just returned from a London exile to attend a friend’s funeral and a dinner honoring a famous actress unknown to all of the literati whom she used to consider compatriots, the voice of Happiness and Love evokes stream-of-consciousness (but not entirely). The novel is written in long, rollicking, run-on sentences with no chapter breaks; in fact, with no paragraph breaks at all. The narrator has a tendency to repeat the same observations two or three or eight times, or to contradict herself, or to argue with various ever-shifting positions in her own mind. Far from being exhausting, which my description admittedly might make it sound, Dubno’s voice is exhilarating. A tremendously internal book (and the narrator is nothing if not unreliable), Happiness and Love records its protagonist’s often scurrilously hateful thoughts about this dinner party held after a tragic suicide and with little regard for the woman who killed herself, a gathering of cynical hangers-on and pretentious arts-and-publishing ghouls. “I was surrounded by the very people that I had spent the last five years avoiding,” says Dubno’s narrator, “people who had taken advantage of the death of our friend Rebecca to drag me back to their cathedral of modernist rococo on the Bowery.” If all of this sounds too twee, too New York, it’s not (and besides, in a debt to Ottessa Moshfegh’s great female anti-heros, Dubno’s main character is hardly likable herself). What Happiness and Love presents, in an admitted authorial debt to Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 novel Woodcutters, isn’t just a stiff and cold glass of Hater-Aid as the narrator takes a psychic scalpel to every MFA and gallery curator seated in a Bowery apartment, but a moving account of trauma and grief, where the title of the novel itself is oddly not ironic at all.
Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian, published in August, combines the genre of the campus novel with a playfully metafictional conceit leavened by some deliciously old-fashioned gossip. The plot concerns that typical English Department trope of professors behaving badly, of predators in tweed and hypocritical cuckholds, but by ingeniously presenting the book itself as if it was the MFA thesis of a star-student who is witness to the entire imbroglio. Ostensibly a work-in-progress by Robbie, a star-student at the fictional Edwards University in Upstate New York which reads as a kind of lesser-Ivy (Cornell, maybe?), Seduction Theory dramatizes the peccadillos of married colleagues Simone and Ethan. Simone is a black-clad, model-good-looking theory prodigy celebrated for her work on Virginia Woolf while her husband Ethan is a sad-sack Gen-X throwaway who only has his position due to the vagaries of the academic two-body problem and the fortunate reality of spousal hiring. A novelist for whom the date of publication for his single book recedes distressingly further and further into the past, Ethan has a brief affair with the department’s administrative assistant Abigail, while Robbie enters into an unhealthy mentorship with Simone. True to the form of the campus novel, Seduction Theory presents everyone acting as the worst version of themselves, permanently stunted men and women that have never fully realized that “Cleverness is a condiment, not a meal.” Occasionally Adrian’s metafictional conceit slips beyond itself, the tenses get a bit confused between the past and the present, so that ironically I think that the breaking-of-the-fourth-wall actually could have been emphasized a bit more. But that’s no matter, because what Seduction Theory had to say about infatuation and inspiration was good enough, especially with its deliciously cynical conclusion.
Cynical conclusions similarly abound in Karim Dimechkie’s The Uproar, released this past June. An interrogation of the wages-of-wokeness in a post-woke world, The Uproar follows a perilous few weeks in the lives of husband-and-wife Sharif and Adjoua. The former, despite his Arabic name, is a white (appearing) do-good, liberal social worker in Brooklyn, while his wife is a progressive Black novelist, the daughter of self-made Senegalese immigrants who has lately taken to writing ad-copy (and the occasional New York Times editorial about racial politics) just to make enough to base-line live in the Lower East Side. Adjoua and Sharif’s lives are in disarray when they discover that their future daughter will have (highly treatable) leukemia so that they must rehome the former’s beloved bull-mastiff Judy. Sharif ends up asking a former client, a hard-luck Haitian immigrant named Emanuele, to take care of the dog. Sharif is a man that lacks any sense of self (or responsibility); his ill-conceived decisions, starting with letting a man he barely knows momentarily adopt Judy, cascade into a situation that brings to bear everything from cultural politics to social media. He is the sort of husband who knows “better than to spoil the moment with a reaction,” thinking that there is virtue in having “sat perfectly still, letting the physical contact fill him with a bright and cleansing air.” The Uproar is subtler and more powerful than my brief description may make it seem; like Dubno, Dimechkie is able to parody aspects of the coastal, liberal bubble without losing empathy for those characters, and while it might be easy to read Sharif as a hypocrite when it comes to the eventual series of confrontations with Emanuele, we’ve spent too much time with him to dismiss him as entirely without redeeming value. That’s what makes the conclusion of The Uproar all the more powerful – even those people with redeeming value can still be responsible for very, very shitty outcomes.
Continuing in the vein of examining the cultural politics of guilt and attrition is Charlotte Runcie’s debut Bringing the House Down. Just as with The Uproar, Runcie’s novel had me white-knuckling through the actions of characters who can’t help themselves, the plot leaving a nervous lump in readers’ throats as the protagonists continue to make terrible choice after terrible choice. At the center of Runcie’s novel is the downfall of Alex Lyons, British tabloid theatre reviewer and nepo-baby son of a beloved stage actress (think a Dame Judy Dench-type) who becomes the rightful target of an Edinburgh Fringe Festival one-woman-show created by a woman that had a one-night stand with the critic after he’d already given her previous production a cruel single star review. Thematically similar to Jo Hamya’s also excellent The Hypocrite (albeit narratively they’re nothing alike), Bringing Down the House is on its surface about the long-due reckoning for male cultural gatekeepers that exploited their positions and abused their power, though beyond that Runcie’s novel has even deeper things to say about the rhetoric of evaluation. In our current moment where anyone with an Amazon or a Goodreads account has carte blanche to give a one-or-five-star-or-anything-in-between review, where the algorithm has turned discernment into a simple numerical issue and the culture industry has transformed criticism into a fully-monetized commodity, what is the nature of evaluation? As the narrator Sophie, the newspaper’s other reporter who is shoved into a crumbling Scottish flat to babysit Alex, says of their vocation – “To everyone whose work I’ve ever reviewed: thank you for making something worth talking about.” Burning Down the House is very much worth talking about. Four stars. Maybe five. Four-and-a-half.
Jon Raymond’s God and Sex, also published in August, offers maybe the most cerebral of iced teas this past year. A slender novel of lyrical precision, God and Sex concerns middling non-fiction writer Arthur Zinn, whom the promotional copy describes as a “New Age writer” but in the novel seems much more an essayist in the vein of a Ross Gay, Maggie Nelson, or Robert Macfarlene rather than Deepak Chopra, who decides that his next venture will be an exploration of the poetics of trees. And so, Zinn enlists the help of an ecologist at the local Washington state university near where he lives, a kind, compassionate, and deeply spiritual man himself, though none of that prevents the writer from pursuing an affair with the professor’s wife. To interpret Raymond’s novel as being merely another tale of middle-class intellectuals hurting themselves and others would be to miss the theological conundrums that ultimately lay at the center of God and Sex, though to explain why that’s the case would require me to give away too much of this short but beautiful novel’s plot. “A book is round,” says Zinn, “To a reader, it unscrolls in a single line, left to right, snaking down the page, wrapping onto the next, but to a writer, it turns more like a wheel.” Indeed, that’s how a life is lived as well, as if writing a book. Because it’s never just one damn thing after the other, but a process of revision and editing, of erasure and occasional triumph, looping back on itself rather than easily progressing forward. God and Sex is haunted by the question of literature – just as it’s also haunted by an absent deity and a present nature – for it fundamentally concerns how it’s possible for any of us to write our own stories, much less properly understand those of another.
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