by Derek Neal
Have you ever read a book that you thought you were going to write? A book that captures something you’ve experienced and wanted to put into words, only to realize that someone else has already done it? The Apartment by Greg Baxter is that book for me.
The Apartment was published in 2012 as Baxter’s debut novel and follows an unnamed American as he looks for an apartment over one day in a cold and snowy European city. Interspersed in his search are flashbacks to his home in America, his deployment in Iraq, and various encounters he’s had while living in Europe. He’s accompanied by Saskia, a local woman intent on helping him, as well as a few other characters they meet throughout the day. This is the extent of the plot.
I’ve thought about writing a story or a novel for years about an American in Europe. I wrote a short story based on an experience in Italy, submitted it to a competition, and promptly forgot about it. I’ve started multiple other stories based in Turin and Nice, France—both places I’ve lived—which are scattered throughout notebooks and Microsoft Word files. Sometimes these stories have plots; sometimes they don’t. What I’m more interested in is atmosphere and style. Baxter seems to have a similar approach.
Although The Apartment is Baxter’s first novel, it is not his first book. That would be A Preparation for Death, a collection of personal essays/memoir detailing his inability to write a novel and a subsequent period of self-destruction. Multiple failed novels are mentioned, as well as one that he edited and redrafted heavily. This process led to “a great deal of conventionality around a book [he] believed was original.” In describing the revisions, Baxter writes that he “had, inarguably, dealt with every criticism [the book] had received. It now answered everyone’s concerns.” There’s a knowing, rueful tone to this passage; with the benefit of hindsight, Baxter realizes that in writing a book for everyone, he wrote a book for no one. A Preparation for Death is a response to this failure—a book written solely for himself, and The Apartment, with its relative lack of plot and dramatic tension, feels the same way.
In interviews, Baxter has cited the discovery of the essay format—particularly Montaigne—as the key to the rebirth of his writing. He notes the honesty that essays require as well their focus, in the case of the personal essay, on autobiography. This is in contrast, in Baxter’s estimation, to the novel and to what he saw in 2010 as “the tired and relentless procession of award-winning novels that all looked the same, and became, through their success, the primary influences of a new generation of fiction writers.” One can’t help but think of Karl Ove Knausgaard here and My Struggle, the first volume of which was published in 2009. Talking about his decision to write an “autobiographical novel,”—what we now refer to as autofiction—Knausgaard said, “The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet.”
When I read The Apartment, it felt like a work of autofiction, not only because of the biographical details that the protagonist shares with the author, but because of what Knausgaard calls “the voice of your own personality.” Another way to put this would be to say the novel presents a clear depiction of consciousness, which is necessarily bound up with memory and time. When we read The Apartment, we feel that we are the protagonist, which to me is one of the appeals of literature and one of the main goals of autofiction. Baxter notes that he “wanted to try to have the narrator hold on, as intensely as possible, to the present tense, and let him fail to do so only when the strain became too great. The book began partly as an experiment in how far present-tense, moment-by-moment narration could stretch. I didn’t get very far.”
A common criticism of autofiction, and one made recently by Anna Kornbluh in Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, is its focus on what Kornbluh terms “immediacy,” which she sees as a desire to portray reality without mediation. In the case of autofiction, this would mean a simple recording of one’s day to day life in a documentarian fashion, without interpretation, which is how Kornbluh characterizes Knausgaard’s My Struggle. However, this is either a dishonest or a careless assessment of Knausgaard. It is true that in the quote cited from Knausgaard he refers to his project in this way, but we must be careful in trusting authors describing their own novels. They are interested in how the novel will be perceived and may want to influence its interpretation, and at other times, they are simply unable to articulate what it is they are doing. This is not a criticism of someone like Knausgaard but rather an observation on how artistic creation works. My Struggle certainly has narrative and is “about something,” in the same way that Rachel Cusk’s stories have character, even if she claims she’s not interested in character. To say that autofiction lacks form, that it is a sort of journalistic narration of one’s life in an attempt to authentically portray reality, is to ignore the architecture underneath the surface of these works. And even if one wanted to write a story without narrative or character, it would be necessary to actively work against these devices rather than just ignoring them. The human mind creates narrative and character from the events of everyday life.
Another rebuttal to Kornbluh’s criticism of autofiction can be seen in Baxter’s description of how he started writing The Apartment. He says that he attempted to have his character hold on to the present tense and narrate the story moment-by-moment, which sounds quite similar to Kornbluh’s “immediacy,” but he failed. Although he doesn’t explain why, one could speculate that it is because he wanted to portray consciousness and interiority, which is one of the principal goals of the novel and perhaps its greatest achievement, only to realize he could not do so through immediacy. Instead, Baxter says, “the narrator starts to interpret his observations [of the city], his interpretations link to memories, and those memories require interpretations, and these interpretations link back to the city.” This is consciousness, and it’s what the reader experiences when reading The Apartment as well as authors like Knausgaard, Cusk, and to cite the novel most closely connected to Baxter’s description, Open City by Teju Cole.
Autofiction, then, is not about pure immediacy but instead uses immediacy as a vehicle to enter the narrator’s mind. In the mind, the present world falls away, permitting the text to go on essayistic digressions that leave the plot of the novel behind. In The Apartment, the narrator enters a department store to buy a winter coat, which leads, somehow, to a memory of a train journey, an encounter at a small hotel with another American, their drive together to see some Roman ruins, and finally a short discussion of the Aeneid, before returning to the department store. Knausgaard also uses these sorts of digressions; indeed, they are one of his signatures. Most infamously, he stuck a 400-page essay on Hitler in the middle of Book Six of My Struggle. This was, I admit, too much for me. I completed the first five books but the sixth remains unfinished. Kudos by Rachel Cusk, which I’ve just read, uses the thinnest veneer of immediacy so she can construct a narrative allowing her to explore the real subject of the novel: the question of freedom and the existential dichotomy of seeming versus being. In Kudos, the protagonist (clearly a stand in for Cusk), is an author en route to a book fair. On the airplane and then in interviews and at other functions at the book fair, the narrator engages in dialogues with others, although dialogues may be the wrong word; these are more like monologues that the narrator listens to and records. At first, it may seem that the novel lacks structure or form, but as we begin to see the way each character’s story is thematically linked, the novel coalesces into a meditation on the questions I’ve mentioned above (freedom and authenticity).
There are other autofictional novels that are focused entirely on “immediacy.” In a recent essay for Harper’s, Hari Kunzru cites Meghan Boyle’s Liveblog, which “recounts the day-to-day minutiae of the author’s life during part of 2013, proceeding in time-stamped sections, sometimes dozens a day.” As I haven’t read this book, I have to trust Kunzru’s description of it and cede that Kornbluh may have a point in her analysis of this sort of autofiction. But considering that the main names associated with the genre are Knausgaard and Cusk, both of whom are cited by Kornbluh, one is forced to question the accuracy of her characterization of autofiction. It is simply untrue to suggest that My Struggle and the Outline novels lack form or mediation. To claim this is a failure of the reader, not the writer, and it is a testament to the skill of both Knausgaard and Cusk that they can make something as difficult as the construction of a narrative seem as simple as the recording of their day to day lives.
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time, in which he discusses his personal philosophy of filmmaking, he writes:
In the course of my work I have noticed time and again, that if the external emotional structure of a film is based on the author’s memory, when impressions of his personal life have been transmuted into screen images, then the film will have the power to move those who see it…
And in contrast:
Even a work that purports to be true to life will seem artificially uniform and simplistic. An artist may achieve an outward illusion, a life-like effect, but that is not at all the same as examining life beneath the surface…You can play a scene with documentary precision, dress the characters correctly to the point of naturalism, have all the details exactly like real life, and the picture that emerges in consequence will still be nowhere near reality, it will seem utterly artificial…
I would suggest that Knausgaard, Cusk, Cole, and Baxter write their novels in the first way, using their personal life and memory as a way to capture something true, whereas other novelists, particularly those writing expansive, social realist dramas, run the risk of creating novels that fall into Tarkovsky’s second category. I do not, however, want to create a false dichotomy where autofiction is good and social realism, in the vein of Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen, is bad. It comes down to the writer and their skill. Kornbluh seems to participate in this dichotomy by contrasting the 19th century novel, written with third person omniscient narration, with autofiction. But I prefer to see them as different means toward the same end: the portrayal of interiority. The 19th century novel uses free indirect discourse to achieve this goal, while autofiction uses first person subjectivity.
My novel, then, would be about an American in Europe and would attempt to follow Tarkovsky’s idea of using memory and one’s personal life to convey something true that creates emotional resonance with the reader. The connection with the reader is key here: another criticism of autofiction is that, because it is intensely personal and subjective, it may lack relevance to an audience. This is misguided, however, mistaking superficial connections between art and audience as more important than internal, spiritual connections. Writing about Tarkovsky’s Mirror, a highly abstract film featuring a nonlinear plot and poems from Tarkovsky’s father, a viewer said, “Thank you for Mirror. My childhood was like that…Only how did you know about it?” When one says something true about oneself, one finds that others have felt this, too.
How does one create this space in a novel, how does one merge memory, time, and personal experience? One technique is to tell the reader that we are not in the external, objective world, but in the world of the narrator’s mind. To do this, the author rejects the abundance of detail and information that is indicative of what James Wood called “hysterical realism” in favor of a purely subjective experience of the world. To push the point even further, the narrator tells the reader that we are in a dream. In the beginning of The Apartment, the narrator says:
I tell myself it’s been six weeks; perhaps it’s been a little longer. Time is losing shape. Sometimes I watch my cigarette smoke rise above me in my hotel room and disperse across the ceiling, and this is what is happening to time. I am trying to live without a preoccupation with endpoints.
A few pages later, the narrator summarizes his experience in the city: “It feels like I am walking through my own imagination now, or a dream.” When I read this passage, I immediately thought of the opening scene of Le Samourai (1967), which shows Alain Delon lying on his bed in a darkened apartment as cigarette smoke slowly wafts up to the ceiling. The camera doesn’t move for two minutes. A bird chirps; cars roll by outside. Smoke continues to rise and dissipate in the air as Delon puffs on his cigarette. Jean-Pierre Melville, the director of the film, said about his style that, “a film is first and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact recreation of it.”
As we read The Apartment, we realize that we are not in Berlin, or Prague, or Vienna, although the city seems to have characteristics of all these places. Instead, we are in a city in the character’s mind, an “unreal” city, as Baxter himself said about the book—not an unnamed city. Once we are in a dream, events do not have to be explained; we have been primed to accept them, and as long as they make intuitive sense, we don’t question them. A dream also allows for the free association, digressions, and extended essays that I see as characterizing the best autofiction, and most of all, it allows us to enter a space from which we don’t want to wake up.