fiction

[REVIEW] The Purple Lotus by Veena Rao

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(She Writes Press, 2020)


REVIEW BY KIRAN BHAT

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We begin the pages of Purple Lotus in transit, or in travel. The main character, Tara Raj, is a young girl on a train heading to Mangalore. Though “peanut shells and crumpled newspaper [strain] over the floor,” and “stink of urine [emanates] from the toilets three compartments down the corridor,” Tara is a little girl filled with wonder, and hope. She sees her mother with “her hair coiled into a neat bun – like Belle in Beauty and the Beast,” she notices the presence of the child in her mother’s belly like “a birthday balloon,” she describes the passing landscape dotted with, “dark clouds too, smudges of dense black ink that threatened to let their wrath loose again.” Do not be fooled. We spend actually very little time in Tara’s childhood, as the chapter immediately after morphs Tara into an adult, having landed into Atlanta, after having been arranged to marry an Indian-American she barely knows. Yet, in the same way that Rao has taken extra care to decorate her language with the right amount of detail, but never too much so as to render her language garish, Rao has started off our imaginary of Tara as a child for a reason. The journey to loving oneself is long, the journey to understanding yourself is just as hard. A superficial read of Purple Lotus would make it appear like the biography of a woman who dealt with constant gaslighting, spousal abuse, and denigration, during her marriage, and found recognition in herself later on in her divorce. At the same time, I think Rao is attempting something much bigger here. Rao is trying to tell the story of the innate smallness each and every one of us have in a society, culture, or family, and yet to remember that, despite that smallness, we offer a vastness of our own to the world.

One of Rao’s great talents at play in Purple Lotus is her ability to reveal the full depths and feelings of a character in an extremely small space. A few days after Tara is brought to Atlanta, she lays in bed, jetlagged, thinking about whether to call her parents or not. Her husband Sanjay has called her, but she does not understand what he said. Later at night, he confronts her. Tara quite earnestly explains that she could not understand his accent, which causes Sanjay to scold her. After insult upon insult, he roars, “‘Aren’t you supposed to have a master’s in English literature?’” and Tara’s instinct is to escape to the bathroom. “She couldn’t let him see the tears. She felt so stupid. She had already rubbed him the wrong way. The tears flowed, hot and earnest.” These handful of lines do pages of work for Rao’s characters. They reveal the lack of compatability in Tara and Sanjay’s worldview, they foreshadow the further toils and turmoils that Tara’s marriage will result in, and they are just simply relatable. Anyone who has been a migrant to the US will know where Tara is coming from, and instantly feel a connection with her inability to fit in.

Another talent of Rao’s is to imbibe the immediacy of an image or sensation into the reader using language. Much like Jhumpa Lahiri, Rao writes about food in a way that not only makes the reader salivate, but also educates them about the importance of food to culture and the building of relationships. For example, in an effort to make their marriage more amenable, Tara tries to learn how to cook Italian and Mexican food. “Her first attempt at making veggie lasagna was a disaster, but her refried bean enchiladas turned out better—the cheese had melted sufficiently, the sauce was still bubbling when she pulled the dish out of the oven, and the chopped black olives and cilantro added aesthetic appeal to their plates.” Ignoring the fact that Rao’s sentences make me wish I had some Mexican food right in front of me, what is important to the narrative is that Sanjay responds to Tara’s hard work by saying, “It’s good,” and still going out to eat most nights elsewhere. Tara savors what little positivity Sanjay gives her, but to the reader, it’s very clear their relationship is going south, or has been south since it has started.

As per the affair, and what happens after, this is where Rao starts to stumble. It was so obvious that Sanjay was cheating on Tara that I would have almost liked to have seen the story go in another direction for subversion’s sake, and while Sanjay appeared like a well-drawn Indian-American initially, his abuse later on reveals him as a character of very little subtly or three-dimensionality. One wonders, is there anything Sanjay likes to do other than rag on Tara and cheat on the side? A similar problem seems to exist for a lot of the other characters Rao introduces. Tara’s Russian neighbour Alyona often comes off as a generic Eastern European immigrant, with very little detail that reads true to anyone who knows Russian culture well, and Rao’s second love interest Cyrus seems to only exist for Tara to dote on. In fact, it’s such a shame to see Rao’s flimsily realized side characters, because Tara is so strongly developed, and realized, and even real.

Still, all writers are learning their craft, and Rao is no exception. No matter what misgivings I have about certain aspects of the novel, Rao’s prose is so well-paced and structurally formed that hundreds of pages can be read in a few hours, and there’s a lot in her writing that is not only likeable, but courageous, and commendable. Purple Lotus proves Rao to be an apt writer of character study and an effortless storyteller. I’d recommend it first and foremost to people who are fans of the expansive storytelling of Tayari Jones, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni or Jhumpa Lahiri, and then to anyone who wants to add to their bookshelf of growing Atlanta literature.

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Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. He has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He is primarily known as the author of we of the forsaken world… (Iguana Books, 2020), but he has authored books in four foreign languages, and has had his writing published in The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, Eclectica, 3AM Magazine, The Radical Art Review, The Chakkar, Mascara Literary Review, and several other places. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He currently lives in Melbourne. You can find him on @Weltgeist Kiran.

[New Flash Fiction] GRAY

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BY BERGITA BUGARIJA

I reserved my last day in town for the museum of contemporary art, the famous one. A must-see, Madge said when I told her about the trip. The fourth floor would change everything, she gushed, her voice breathy. Hardly, I thought, but didn’t have the heart to crush her zeal.

I entered the concrete and glass box. I don’t mind minimalism. Although, the vast, sprawling lobby was scary. A block of white granite in the middle, the reception desk, seemed like a life raft in a sea of spooky echoes. Murmuring multitudes studied colorful floor plans that, if followed as recommended by their own Madges, would change their lives.  

First floor, Lichtenstein. Okay. Second, Mondrian. Fine. Third, Warhol. I get it. Kind of. And then the fourth, the inevitable: a square of gray. A mockery posing as art and all of us, certainly the Madges of the world, in on the prank.

Well, not me.

No one can tell me that a piece of gray painted canvas stretched on a frame is art. And the worst kind of gray, at that: nihilism gray. Not charcoal, not pebble, not mouse, not elephant, not concrete, not rainy day. Not smoke gray. Not ash gray. Not stone gray. Not gray hair gray.

Just gray. The synthetic kind, artificial like its callous attempt to make us second-guess our sanity, forgo our common sense, our instincts, our sensory grounded reality.

It’s not even that, like so much of contemporary “art,” the gray square made me feel I could have done it. Of course I could have. In five seconds. Madge’s hologram appeared before me emitting the art community’s worn-out comeback: You could have. But you didn’t. You know what? I wouldn’t have made this even if I could, or, for that matter, because I could! This shameless practical joke that went too far. Seriously, is this what I traveled miles for and paid money to see? This pretentious nonsense posing as a provocation, I suppose. Of what?

Oh, Madge…

Gray square like a gray cat; neither bad luck nor good fortune, just whatever. Not a majestic humpback whale gray, not a dewdrop translucent playful gray, none of the mystery of the fog gray. Even smog gray is more enigmatic than this dull one venerated at the world’s esteemed museum. Not moon, not London, none of the fifty shades from that bestselling erotic saga I never read but a friend told me all about. Even gray aluminum wall installations at any of the countless nondescript corporate headquarters have more depth and texture, more soul.

I don’t think this gray was even painted on the canvas, the charlatan artist didn’t even bother that much. What most likely happened is this poser bought a gray tarp from a knockoff Gucci handbag trafficker who used the cloth to bundle and transport the illicit cargo. So fascinating. Right, Madge?

My skin started to itch at the edge of my sweater sleeves.

The color of elegance, they say, of fine Italian suits. I say a warzone tent has more charm, more layers, more emotion. But no, let’s attribute to this gray square some deeper message, elevate it to a pedestal of a cliché metaphor like “the gray zone” symbolizing the absence of clarity and straightforwardness, the visual representation of the relativity zeitgeist. Or maybe it’s a social commentary on the gray economy, or a racial paradigm shift—the whirlpool of humanity in which all mingle victoriously color blind.

But wait. Maybe gray is a trickster. Officially achromatic, inoffensive, unassuming. Hm… Who are you kidding? What are you hiding, gray? Are you afraid that the nuance would overwhelm our fragile brains so we’d better not take a closer look?

I crossed the masking tape on the floor delineating the art’s personal space bubble.

Now up close, I inspected the travesty and guess what? It’s pixelated. And the pixels are not even gray but purple, peach, black, brown, indigo. Each pixel aware of its pigment, each more colorful than the next, playing their part, each anything but boring and meaningless, anything but meek, anything but safe. But all decidedly laying low, partaking in a camouflage orgy to create a deceivingly idle, harmless gray puddle, shun the attention, perpetuate an illusion of sameness, equality. All under the pretense of offering a generous respite for our overstimulated irises prancing along, uninterested in truth, preoccupied with distraction, counting on all to pass by unaroused, mindless, lifeless.

Neutral? Nice try, gray. All those pixels. What for? To glorify opacity and indecision? How brazen. How weak.

Just as the sweaty half ovals radiating from my pits reached my bottom ribs, the guard hushed that the museum was closing in a few minutes. I walked out the exit and breathed the fresh darkness, the streetlight polka-dotted night, the ease, order, the calm black and white.

Still, I was angry as anyone denied closure would be, fuming at Madge and the stupid gray square for wasting my life, for weaseling its way to that prestigious piece of wall real estate, blasé and arrogant, while so many worthy of the spotlight whimpered in bleak anonymity. How did the “artist” con the curator? How could the curator suspend all reason and allow that garbage to pass for art? What did they see? What could the “piece” possibly mean, what could it evoke, stir up? That drab, mute piece of nothing.

—

BERGITA BUGARIJA was born and raised in Zagreb, Croatia. After the War of Independence in the nineties she moved to Pittsburgh. Her fiction is forthcoming in Pleiades. She is at work on a collection of stories and a novel.

Author Interview with Melissa Ragsly of We Know This Will All Disappear

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Order WE KNOW THIS WILL ALL DISAPPEAR HERE

PANK Team Member Emily McLaughlin sat down with our 2019 Fiction Contest Winner (as selected by Gabino Iglesias) and 2020 PANK Books Fiction Contest Judge Melissa Ragsly to discuss the incredible stories in her debut collection We Know This Will All Disappear.

Emily McLaughlin: A strange time to have your book come out . . . What has the book launch during a quarantine experience been like so far?

Melissa Ragsly: Honestly, I have nothing to compare it to, but it’s definitely felt restrained, happy to have it out in the world and a network of friends and writers to share it with. I don’t think it can replace some of the traditional elements of a book launch. A launch in quarantine might be less expensive, no traveling required, but I think it’s limiting in terms of who has access to a book. If you are promoting through your own social media, there is less chance of breaking through to someone new. I’ve done some virtual readings and some more are coming down the pike, but I’m also imagining next summer, I’d be able to do more in-person readings in bookstores and bars. The intimacy of what I write seems best experienced in dark rooms, not screens. Maybe it would be best if I recorded bits of stories in sound files instead of Zoom events. I’d rather you hear these stories in that context. It’s been a challenge to think creatively in any context as our lives have changed so much in the past few months. Adding to that pile by coming up with solutions to creatively market a small press book? It’s surreal.

EM: When you read “Bio Baby” for the book’s launch at AWP, does feel of another lifetime. That story is even more moving read aloud. Since then, the more time I have spent pouring over the sixteen stories here, the more I am floored by how perfectly crafted and polished each one is, how you pack so many exquisite details into short spaces, how each one performs the tricks only stories are capable of. I could bring each story into my creative writing class and hold up as an example to students: “this is how you write a short story” and then point out, and this is how much work you can expect it to be. Can you walk us through your drafting and revision process, maybe how much time you spent on revising one story versus another?

MR: I’m not one of those people that writes a whole draft through knowing I need to go back and fix everything. I like avoiding the fixing. I start a story with an idea or an image, a feeling really, so I don’t really know what it’s about or where it’s going. I write a page, print it out, edit it for voice and in doing so, usually find the next beat. Write that, repeat until I get to the conclusion. For flash, sometimes, that conclusion or the point of it is hiding in the first draft, but I still try to coax it using the same process. Drafting feels very back and forth, like playing an accordion.

EM: And how do you decide that the story is complete, ready to send to journals?

It’s difficult to write a story and think it’s perfect and it being done is not the same as being perfect. So you just have to accept it’s done when it feels done. When I put it down and pick it up again and it still feels done. It can try to fool you into thinking it’s complete, fake you out a bit, or maybe that’s something that happens to me because I’m lazy and I just desperately want it to be over. You write it and then you have to sneak up on it again after a few days. It would terrify me to write straight through and then go back to the beginning and tackle all its mistakes from the first paragraph. I need to know some of that work is done so that when I am done with it, it’s ready to go out on submission. 

EM: I love so many of your lines. This one, in “Napkin of Death Metal” is amazing: “Sometimes just sitting in a bar makes men think girls are waiting for them to come. A girl is a frozen toy mouse marking time until a paw bats them across the floor.” This seems like the kind of line a writer gets in her head and thinks, I have to put this in a story. But maybe not?

MR: That line was added on the last pass through. To go back to the earlier question, how do you know when a story is ready to send—without that line it wasn’t ready. Sometimes a line can only come out once you know better what the story is about and you can either say it straight out, or you can try to allude to it. A line like that is almost for me as much as for a reader, I’m telling us both what it’s about.

I think that the only time I came up with a line first before the story was the opening line of Bio-Baby. “On the morning of my abortion I watched a Teen Mom 2 marathon.” That was going to be a completely different story. More essayistic, more personal and it turned out the complete opposite. But I kept the line.

EM: Each story seems to do its own thing, invent its own way of how it’s going to tell the story, and compiled together, this gives the collection a sense of unpredictability, excitement. Yet there’s a feeling of stability reading them, in that you know each one is going to deliver some kind of feeling of peace. How did you assemble the stories, or envision the structure for the book?

MR: In ordering the collection, I went with intuition, all feel, but the specific feeling I tried to create was something like a wave, so in and of itself, something peaceful, yet unpredictable; delightful, yet destructive. Something whose strength can surprise you. Having both longer stories and flashes, you just want the pattern of them to make sense. You want some pieces to feel like a breath, some like an anchor. A table of contents is like this puzzle you get to play with, shuffle around the order. I did that until I felt I’d translated that feeling of tides.

EM: The majority of the collection uses first person narration versus the five stories told in third. Did you ever feel pressure to write in third for variety’s sake? Does one seem more natural to you than the other, and what do you notice changes about the story when you write about the character in third? For example, in “No One’s Watching” why did you ultimately decide to approach the character from third, not first, as opposed to a story such as “Bio Baby?”

MR: I can full-throatedly say I prefer first person. Writing it and reading it. I want the intimacy of it. When I hear criticism of it, that its navel gazing or self-indulgent, I don’t get that at all because it’s like criticism of first person seems to come from people thinking it’s someone talking to themselves in their own head when to me it’s someone talking to someone else, it’s like a one-on-one confession. It feels like the only way a writer and a reader can bond. I’m also just a very one-on-one person. Third person feels so group to me. Like no one is being honest here, it feels polite, like as if not to offend. I tend to think of third as more appropriate for longer, more traditional stories, almost as a default.  

“No One’s Watching” was very different on the first draft. The story as it is now was the flashback in a longer story, so third made it feel distant from the rest of the story. I kept that, I think, because the story itself, emotionally deals with distance that isn’t quite understood by the characters yet. It’s almost like an origin story, maybe you’ll find that character again later in a first person story dealing with the ramifications of those feeling and events in this one.

EM: All of your stories have these meditative poetic lines buried in the paragraphs, as if you or the characters are humble, trying to hide them.  Just one example, I could pull so many out as examples: “I wanted to know I had a place that I wouldn’t have to exist for anyone but myself.” Is this intentional to not draw attention to the writing? Does more self-congratulatory writing bother you?

MR: I think if you reveal something vulnerable, or a truth that you realize, you do it in a non-calculated way. Your body just opens up to the truth and it’s a portal that can slam shut quickly. Most people stumble on the truth and then can turn their backs to it without realizing it or wanting to, because it appears randomly in a moment. It makes sense to have those moments appear and then the characters move on. It’s not conscious on a writer level, but more on a character level. I think I write about the types of person that thinks this way. Like, there it is, I see it, and I’m going to blink and it might not be there when I look again.

EM: That’s a very nice way to put that. So what was the first story you wrote here?

MR: “Tattoo”. That was started probably in 2014? 2015? And then most of the longer short stories after that. In the last year, it’s been mostly flash. Flash really opened me up in a way longer stories didn’t. They feel rule-less or more freeing in their containment.

EM: Is there a story you feel closest to?

MR: It changes. At the moment, I feel a connection to “Napkin of Death Metal” and “All You’ve Heard is True.” It goes back to the idea of flash. I think there’s so much of me in both of them and if I tried to write these as longer pieces, they would feel diluted. I feel like these are four-dimensional. I like to joke my favorite is writing in the fourth person and I think this is what I mean. I think!

EM: So obviously you are writing a novel in fourth person.

MR: I am writing a novel and I have been for many years and I haven’t quite cracked how to do it. I know people have opinions on how to do it. And many people have done it, so I know it’s possible. But I haven’t yet!

EM: How do you approach keeping your character’s level of perception of her world consistent in a novel versus in a story? (to clarify: do you struggle with interiority in the form of novel versus in the story?)

MR: I actually started writing this novel in third person and it never quite worked. I switched to first but then it wasn’t working then because it was about more than one person, so I found the groove using several different POVs. And while I have not completed this one, of course I have already started formulating the next and I also am thinking of it as several different POVs. I feel comfortable with telling the story that way. Multiple POVs feels like you’re telling an oral history and I’m obsessed with them. Like reading a documentary. And yes, I do think that is also a way for me to keep handle on the character’s interiority, because I’m finding ways to use different character’s thoughts and happenings as companions and comparisons to others. In a way, it feels a little like trying to formulate that collection order. Finding ways for the story as a whole to feel like teeth on a zipper gnashing together. And again, it’s not always about interiority for me, so much as the conversation between the character/writer and the reader. The characters are not talking to themselves so it’s more like an open interiority. Like the roof’s off the room.

As far as being productive, lock-down with children has made me feel like my hands are tied. But the goal is to have it finished this year. 

EM: That’s ambitious — even for a writer not locked down with children!

I was trying to figure out how you wove such suspense into the story “Lilith,” when we already know the ending at the start – Lilith is not coming back. Can you tell me your secret? When writing this one, did you find yourself not wanting to conform to tropes about missing women? Is this why the character thinks in terms of time tables, lists of facts, even math equations here?

MR: I wanted there to be an element of logic as a way of containing your feelings. Some people don’t know how to feel. But they do anyway, so what are ways that feeling emerge? I was obsessed with thinking about those crime solving brainstorm boards. Pictures of people and places connected by strings. I wanted to play with how logic and feelings can work together.

This story came together on one of those days where I just felt depressed and like I couldn’t think and I just felt like watching Dateline which is like a once a year, falling into a depression, brain-clean. Just sit there and watch stories about murder and crime and how people figure out these puzzles. I saw one about a missing woman. She was never found. It’s a pretty famous one, although I can’t remember her name. You didn’t get the benefit of the arrest at the end. A question you don’t get the answer to. It was frustrating for me, sitting there depressed on the couch, not knowing what happened to her. How is it going to feel for someone who is actually invested. I just wanted to try to understand how that felt. I felt like there were so many questions within my family that were never answered. Or answered much later. So I also wanted to think about how sometimes you can’t have an answer, you can’t solve something and so how do you move on? Do you make up an answer and accept it or do you keep trying to solve it? Or do you just get stuck?

EM: Do you want to tell us about the book’s cover and your vision for how this melancholy image correlates to your title?

MR: The cover is a picture I took that is actually larger. You don’t get to see the whole image and the whole one is actually more hopeful. That hooded man — that’s my husband and that’s a park in our town and one of our kids was in the swing. So, the sort of gloomy hood of death is next to a kid in the swing, but turned away. So it’s actually kind of funny.

The black and white, the hunch, yes, it’s melancholy as I think my stories are, but I do think that the title also reflects an acceptance. Everything will disappear in time, but that means the bad things too. Any pain or crisis, lockdown. All that will be over at some point. The effects of all the things we live through, good or bad, remain. That’s what stories feel like—the stubborn invisible.

EM: How did you maintain confidence or stop yourself from succumbing to self-doubt when working on this project, or maybe your next project? Any special powers you tap into in order to dig your feet in?

MR: I don’t have self-doubt about my ability, but I am so lazy when it comes to time and I’m absolutely a late bloomer so it doesn’t bother me to take a long time to get a project done. I feel like if it’s worthy and meant to be in the world, I will finish it.

Any writer’s special power is reading. But I’m a bumble bee reader. Maybe because my name means “honey bee” or I feel like I’m missing out if I don’t, I have to be reading like 15 books at once. The best thing is to have a big pile of them and read 10 pages in each until you cycle thorough and start over again. It’s kind of like flipping through channels. I look for similarities and connections and see if the different books speak to each other in some way. Yesterday, 2 things I read mentioned Zeno’s Paradox. I’d never heard of it before and then twice in one day, Zeno and his philosophies come into my hands. Reading and thinking give me the confidence to write because I want to be that brain exercise for someone else. Just a link in the chain.

ORDER WE KNOW THIS WILL ALL DISAPPEAR HERE

________________

Melissa Ragsly is a writer living in the Hudson Valley. Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best Small Fictions, Iowa Review, Hobart, and other journals. More can be found at melissaragsly.com.

We Know This Will All Disappear by Melissa Ragsly

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We Know This Will All Disappear - Melissa Ragsly - Fiction Book Award Winner - Short Stories
Order We Know This Will All Disappear HERE

Even in a catastrophic world, still we seek the solace of stories. You won’t be disappointed with our April release We Know This Will All Disappear, a first collection by Melissa Ragsly and our 2019 [PANK] Fiction Book Winner selected by Gabino Iglesias.

We Know This Will All Disappear is a collection of short stories and flash pieces that explore the chaotic and exhilarating inner lives of women and grief. The sense of loss they navigate does not always stem from the death of a loved one, but rather the loss of something dear, something familiar. What do we put in that empty place when something is gone?

These stories create a beautiful and devastating atmosphere for the reader to follow characters as they play an emotional hide-and-seek. Looking for answers as well as questions in dark surprising places. Replacing a lost thing, you can make your world more chaotic and claustrophobic—adopt a mannequin with your friends, sing the entire karaoke catalog, sell your story to a momager—or you can shed things around you to make more room for the grief. You can rent a secret room, you can grow your baby outside the womb, you can sleep in your childhood bedroom under your Bruins posters. These are the ways these characters survive.

These sixteen stories are not about defeated people, but people that are in a pause, a crossroads, that only they see before them. These characters are intimate with themselves; intimacies are raw but not always truthful. These are stories of adaption.

“We Know This Will All Disappear burrows under your skin looking for answers to questions you didn’t know you’d asked. These stories are dirty, brilliant, painfully human, fast, and strangely sensual. They were pulled from somewhere between a drunken phone call and a half-forgotten childhood dream. Read them.” – Gabino Iglesias

Order We Know This Will All Disappear HERE.

NOT DEAD YET: An interview with Hadley Moore

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(Autumn House Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY CAROL SMALLWOOD

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Not Dead Yet, winner of the 2018 Fiction Prize at Autumn House Press, studies the uncertainties of loss, turning a gaze toward the often-silenced voices of the infirm, elderly, and adolescent. Rich in humor and honesty, Hadley Moore’s debut collection of short stories presents a contemporary set of narratives from a lush cast of characters. We find the protagonists of her stories tenderly revealing their pain after the loss of loved ones and coping with the voids left by the passing of youth, happiness, and fulfillment. ~Autumn House Press

Carol Smallwood: Not Dead Yet has contemporary characters dealing squarely with universal problems. Which of the characters did you find the easiest to write about? How long did it take to complete the collection?

Hadley Moore: I say this all the time, but it is true: the process is so mysterious. For me, it isn’t so much that certain characters are easier or harder to write as that whole stories are. I can look at the table of contents of this book and remember what it was like to draft and revise each story—which I wrote relatively quickly; which went through multiple revisions, sometimes in fits and starts over years; which I thought I might never finish—but I can’t tell you why. The process is likely determined by a combination of how well-formed the idea was to begin with, whether I received useful feedback from a reader on an early draft, how much uninterrupted time I had to work on it, and many other factors related to all the as-yet-unknown ways our brains operate. I just have to accept that when I start a new project there isn’t any way to know how it will go.

This book took about ten years to complete, during which time I also focused on other work. Each story felt like a discreet project, and it didn’t occur to me until I had most of them drafted that I might be heading toward a full collection.

CS: Do you write poetry or nonfiction? When did you begin to write character-centered fiction?

HM: I admire poetry but I don’t write it; everything that comes out of me is a sentence. And if I have an urge to write nonfiction, it’s usually about fiction books or fiction writing, but I haven’t published an essay in years. All of this is to say fiction is my literary home.

In my early twenties, I started dabbling in essays, then I got an MS in journalism, and it was a few years after that that I finally decided to try fiction. I was twenty-nine when I started my master of fine arts (MFA) program.

CS: You shared in an interview with Midwestern Gothic: “There’s an austerity to the Midwest that doesn’t lend itself to self-promotion.” Can you say more about that?

HM: This was in response to a question about why there isn’t so much acknowledgment of a regional school of writing of the Midwest as there is of, say, the West or the South. I don’t have a comprehensive answer, but I do think it has something to do with the unassuming nature of (at least parts of) the Midwest. That’s a stereotype and a sweeping generalization, but there are certainly aspects of truth to it.

CS: How do you manage to include humor, even absurdity, in difficult situations?

HM: It’s just the way my brain works! Not everything I write is funny, but much of it has an element of gallows humor. It’s something that presents itself early in drafting, as part of the tone and a character’s situation or worldview. I like to say my life’s motto is “Laugh or slit your wrists,” which I realize can come off as both overly dark and also flippant, but life is hard. You have to laugh at it.

CS: Do you find male characters more challenging to delineate?

HM: No. I don’t think we’re so different, really, in what motivates us and what we obsess over and what the stakes are in our lives.

CS: In what magazines has your work appeared?

HM: Many literary journals: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, the Indiana Review, and others. Many of these are housed in and receive support from universities. I keep an updated list on my website.

CS: What is your literary training, background?

HM: I earned my MFA from the wonderful Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, where my teachers were Maud Casey, CJ Hribal, Erin McGraw, Michael Parker, and Steven Schwartz. They were all excellent. I was very lucky.

I also participated in the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Writer to Writer Mentorship Program with the writer Christine Sneed, who has been so generous and encouraging.

CS: What are you working on now and what advice can you share with those wanting to be published?

HM: I’d like to find a home for a novel manuscript I’ve revised several times, and my current project is shaping up to be thematically linked stories about the assassinations of the 1960s.

Persistence is the key. Writing has to be work you would do no matter what. Publishing ambition is great, but artistic ambition must precede it.

CS: Where can readers learn more about your work?

HM: My website is www.hadleymoore.net, and I very recently got on Twitter @HadleyMoore10.

 

HADLEY MOORE’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Witness, Amazon’s Day One, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the revived december, the Indiana Review, Anomaly, Quarter After Eight, Confrontation, The Drum, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. She is an alumna of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives near Kalamazoo, Michigan.

 

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CAROL SMALLWOOD is a literary reader, judge, and interviewer. Her most recent book is Patterns: Moments in Time (Word Poetry, 2019)

[NEW FICTION] Saint Lorna

Posted on by

BY BRIAN ALESSANDRO

—

AT FIRST, SHE HESITATED TO CLICK ON THE LINK. As a rule, Lorna deleted emails from unknown senders, though few ever made it past her spam filter. She felt safe opening this one. The subject line read “Dr. Truman-Hall, I am NOT a Robot! Please read me! EOM.”

Lorna clicked the embedded URL, a YouTube destination, and watched herself give a lecture from two days ago. She recalled that it was the day she’d slipped up and gone on a rant in her Gendering Culture class. She had discussed the myth of rape, about how there were parts of the violation that could be construed as desirable (“I mean, who doesn’t like a show of strength?” she’d said), the complicity of females in their own degradation, the “problem” with gay and effeminate men, and the sovereignty of heterosexual masculinity. She had held these views for years and written about them in numerous articles and books, but pushback had historically been confined to civil discourse between academics, lively and respectful debates in university auditoriums. Her new book, The Wanton Feminine, forthcoming in a few months from Dowling House, her most high-profile publisher, would set the record straight.

The clip had only been posted a day ago, but already yielded four hundred and twenty thousand views and eighty-seven thousand comments, almost all of which excoriated Lorna. Some even demanded a live-streamed suicide.

“Though I consider myself a progressive, my gripe with the left is that they absent things like common sense, basic biology, and ancient history.” Lorna watched herself address the students in the five-minute clip. “Girls need to smarten up and start acknowledging human nature—and especially male nature—as something concrete, not theoretical or elastic. Not something that will bend to the whims of political correctness. The brain has a tendency to mistake pursuit for desire, but that’s not entirely what I’m talking about here. I do believe that we’re built this way on an evolutionary level to perpetuate the species, though. It follows that those alpha men who effectuate change and keep the world spinning forward are also inclined to conquer sexually. Without beta permission, without omega timidity. They are biologically pushed to spread their seed. To propagate. Shaming those men into believing that there’s something wrong with that impulse will surely extinguish their flames. The constructive fires that build cities and cure diseases and produce great art. Women are neurologically wired to accept the conquest because they know on some unconscious level that they’re welcoming in an alpha seed and thereby helping civilization advance. And for the last time, please stop writing about the fluidity of gender in your papers. Gender is not fluid. It’s as fixed as a tumor or a clogged artery.”

NOW Lorna looked around her austere office and wondered if she’d been playing the clip too loud, if anyone in the hall could have heard it. She lowered the volume and put on closed captioning for the duration of the video as she searched her memory for which students might have had his or her phone out during class. As there were over eighty students in attendance, the clandestine recorder was as much a mystery as the anonymous sender of the email.

 

LORNA WEATHERED THE STARES AND SNEERS with admirable indifference as she walked across campus. The muffled comments and audible hisses were more impactful—how she loathed this neologism or more precisely the back-formation of the word into an adjective— blows to withstand. CUNY Merkin’s faculty and students were nothing if not up on their viral video sensations. And all the chatter that would follow. Multiple Twitter storms and FaceBook fusillades erupted. She had happened upon them after closing the YouTube video and researching the national witch hunt playing out online. It all left her dazzled. She almost chimed in but decided she’d better not.

Even the barista at her favorite café across the street was awkward when handing her the receipt. She’d been an affable young woman, a graduate student who was fond of Lorna’s work and conversation, if not tips. Her nametag read “Sam,” but Lorna always thought she looked more like a Sue. The young woman flashed a half-smile and busily moved on to the next customer waiting in line, eyeballing Lorna with unease, if not impoliteness. Were so many people really that plugged into YouTube? It’s not as if the clip had been broadcast on any of the major networks or 24-hour news channels. Not yet, anyway.

A group of protestors, politically-active doctoral candidates that Lorna had recognized from past colloquia, had gathered at Merkin’s main entrance and held placards that read “No Room for Hate Speech!” and “Beware Traitors Infiltrating from Within!” and “Stop the Sexists!” and “#MeToo is NOT a Passing Fad!” and “Toxic Masculinity is a Cloak That Even Women Can Don!” They shouted their slogans with theatrical brio.

Lorna sipped her hot black coffee and hadn’t realized that the demonstrations had been organized in her honor, even though they’d co-opted one of her phrases—donning the masculine cloak. It became clear that she was the butt of the joke—that’s what this whole farce was, after all, a joke— when one of the protestors saw her and began hissing. The others followed suit. Lorna turned away, red face and wide-eyed, and brushed past them, spilling some of her coffee on her pants and scuffing the side of her shoe on the base of a nearby concrete planter.

 

CONSTANCE DE LA ROSA, the chair of the cultural studies department, entered Lorna’s office with authority. Closing in on sixty-five, Constance was breathless, if not flush, by having made the urgent visit. As if she had run up the stairs from her office three floors below.

Lorna, obfuscating any signs of annoyance, looked at her. “Constance?”

“Are you kidding me with all this?” Constance spoke in a smooth, unnecessarily breathy purr. The kind of feminine, neither sexy nor expedient, that always got on Lorna’s nerves.

“What?” said Lorna, slouching.

Constance, her silver-black hair coming slowly undone from its bun, paced with a menacing majesty. “That video, Lorna—let’s get right to it, you know the one I mean—the one that’s been all over social media all morning. It’s going to cause some trouble. It is causing trouble!”

Lorna stood, began watering her numerous succulents, and nodded, absorbing Constance’s admonishment. “I didn’t’ know I was being recorded, Constance.”

“That’s beside the point. The things you were saying shouldn’t have been said in the first place! The department doesn’t need that kind of attention. Not in this climate.”

“The department doesn’t? Or the university doesn’t?”

Constance’s cheeks bunched when she winced. “What difference does it make? The department is the university!”

Lorna continued moving around her office with the pitcher. The plants were thirsty. “Oh, an honest and direct answer. I like that!”

Constance hurried after her. “We don’t support your views, Lorna. Not on this one.”

Lorna stopped again. “What’s the problem, exactly, Constance? What’s so threatening about—”

“You can’t be serious asking me that? What you’ve said about women and rape and gay people … it’s just downright bullying, Lorna. And frankly bigotry.”

Lorna’s top lip curled into a livid smirk. “The hypocrisy is stomach-turning.”

“There’s no hypocrisy!”

“Constance …”

“And we won’t even get into how you believe women secretly desire being oppressed within patriarchal systems. From that ludicrous article you had published last month! The Atlantic used to have standards—”

“I never said they desire being oppressed. I said they long to be named, designated: ‘Whore.’ ‘Mother.’ ‘Loose.’ ‘Frigid.’ Women are like all other people. They require leadership.”

“And that appalling thing you wrote about a woman’s worth measured by how much they’re willing to –”

“Look, these kids spend upwards of seventy-five thousand dollars a year on a liberal education, to think freely, to expand their scope, and yet you’re prepared to deny their educators the right to think liberally, to speak freely! It’s the exact definition of hypocrisy, Dr. De La Rosa!”

Constance gathered herself, took in a deep, hearty breath worthy of a master vinyasa yogi, and spoke softly, slowly with eyelids firmly half-mast. “And Slate Review just published an essay denouncing you. They criticized Merkin for keeping you on staff. They say we’re complicit. Aiding and abetting a criminal.”

Lorna scoffed.

“And it’s had almost two hundred thousand hits already, Lorna. It was just released this afternoon.”

Lorna sobered up. Retrieved her stoic mask. “Clearly, my words have been taken out of context and distorted. The Wanton Feminine will be out in a few months. I’ll be touring with the book and I’ll be able to clear up all the confusion.”

Constance shook her head, her eyes heavier than before. “We’re working on having the video taken down, but as far as the article … it doesn’t help and now in light of what you said in class … We can’t have it. Write a retraction.”

“I won’t do that.”

“Then you’re alone. The department and the president will send editorials of their own to The Times distancing ourselves from your views. And from you, Lorna.”

Lorna pondered the threat with a demonstrative gusto. She shrugged. “I’m tenured. And need to grade papers.”

Constance left. Lorna watched the YouTube video three more times, counting the increasing number of hits with each viewing.

 

LORNA’S EIGHTY-FOUR PUPILS LISTENED with a rapt attentiveness. Their tacit enthusiasm would electrify Merkin’s largest lecture hall. Or so she had relished believing. She got off on the energy that her seminars had elicited in undergraduates, apparently. Prided herself on telling the kind of truth missing from contemporary academia: that of the ugly, offensive variety. She owned her ugliness. Cuddled her offensiveness. Cultural studies as a subject was still relatively new and students were eager to learn as much critical theory as possible if for no other reason than to show off their creative connections between disciplines and earth-shattering insights at cocktail parties.

She should have made an attempt to move on and away from the YouTube clip, but the cold war brewing between her pupils, ghoulishly bathed in the blue-white glow of laptop screens, and herself was a battle from which she’d not shrink. Though the circumstances couldn’t be more awkward, Lorna would make the video the centerpiece of today’s Gendering Culture class. And it being a lecture, there’d be fewer opportunities for talkback or scrutiny.

“Good afternoon. You have by now all seen this YouTube clip of my lecture last week, which has been circulating on social media, I’m sure? You were all at that session.” Lorna paused with a delightful smile and gay eyes. “And one of you even recorded it.”

Some students shifted in their seats, others leered, ready for an apology or a confession or a gloriously well-executed excuse

“What I said wasn’t new. I’ve been writing about it for the past twenty years. You’ve all had time to read my book, The Civilized Masculine: Unnecessary Crisis in The Age of Traumatized Selfhood and should know my positions by now. None of this was done for shock value. Or to hurt anymore.”

A male student, black, preppy, bespectacled, and likely a senior based on his age, raised his hand but began speaking before Lorna had a chance to call on him. “You really think that women ask for rape?”

Lorna sighed and hunched a bit, approximated well the mien of an embattled woman. “I see my comments were taken out of context. Tragically, you all weren’t able to detect the nuance and subtext of my delivery. If only you had been keeping up with the reading, you’d have been able to better understand what I meant.”

Lorna caught them, the faces, the expressions made by newly educated kids who liked to prove street credibility by schooling others, usually older and in modes of power, like parents or employers or teachers. They rolled eyes and shrugged shoulders and curled lips into mocking smirks.

Actually, she could never be sure if their sneers were for her or her intended targets.

“So, then, a summary.” Lorna reviewed her book, thumbed through the dog-eared pages, then put it down. “Listen, I’m less interested in dwelling on the role of women in all of this. The so-called victims or ‘receptacles.’ They’ll get their hearing in my new book, The Wanton Feminine, coming in a few months. No, no. We’d be better served understanding the so-called perpetrators, the ‘violators.’ Men. When scrutinizing the behavior patterns and reactions exhibited by males in today’s society one is wise to consider the archetypal roots found in male icons of centuries and millennia past. Ramses II. Alexander the Great. Caesar Augustus. Henry VIII. Napoleon. King Herod. King Solomon. Hitler. Though their pride ultimately led them to ruin, it also fueled a quest for greatness, and here we are after all this time still discussing their indubitable glories.”

Some of the students, those who weren’t busy muttering foul sentiments under their breath, nodded and jotted notes or punched keys. They annotated copies of her article. They wrote immediate responses, rebuttals. They logged their triggers.

“Envy between even heterosexual males spawns a strange desire. The second-fiddle beta or lowest-rung omega endeavors not to just steal the alpha’s place, but to supplant the alpha himself! To be him. Or defeat him. This odd craving generates a disruption in the beta’s or omega’s ego. The disrupted ego occasions bizarre role plays, toxic theater, and dangerous charades. The said role plays, theater, and charades foster varying humiliations. Their humiliations cause carnage. The tools of their combat and disaster are now voyeuristic, judgmental bystanders, ever-recording cellphone cameras, and an omniscient internet. Before, it was a coliseum. The envy cuts deep. A need to assert and prove one’s self arises. Women, caught in between, become collateral damage. Remarkable this masculine toxicity.”

Some of the young students sniggered but admitted uneasy truths, anyway. Others shifted again with a detectable agitation. The note-taking and keyboard clacking persisted. Lorna paused for a dramatic beat, seductively, sweetly eyeballing the front row, all of whom looked up at her with a dense air of uneasiness. She diffused with a gentle disposition. Maternal, soothing.

“Men, not broadly mankind, but straight men specifically, are prone to self-immolation. They are ruled by the command to conquer and create. When they find themselves unable to do either they choose destruction and death over surrender and submission. And there always remains one obstacle too insurmountable to fathom for the great heroes of history, be it India for the Macedonian emperor or Waterloo for the French dwarf. All supreme men are hungry dogs seeking domination. And, yes, I realize that Alexander was bi.”

Lorna felt the ions shift in the lecture hall, the eagerness to share thoughts and push back against theories that didn’t sit well was in the dense, uneasy air. And yet she was capable of making the suspense linger. She would push the lesson and her students’ nerves further. The tension was necessary as it provoked concentration and remembrance; she was a professor who demanded absolute concentration and complete remembrance.

These lectures were her art and she would somehow reclaim that goddamn, motherfucking YouTube video.

“It takes literal balls to build a culture. The bold push from the testes produces civilization and advancement. My blend of feminism permits the worship of men who have made the world their own and those few women who have … donned the masculine cloak … and done so for themselves: Cleopatra, Elizabeth I and even her ruthless half-sister Mary, Victoria, Thatcher, Clinton. Essentialism has its limits as a philosophy. As a science, it is an experiment intended for ceaseless empirical research.”

Whereas it had been the more delicate men who were most vocal in their braying at her pronouncements up until this point, the women in the room had now suddenly found themselves jeering their teacher’s pseudo-defense. Lorna enjoyed this the most. To trouble young girls, to upend their new, ill-informed feminism, to chip away at the patina of their self-congratulatory activism and performative outrage. But still, she worked toward disarming with a loving glow.

Several female students were now shaking their heads and had crossed their arms, silently and in solidarity refusing to take notes, protesting any more propaganda from this self-loathing woman. Lorna’s calculations were not off; by her estimates two-thirds of the whole class will have joined them by the time her session was up.

“Several volumes of this epic could be filled with the data amassed on the transformations undergone by the alpha and his beta. And their omega. Their change is seemingly ineluctable. It must be a demoralizing revelation indeed when these men find out that they are unable to control their own personalities, and that they had seized control of them like angry poltergeists, intent on either breaking them or recreating them.”

Lorna could tell at this point that several of her scrawnier, meek pupils were searching the auditorium for the jocks, the models, the physically superior specimens. The inadequacies screamed. The jocks, the models themselves basked in the silent adulation. The bitter atoms between the alphas and betas and omegas caused the female students to tingle in all the appropriate places. Lorna tingled, too.

“Finding comparisons between the ‘tournaments’ held by the competing men and idolatry and the ancient gods requires no leap of faith. Even as the beta and omega succumb wholeheartedly to nihilism and even anarchy in their self-loathing-fueled destruction. He who shirked the dictates of logic and abided by the commands of delusion. Fastidiously, and with fetishistic relish, the beta and the omega work toward the solution to his problem: debilitating self-doubt in the shadow of their alpha.”

The small, quiet, bookish boys—the first to have been audible in their disagreement— had begun to rock back and forth in their seats, their knuckles white, their cheeks flush. Lorna imagined that the jocks, the models were by now fluffing their feathers, their tumescence likely apparent had she looked closer. She couldn’t be sure who’d recorded her, but she could manage the temperature in the room. And when tactical, quiet her judges with congeniality.

“The lazy analysis suggests that men are inherently sadistic and women masochistic. This is one of life’s great fallacies. Men, not women, are the true masochists as their failure is inevitable and the suffering their conceit is destined to afford them will reveal itself as the humiliation for which they implicitly thirst. For more on this see my previous examination of self-importance, Theater of Violent Happiness published in 2010 by Lakehouse Ltd.”

The females in the classroom scribbled with personal grudges. Lorna wondered what criticisms they were inventorying, what caricatures of her they were drawing, what phallic symbols they were sketching. She made eye contact with one student, an East Asian girl whose expression ambiguously bordered on scorn, or maybe rapt attentiveness. Lorna averted her eyes, set them on her notes.

 

“Please understand this. The beta and the omega do not pine for success or power in the conventional Western sense. He seeks no fame or grandeur for their own sake. Rather, he is after a deeper-dwelling fish. He plumbs depths, leagues-beneath the surface. He fights murderously for self-acceptance. His introspection is so focused and pointed that one would feel a sense of shame when in proximity, first for themselves for not digging as ardently, and then for him, for the beta and the omega, for doing so. A man of his time and at a certain age ought to turn his attention to others, elsewhere, outward. He should come to the cold realization that he and his contentment or sense of achievement or worth no longer matter. The alpha is so satisfied with who he has manifested into that self-reflection is to him a vain, pointless exercise.”

Lorna thought about her husband Risk and son Theo, and their designations. How would she rank them? Among the alphas? Certainly not. Though Risk would like to think of himself as worthy of the station. He was no omega. Beta, then. And what about Theo? Her son was firmly planted amid the omegas. The lowest. Her theories had originated as a reaction to her marriage. They were developed as a reaction to her son. Risk engendered an intolerance with faux, forced manliness, while Theo implanted an impatience with a complete disavowal of natural states.

A young female student—Hispanic, short, overweight, and starter stylish in pink and black plaid—raised her hand with a fiery ardor, waving a paperback novel in the air; she sighed irritably. “But wait!”

Lorna’s eyes rounded. She paused, clasped her hands, and stood with a cocked head and warm smile like an unthreatening grandma. “Yes, my dear?”

“What about what Herman Hesse wrote in Narcissus and Goldmund? We’re reading it now in our German literature class,” said the girl, thumbing through the book to a dog-eared page. “Here. ‘We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other’s opposite and complement.’ Why does there have to always be a pissing contest?”

“Well, Hesse meant well as a permissive fiction writer, but that’s really all it is. Fiction. Also, his blend of pseudo-spirituality is to blame for this awful wave of nonsensical New Age pop psychology. He was a fraud and a weakling, I’m afraid. A narcissistic coward.”

The ardent student looked down and closed her copy of Hesse’s novel. This business of analyzing student psychology in the moment of intellectual delivery was a tricky affair. It had never thrown Lorna before, but these days, what with the video burning down her reputation, the steel had run from her nerves, and she was becoming distracted and driven off course. She redirected her eyes once again and fixed on a crack in the wall, found comfort in its inevitability.

Lesser critical theorists—typical critical theorists—relied solely on the narrow and limited tradition of the cultural Marxists. It’s all magical thinking, not honest, comprehensive life. Lorna couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy.

A thin-boned boy swaddled in oversized sweaters and pants, clashing patterns, and uncombed hair, twitchy and bothered, raised his hand and began to sweat. Lorna nodded in his direction.

When the thin boy spoke, it was with shallow breaths: “But, I think these are false equivalencies: gay men, beta and omega. Straight men, alpha. Feminine behavior: beta and omega. Masculinity: alpha. I just … I think they’re … false!”

Lorna landed her grandmotherly posturing with a kindly smile. “Oh, but I don’t think so, young man. I just believe that gay men, effeminate men ought to resign themselves to their beta and omega statuses. They have their place in the culture, but it’s just not behind the wheel of the big ship, is all. And straight men must embrace and even protect their masculinity because it is the primary engine that drives civilization. It’s nothing to feel ashamed about. Don’t buy into this ridiculous new narrative that they’re selling you! Look, the Left produces victimhood, plain and simple! They require an oppressor and an oppressed in order for their industry to thrive. You, my sweet child, are not a victim.”

The boy had reminded Lorna of her son. It’s why she wasn’t moved by his trembles, pouting, and deep breathing.

Risk had been his most self-absorbed. Most childish in his pursuits. Playing at boyhood aspirations. And Theo was getting smaller by the day, shrinking into himself, into a cowed and embarrassing boy. They had failed her. She had failed them. Everyone broke contract.

“Family is a sort of a business, a corporation, in which matters of facilities and operations must be attended to. It is a concept that a leader must internalize to keep the institution running through supervision and execution of daily functions, accountability, and principles of growth and improvement. If the omega or beta is the manager of his company, the head of his household, he is remiss in his responsibilities and derelict of duty. And the employees, that is, the wife and child, duly suffer. A culture of criminal neglect and routine embarrassment is one that will not persist.”

Students grumbled to one another, the hall reverberating impatient hisses, as the session was almost over, and lunch was to be had. Lorna needed a strong finisher. She always ended her classes with a punch, something for the kiddies to mull over until the next session. Three hands were raised. She ignored them. Two students had already left early, probably to use the bathroom or smoke a cigarette. No matter, she had plenty of others to populate her captive audience.

“What barbaric grief—the episodes unfurled by the child, the child of the beta or omega, his own depraved public outreach, echoing that of his father. The inherited tendencies toward exhibitionism and self-defeat rear ugly heads. On parity with the tragic Greeks or saddest Shakespeare. And the wife—her own petty, spiteful journey away from kin and into sin. Astonishing, truly, how the dissolution of a perfectly normal and well-adjusted family is begotten by such infinitesimal insults and small, needy flashes of unwise pride. Consider Emerson and Thoreau. The transcendental way. Consider their grave admonishments. Not to stray too far from nature, God, the humble soul. Modest needs. They warned of disingenuousness, of flinging yourself too far from earth. The disconnected face unhappy ends. They fail at grace. Nature scolds them for their hubris. It’s a note worth taking.”

The students at this point had become lost in the maze Dr. Hall-Truman had built around them. Finding themselves in the middle of the labyrinth, the students turned and stared blankly at one another, waiting for a roadmap out, but Lorna had already packed up for the day. The lecture had ended, and she would leave no compass.

 

ODDLY, LORNA’S HUSBAND RISK TRUMAN had also melted down on a public stage. In a series of performances purposefully recorded for the whole world to consume. Because he was affluent, he could afford the endeavors. An investment banker at a leading hedge fund, Risk spent his way through it, first by funding a charter school network in the South Bronx and Harlem, then by hiring himself as a history teacher (to live out the fantasy of a common man and role model of wayward, impressionable, minority youth) and now he had begun to orchestrate team-building exercises that served as a cover for competitions between himself and the school’s younger, fitter, more attractive science teacher, Dominick Bonaventura. Risk shared his own YouTube channel with Lorna, so far consisting of only several videos, but each boasting thousands of views. She’d already told him about her own Internet stardom, but he dismissed it as a passing fad.

“The way these things work, darling, it’ll blow over before you know it, and it’s not like my channel where I made something, you know? This is just some punk student who’s too delicate a snowflake to handle the education you’re trying to give them. Plus, make this work for you! It’s. great PR! You have a new book coming out soon, right? You can’t pay for this kind of exposure! Use the hype!

Risk competed and strategized so impulsively it had become as natural as breathing.

“Who shot all of these?” asked Lorna, watching her husband first indoor rock climb in Washington Heights, then run an outdoor obstacle course in Upstate New York, then engage in a Muay Thai kickboxing session in Bushwick. In each video, Risk was both predatory and bested. His prey and eventual victor, the young Mr. Bonaventura, Risk’s junior by twenty years.

Risk positioned the laptop on a coffee table in the middle of the living room of their too-large Upper West Side apartment. “Darnell, he’s great with the camera, isn’t he?”

Had he not realized how petty and pathetic he was coming across in these clips? “I don’t understand, Risk? What are these for?”

“Just for fun, Lorna. God. Not everything has to be some symbol for something else.”

Lorna imagined these clips conflagrating, her husband becoming the poster boy for middle-aged men trying too hard to prove their manliness and failing. The insecurity was the stuff of legend, and Lorna would be sure to file it away for another essay. She sometimes wondered how closely her husband paid attention to her work if he knew she’d been all the while writing about him and men like him. Resenting that level of clumsy, ineffectual machismo.

He said, chillingly to Lorna: “Have you given any more thought to Spain?”

Risk’s next escapade, after acting the part of a teacher and businessman, was to pay his way into the bullfighting circles of Madrid and become a matador. It was an outrageous aspiration, but one he would pursue, anyway. He’d already contacted the most famous bullfighter in the country, Javier Alegria, who maintained a cordial relationship with him through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Perhaps now that he was being routinely defeated by his charismatic young colleague/ employee, and inexplicably—masochistically—sharing it with the consumptive world, Risk was ready to move on. If things got worse in her own virtual life, Lorna would have to move on, too.

Their son, Theo, “Thee Thee” to friends and in online video games, was a different animal, entirely. She knew he’d caught wind of her writings about feminine, queer men. Her son, being both feminine and queer, had stopped talking to her for months at a time whenever she’d publish a book or article or give a lecture on the subject. He’d felt like her lab rat, the thing she didn’t want but needed for the professional profile. Wife, mother, scholar. As a straight woman, it softened her. Made her accessible. All jobs now required a relatable narrative and a likable protagonist. Lorna could be likable. At least on paper.

“Since you’re YouTube famous now, mom, I guess it’s high time I share my channel with you!”

Had everyone in her family been a social media superstar?

Theo’s soft manner and voice, his pasty complexion, his lanky frame. All of it rankled Lorna, but she’d tried to be pleasant. Conceal her distaste for his manifestation. A child knows, though. Theo possessed an uncanny knack for picking up on his mother’s suppressed loathing

His video collection consisted of strangers taking nasty spills, dropping boxes, fumbling groceries, crashing bicycles, tumbling down staircases.

“What is this? Are they friends of yours? I don’t get it, Theo.”

“They’re just people, like, making asses of themselves. It’s all about public humiliation.”

“Well, why?”

She was asking him, her son, with his not completely masculine nickname. Thee thee

Theo looked at his mother as though she were simple. “Because … it’s funny.”

“Is it, though?”

Lorna looked at her son’s laptop and watched one of the videos. A twentysomething white yuppie in an expensive suit getting socked in the mouth while smoking a Cuban cigar in front of Trump Tower on 5th Avenue. The attacker was a homeless man, probably sixty or sixty-five-years old, and shorter than the victim. The assailant had to leap to connect with the gangly investment banker’s lofty jaw, knocking the cigar across the street and the target on his ass.

Lorna had wondered if Theo had paid these people to make fools of themselves or if he’d secretly orchestrated the accidents. An oil slick. A nail. A screw. Hidden twine. A drummed-up altercation. To what extent of sabotage was her son capable?

“Well, all these people seem to think so.” Theo pointed to the views and likes and comments. The numbers still fell short of her own. This was a competition that she had no interest in winning. “I mean, we can’t all be like you, Mom. Instant, overnight celebrity!”

Theo trundled back into his bedroom, a place of comic books, drawing pads, homoerotic cartoon characters sodomizing each other, nests of wires and gadgets and old cell phones and laptops, walls of rapidly outdated video game systems, classic comic books, superhero and horror Funko Pop figurines, caringly-framed posters of the drag queens Adore Delano, Sharon Needles, and Bianca Del Rio, vintage board games, and all the stuffed toys he’d held onto from his childhood. He was the spawn of a nationally vilified cultural studies professor and stunted investment banker living out boyhood fantasies, after all. Lorna should appreciate that much, he always thought; he might be a sissy but at least he was interesting.

AMID the Twitter storm and FaceBook fusillade that she’d periodically check in on, without commenting, and against her better judgement, Lorna, in bed on her iPhone, found two posts sticking to her, one from a college student in Chicago, a male, who wrote about her sermon: “The weak violently protect the powerful. For the poor, the rich, or in Dr. Hall-Truman’s case, for women—men, because there’s an aspiration to become such.” Another, a female high school student in Tucson, called her out in a post: “Social media raised me, not my parents. And it’s because of adults like you, I’m grateful for that!!!”

 

THE WALL CLOSEST TO LORNA’S DESK was plastered with images of men. Prime men. Primal men. Merciless leaders. Libidinal warriors. Even Russell Crowe in Gladiator and the strapping Spartans with the airbrushed abs in 300. The subjects weren’t erotic in nature however the emphasis was on physique and physicality. In fact, her entire outsized office was full of paintings, drawings, and photographs of powerful bodies in glorious, gorgeous postures. She reviewed a stack of synthesized alpha biographies. Her connections between ancient rulers and contemporary athletes prompted many in academia to compare her to Camille Paglia, someone she had known for a short while when she taught for a year at the University of Pennsylvania as a visiting professor soon after earning her doctorate.

Lorna’s notes on Sargon of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, Ghengis Khan, and Ramses II were as voluminous as her dossiers on Michael Jordan, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Roger Federer. Lorna was working toward building bridges between the men of their respective eras and the adoration and emulation they elicited in their followers. She considered modern male megastars to be on a parity with the supreme commanders of history.

Her peers in the department had once supported her views, knowing that it would help her forge a distinction in the field; cultural studies was messy and turbulent and those few whose hypotheses could deliver the zeitgeist in palpable sound bites tended to reap a good deal of attention, appearing on Real Time with Bill Maher. Judith Butler and Jordan Peterson had been recent “co-stars”.

It had been a week since the video leaked on YouTube. The faculty had since rescinded their initial encouragement.

“This bit goes too far, I think, dear.”

Geraldine was a mainstay at Merkin who was closing in on seventy and had earned her Ph.D. in the 1970s, a time when such grand accomplishments felt rarified and radical, especially for women. Her mentor was the eminent and still clandestine Julia Kristeva. Dr. Herzer’s writings on “the abject” mystified her graduate students and sickened her critics who thought that she was too fixated on notions of good and bad breasts, authoritarian and inconsistent parenting and the instability it engenders in the needy, avoidant children they raise.

Lorna stopped watering her succulents and turned to Geraldine. “Which?”

“Here,” said Geraldine, poking the text with the tip of her red pen. “You state all-too-assuredly that even the most accomplished women ought to revere men as the chief builders and managers. That all women need to support their constructions and influence.”

Lorna’s eyes sharpened. “How’s it too far, Geraldine?”

“Oh, Lorna, come on now, I know you value your provocations and polemics, but this is a bit much, no? Especially after the YouTube business. You know, our students complain to me. To us.”

Lorna continued watering the succulents. One, robust and virile in purple, took the water aggressively. She thought she heard it suck in the moisture. Everything thirsted.

“I mean, it’s one thing to criticize men for their compulsion to fight and quibble over penis size, but it’s quite another to suggest that women should worship at the altar of their narcissistic bravado.”

“Okay, Geraldine. I get it. This has nothing to do with the article. Nothing about my work has changed. This is about the video.”

Geraldine’s eyes narrowed. “The video, yes, and the murmur across campus of students who feel unsafe here because of what you’ve said. You’ve no idea the number who want to file a class-action lawsuit.”

Though her office was always the coldest in the wing, Lorna managed to chill Geraldine with her gaze more thoroughly than did the temperature. The artic atmosphere warmed considerably when the remainder of the cultural studies staff walked in ready for their monthly department meeting.

The men entered laughing. Thomas Chen was a short, sinewy Beijing exponent. Matthew Bowman, a ginger from Rhode Island whose years of sprinting left him with disproportionately large legs and an easy strut.

Myriam Farshadi, a twentysomething Persian from Tehran, who had modeled her way through graduate school in Los Angeles and had only recently relocated to New York for Merkin’s appointment, sheepishly filed in after them. She was hoping to make tenure within the next three years.

“Weird tension here today,” said Bowman, only twenty-eight and quicker with his tongue than with his brain. He’d done time at Harvard and then at Magdalene College in Cambridge, where debating was easy, fearless, and as natural as trained rowing on the Charles.

Geraldine bunched up her face in a mischievous smirk.

Lorna ignored the comment and instead reviewed her notes, the agenda for the meeting.

The staff assumed their jocularly fearsome circular seating formation. Oh, these people.

Dr. Chen said: “Your last paper, the one just published in Junk & Noise, was oddly confident in its assertions about homoerotic imperialism and role play, Dr. Truman-Hall.”

“Why was the confidence odd, Dr. Chen?”

Dr. Chen crossed his legs and spoke with a raised chin. “Well, there’s not been a sufficient amount of data collected, yet. It’s still just theoretical.”

Lorna sighed. “But that’s what we are. Theoreticians. Our work is rooted in observation and analysis. It’s also largely guesswork. Creative guesswork.”

Dr. Chen’s dismissive smile, marked by bushy inverted eyebrows and dimples, caused Lorna to reflexively sneer. “Dr. Truman-Hall … Lorna … Our students keep interrupting class to discuss the YouTube video … it’s been over a week and it’s not going away.”

Dr. Farshadi sighed and, a little bored, thumbed through her students’ research essays, which she had been grading before the meeting diverted her. These gatherings were always sullen and tense, not unlike a funerary repast, she thought. And it being the first since the social media bombshell, it was better to have work on hand for the sake of healthy distraction

Lorna took a breath before speaking. “It is the white elephant in the room today, isn’t it? I get it, I do. But, really, what do any of you want me to do about it? I was just doing my job. I have no interest in being that kind of a teacher, who watches her Ps and Qs, censors herself, pleases the students and their parents and the community and the stakeholders. If I wanted to become that kind of teacher, I wouldn’t have earned my fucking doctorate and I would have resigned myself to teaching high school or kindergarten! Do you have any idea how many emails and letters I’ve been receiving? People calling me a cunt and a bitch and a self-loathing woman, a gender traitor! A sexist and a misogynist? Do you?!”

Lorna was taken aback by how angry she’d become. It had crept up on her the more she talked, the more she thought about how useless and compromising the entire affair had been.

“And look!” she ventured on.

Lorna grabbed her laptop off her desk, smashed away nervously at the keys, and then spun the computer around for her staff to see the video playing on Vimeo:

Two suited women, both with close-cropped hair and chalky white skin, spoke chirpily about Lorna, the footage of the infamous video on mute in the background. It was MSNBC and the talking heads were self-satisfied in their tone and regal in their miens.

“She should be censured,” said one woman. “Merkin has a moral and ethical responsibility to patrol and discipline their own.”

“I think she’s a dangerous dinosaur who’s undermining the Democratic party,” said the other. “And in the end, she’ll just end up empowering the Republicans. This is exactly what they want.”

Lorna stopped the clip, put her laptop on the desk, and combed her hair back behind her ears. Her wide, handsome face, often with little makeup and dark eyes with thin lips, wasn’t completely feminine with her hair set back.

Geraldine fixed her stare on a Victorian weathervane and Colonial scale of justice, both patina laden, resting on a mantle close to Lorna’s desk. Her office was stately that way, thought Geraldine. Quintessential in its Ivy League trappings.

“This is what we’ve been saying, Lorna,” said Geraldine. “It’s becoming a bigger story and it’s not fair for us to have to bear the brunt as a department.”

“It’s not nice, the things I say, and I know that, but nice isn’t something I aspire to be. Right is. I am only interested in being right, Geraldine.”

Geraldine made a cartoonish, goofy face. A face that laughed at others, a face to be laughed at. “And do you really think you are with all of this?”

Lorna’s eyes widened in faux cheer. “Bowman, your ancestors were from England, right?”

Dr. Bowman’s grin caused him to redden. His powder blue eyes even sparkled. “English, through and through.”

Lorna nodded, played with her earring. “Chen, your family are Cantonese, though they moved to Beijing when you were in first grade, no?”

“Yes, that’s right. Though we went to Hong Kong probably once a month to visit family.”

That time her father caught her masturbating to a boxing match when she was fourteen. Mother had dismissed it as healthy. He was supposed to have been the more progressive of the two, but it was she who better understood the ways of a young woman’s impulses. What excited. What satisfied. She spared Lorna a discussion. Lorna would graduate to horror films and BDSM videos she’d find on gay websites by college. Popular, respectable teen girl and women’s magazines would never explore these impulses. They were proclivities that no one wanted to touch, consider, or watch.

Lorna stopped fidgeting with her earring and said to Bowman, as though they were faculty gathering friends: “They left, though, because they had trouble with England’s ethnic influence, right?”

Dr. Chen cleared his throat and mumbled when he spoke. “Even after the handover in ‘97, it still lingers. Like a stain.”

Bowman’s eyes narrowed as he chewed his cheek.

“Like a stain,” repeated Lorna. “What kind of a stain?”

Dr. Chen’s compact body with aged muscle seemed to grow bigger as his childlike face took on a hardened countenance. He chuckled and pretended to annotate an article.

Dr. Chen, into his chest: “They arrived in 1841. It was a long time, their stay. They had occupied for a long time, Lorna.”

Lorna tapped her pen softly against her bare left leg, slung over her right. “You’re aware of the emasculation campaign that some British soldiers decided to spearhead clandestinely, aren’t you?”

Dr. Bowman sat up, jaw clenched.

Dr. Chen frowned. “I’m not familiar, no.”

“Apparently, the young English soldiers of a small village outside of Hong Kong, I believe not far from Kowloon Bay, had decided that to make the Cantonese men easier to manage they’d have to break them first of their pride and pesky tendency toward self-defense.”

Dr. Bowman’s sat up awkwardly as his stomach tightened. On his knees, Dr. Chen’s fists balled.

“These young English soldiers would systematically pick out the strongest and most dominant men in the pack, the troublemakers, the agitators. Mostly fishermen or dock workers. Real brutes. And they would ritualistically rape them in front of the whole community. Shaming them. Feminizing them. Many committed suicide. Many others ran away. The British had their reign. As you said, Dr. Chen, it had lasted for one hundred and fifty-six years.”

Dr. Chen snarled and when he spoke it was with a big, wet lump in his throat. “Fucking Limey bastards.”

“Whoa there!” exclaimed Dr. Bowman who stood up on a nervy impulse, dropping his folder and notes to the floor.

Dr. Farshadi gasped and instinctively covered her breasts and closed her long tawny legs.

Red obscured Dr. Chen’s vision and he shook. “Piggish white people. I could go on!”

Dr. Bowman snapped out the epithet, and the word could not be unsaid. He knew he erred when he saw the faces of Dr. Farshadi and Geraldine, both of whom were wearing expressions of repulsion. But Dr. Bowman had only reacted and lost his sense of station, of place, of propriety.

Dr. Chen also snapped, but his explosion was not verbal. It was physical and before he realized what he was doing he had already leaped to his feet, thrown a knee in Dr. Bowman’s ribs, causing his pillar-like legs to crumble, another into his face, and was currently on top of him striking with a crazed repetition the boyish redhead’s swollen mouth, making it bleed.

Lorna’s desk had been knocked over, two of her plants were left smashed, and at least one chair-leg was cracked. But she didn’t care about any of that. In fact, she could barely contain her glow, the grin too bright to shade, and it shone on Dr. Chen, who was panting and revealed the faint outline of an erection when he stood. It shone too on Dr. Farshadi, who had a hand pressed against her right breast and another against her mons veneris.

Geraldine was breathless and flush, her hands out of view.

Nothing like this had ever happened, though Lorna had always hoped and meant it to. But it kept on happening, and delightedly Lorna wondered how’d she work it into her next book without condemning anyone at all. She thought of Plato’s reverence for the Olympians.

Dr. Bowman groaned and coughed up a tooth and some of his lunch as Dr. Chen adjusted his tumescence and the female professors endeavored to steady their breathing. Lorna’s inconvenient insights settled on the room’s queasy inhabitants with an uneasy weight. Though it hadn’t solved any problems, she was satisfied with the support of her thesis it had offered.

Then it was over, for now. It would prefigure future events, Lorna was certain.

 

THE NEXT FEW DAYS would bring about more Internet-triggered seismic spasms. It manifested next at home. Risk policed the bar and drank too much. Lorna was on the couch and replayed the events of the barbarism in her office. She’d thought about it often since the melee.

“So, it seems that the board has a problem with my behavior,” said Risk, lumbering over a series of wine traps, gripping a bottle of beer.

Lorna was on her second highball. “No kidding?”

“They took issue with how I conducted myself during the team-building challenges and, you know, that I videotaped it, put it online. Fucking shit. They think it reflects badly on me and as an extension on the network. Whatever. Small, mediocre …”

How he conducted himself: pulling Dominick’s ankle as he climbed the tall, plastic rock wall, causing him to dislocate a knee. Tackling him into poison ivy near West Point after he was clearly going to reach the finish line first. Kicking him in the balls during what had been a friendly Muay Thai sparing session. And then electing to upload all of these juvenile, violent shenanigans onto an internationally-accessible website.

“And the Remington Associates, they’re, uh, not happy either. So …”

“So, they’ve both let you go, then? Fired you?”

“Yeah, but not without a healthy severance … and then there’s our savings, right? I mean, we’re fine. Just fine. And this means that maybe we can seriously move forward with Spain.”

Move forward with Spain. As though it were wedding plans or a military campaign. Lorna hadn’t said too much more after his blasé pronouncements.

Why had she ever thought their lives were anything but contingency?  Once Spain had seemed like a romantic fling held at bay while they found themselves. They’d never used the phrase found themselves.  But that’s what they were doing because both of them were now completely lost. The city was already forgetting them.

She retreated into her home office, smaller than the one at Merkin by half, and checked her emails. The home office featured no plants, no posters of any Adonis or warrior. Just stacks of papers and shelves lined with books.

So many emails from former students and colleagues who wished to express their disfavor or support, scolding and sympathy.

Though at fifty-one she wasn’t all that old, Lorna was dazzled by how quickly the world had changed and how far behind it had left her. The new guard deemed her a relic of a primitive age. Not long ago her theories would be fodder for dinnertime discussion, stimulating classroom debate, and gentlemanly cross-examination in chambers of critical analysis. Now she was just labeled a cretin and a monster.

Multiple requests from legacy media, top brands wishing for interviews and profiles. Lorna would consider, but ultimately ignore the opportunities. She had no need to clear her name or clarify anything she’d said. The email from the publisher of The Wanton Feminine wouldn’t arrive for another week. It would remind her of the morality clause in her contract and cancel the publication of her book, citing “too-tempestuous social headwinds”. They’d allude to the Twitter storms, the FaceBook fusillades, and the coverage on the 24-hour news networks, excerpting the comments and posts, likes and emojis.

 

BUT she was surprised by how grateful she felt for the momentary attention, negative though it mostly was. So what if the suicide requests and insults had started to chip away at her? She was relevant, again. Perhaps it was time to leave. Start over. Find a place in the world where they didn’t martyr speakers of unpopular truths.

And then an official letter from Sherlyn Lopez, Merkin’s director of human resources. Lorna urgently opened the email. She stared at the screen, rereading the words until her eyes strained, until they made sense. It took many minutes before they did.

Dr. Hall-Truman,

We regret to inform you that your term of employment at City University of New York Merkin has come to an immediate end. Due to your violation of our employee code of conduct Section 4.b) we have no choice but to end your employment with us.

You have until the end of November 2019 to clean out your office and vacate the premises. If you do not comply, your belongings will be packed up for you and you will be escorted off the premises by our security team.

Your courses for the remainder of the Autumn 2019 semester have been canceled and all students have received full refunds.

We thank you for your service to City University of New York Merkin and we wish it didn’t have to end this way.

She could hear realtors picking up the phone and calling to ask if it was true, and how soon would their place be available for staging and showing.

 

 

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Brian Alessandro holds an MA in clinical psychology from Columbia University and has taught the subject at the high school and college levels for over ten years.  His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice and the Independent Book Publisher Association Best New Voice Award. In 2011, he wrote and directed the feature film, Afghan Hound, and has adapted Edmund White’s 1982-classic “A Boy’s Own Story” into a graphic novel for Top Shelf Productions. Brian currently writes literary criticism for Newsday.

“No Content Warnings”: a conversation with Laura Sims, author of LOOKER

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(Scribner, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY JO VARNISH

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Laura Sims, author of the critically acclaimed Looker (Scribner, 2019) opens up about her debut novel, her process and her feelings on content warnings.

 

Jo Varnish: The paperback edition of your novel, Looker, comes out on October 1st. How would you describe the novel and its central themes?

Laura Sims: I’d describe it as a literary character study first and foremost, though it also has the fast pacing and dark storyline of a psychological thriller. It shouldn’t be confused with a typical thriller, though; it doesn’t make the expected genre moves—like plot twists and shocking revelations. The novel follows a woman whose life has recently imploded; in the wake of this, she becomes fixated on her neighbor, a famous actress who seems to have everything the narrator wants and believes she will never have: a stable, loving family, an exciting career, a beautiful home, status and wealth. In her obsession, the narrator acts out in increasingly unacceptable ways…and things go very badly.

Through the narrator’s situation, the book explores how toxic our culture of looking at others—whether in real life or on social media—can be. My narrator is particularly vulnerable and embittered by circumstance, but I think anyone can relate to comparing themselves to someone else and feeling decidedly “less than.” In my narrator’s case, some of this feeling can be attributed to how societal standards for women impact her life. She isn’t checking certain boxes women of her age and station are “supposed” to check, so this adds pressure and ultimately has disastrous results.

JV: There are some biographical similarities between you and your narrator.  Like her, you used to live in Brooklyn, and also like her, you taught creative writing to adult students at a city school.  How do you react to the inevitable questions of author-narrator merge?

LS: I just heard Phoebe Waller-Bridge address this question/issue in an interview. When asked how autobiographical “Fleabag” was, she said: “Women can make things up. It’s not all a diary.” That cracked me up—and also resonated with me. I think it’s true that women get questions about author-narrator or life-fiction merge far more often than men, as if it’s assumed that our imaginations are so limited, our lives so constricted, that we must rely on autobiography for our creative work. I definitely share some autobiographical facts (and a lipstick shade) with my narrator, and we all know that fiction writers do draw, to some extent, on their lives for their writing, but in the end: it doesn’t matter. The character and her story exist independently of the facts and circumstances of my life, and the work should be received, valued, and understood solely as a work of fiction.

JV: Where did you draw your inspiration for Looker’s story and characters?

LS: Living in Brooklyn was a huge inspiration for the novel, because of the way you live pressed up against people from all segments of the socioeconomic spectrum: middle-class families, homeless people, longtime working-class residents, and even celebrities. It was interesting to think of the different worlds we inhabited, all within a relatively small space, and what that kind of proximity might do to someone who perceives herself to be steps away, yet forever separated from a richer, better life. There was one particular day when I was walking home in the dead heat of August, lugging fifteen grocery bags from the store and girding myself to carry them up four flights, when a beautiful actress walked by. My immediate reaction was to envy her seemingly effortless elegance, and to wonder if she had ever carried grocery bags uphill in her life (probably not, I decided). That’s when another woman’s voice, bitter and raging at the world, popped into my head. She couldn’t stand seeing this entitled, richly dressed woman walk by so unencumbered, so carefree. She admired, despised, and envied her in equal measure. I went home, sat down, and started to write in that woman’s voice. The other characters around my narrator came pretty easily, as they were loosely inspired by ‘types’ in my Brooklyn neighborhood.

JV: Is the object of the narrator’s obsession a reflection on our fascination with celebrity insofar as she is a famous actress?  Further, was your decision not to name the actress or the narrator a comment on our culture’s interest in surface at the cost of deeper identity?

LS: It can definitely be read as a reflection on our fascination with celebrity, though it wasn’t intentional. In our culture of constantly looking at celebrities, they seem an easy target for fixation, especially for someone who’s in a vulnerable state of mind. It’s potentially harmful to both parties—the looker and the looked at. It’s even dangerous—or unhealthy, at least, for people who aren’t particularly sensitive or damaged. To always be looking at others’ seemingly flawless lives can make our own lives feel thin and dreary by comparison—even if the seeming flawlessness is nothing but a show.

I didn’t intentionally leave my characters unnamed. It was something that happened naturally as I was writing the book, but looking back I see how their namelessness fits with Looker’s focus on how intertwined perception and identity can be. The actress is trapped by the narrator’s perception of her as “the actress”; she isn’t allowed to be more or less than that. And the narrator’s namelessness blots her out, just as she blots herself out, or perceives herself to be blotted out by society. But her namelessness is also useful because it erases the distance between reader and character and helps create the raw, even uncomfortable, intimacy that some readers have described.

JV: The narrator has a complicated relationship with her pet, Cat, who she refuses to return to her ex-husband. What do her changing feelings for Cat tell us about her mental state?

LS: As it shifts from one extreme to the other, her relationship with Cat reflects the moods and stages of her mental decline.  She begins by seeing Cat as a nuisance, then shifts to loving her, adoring her, even, when she realizes Cat can be used to manipulate her ex-husband. When things deteriorate further in the narrator’s life, she becomes impatient, unkind. And then her final, most vicious act signals to us that she has finally crossed the line into what many would call madness.

JV: I was surprised to learn how strongly some readers have reacted to the narrator’s treatment of Cat. I know “content warnings” are increasingly used on Goodreads and elsewhere.  How do you feel about such warnings?

LS: Yes, I was surprised, too. The moment in the book they’re responding to was the hardest scene for me to write, but it was also the most crucial; inevitable, I’d have to say. She had to do it. She had to show us just how far she’d come from her reasonably ordered, societally acceptable life: very far. I was happy to learn that people felt discomfort, anger, even outrage in response to that moment; it constitutes a powerful reaction to the book, and isn’t that what fiction and other art forms are for? To provoke, in the most general sense: to provoke thought and emotion. I find that ‘content warnings,’ in the sphere of literature, interfere with that crucial relationship between artwork and audience. They neutralize any potential threat to a reader’s state of mind, and in doing so they neutralize the work itself. Make it bland and safe for everyone, so that we may as well be watching a network sitcom (though they’ve come far in recent years) rather than reading a complex work of fiction.

JV: I find it impossible not to empathize with the narrator.  Dealing with infertility and the breakdown of a marriage are understandably unsettling, and likely trigger her breakaway from reality. Was creating compassion for her intentional?

LS: I wouldn’t say it was intentional, but I did feel very deeply for her. I didn’t want her to be a two-dimensional villain. (I don’t think of her as a “villain” at all.) My hope is that readers will feel some measure of compassion and empathy for her—as you did—and will see in her some basic human desires: to love and be loved; to connect; to transcend the rigors, indignities, and monotony of everyday life. Maybe she heads down strange avenues in hopes of satisfying these desires, but the desires themselves are universal.

JV: Tell us about your process as a writer.  What does a writing day typically look like for you?  Over what time period did you write Looker?

LS: On my best, most productive days, I head to a co-working space in town right after the school bus leaves. I try to work for several hours in the morning there, when my focus is sharpest. Then I devote the rest of my day to family business, schoolwork (see below), exercise, errands, etc. But I find it really important to preserve and protect those morning hours when I can. It also depends on what stage I’m in of the writing process. Right now, I’m editing a finished draft, and while the morning hours are helpful, I end up working outside of those hours, too. I can’t stop working. But when I’m struggling my way through a first draft I need more structure to stay engaged. I find drafting painful and editing intoxicating and FUN.

I wrote Looker over a period of about three years. At the time, I was working on other creative projects, too: a young adult novel that never saw the light of day and a poetry book. I was also teaching part-time and getting my Master’s degree in Library & Info Science. (Still getting that degree, by the way. Almost done!) But Looker was my side project, my passion project—I couldn’t stop returning to it, and worked on it whenever I could. One of the things that’s been hardest about moving forward after Looker is trying to recapture that feeling of working on something that no one knows or cares about, in a kind of protective secrecy. It’s something new authors don’t talk about enough: how hard it is, after being seen, to go back and work on something in the same cloistered way you did before you’d published your book. I realize it’s a good problem to have, but it’s been a challenge nonetheless.

JV: For readers who loved Looker, what would you recommend they read next?

LS: There are several books that inspired me (in some way) in the writing of this novel, and I’d highly recommend them because they’re also some of my favorite contemporary novels: The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante, Dept of Speculation, by Jenny Offill, and Notes on a Scandal, by Zoe Heller. I wasn’t consciously drawing on these books when I was writing Looker, but thinking back, I know they were influential. Also The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Reading that in college had a profound impact on me; it’s the ultimate tale of a woman’s downward spiral and the societal forces that hastened it. I’d also highly recommend Helen Phillips’ new book, The Need—it’s very different from Looker, but plays with genre, too, in that it’s a literary novel with a science fiction storyline and thriller pacing. It’s compulsively readable, beautifully written, and terrifying. Three of my favorite things.

JV: What are you working on at the moment?

LS: I’m working on a novel—well, to be honest, two novels. I’ve got complete drafts of both of them and am working to make them readable before passing them to my agent, who will help me whip them into shape.

JV: Lastly, Looker has a cinematic feel on reading.  Are there any plans to bring your story to the big screen?

LS: Not to the big screen, but to the small screen! Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola’s King Bee production company, along with eOne, have bought the rights to Looker. Emily will star as the narrator and produce. The screenwriters are working on the screenplay now; I can’t wait to see how they adapt it.

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Laura Sims’s debut novel, Looker (Scribner), was published to critical acclaim in early 2019; The Wall Street Journal called it “a sugarcoated poison pill of psychological terror” and Publishers Weekly called it a “chilling and riveting debut.” Sims has also published four books of poetry, including, most recently, Staying Alive; her first poetry collection, Practice, Restraint, was the winner of the 2005 Fence Books Ottoline Prize. In 2014, she edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson. Sims has been the recipient of a US-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship, and her poetry and prose have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Gulf Coast, and other journals. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

 

Originally from England, Jo Varnish now lives outside New York City.  She is assistant editor at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and her short stories and creative nonfiction have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Okay Donkey, Ellipsis Zine, Brevity Blog and others. Jo has been a writer in residence at L’Atelier Writers for two years, and is currently studying for her MFA.  She can be found on twitter @jovarnish1.

[REVIEW] Nobber by Oisín Fagan

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(John Murray Originals, 2019)

REVIEW BY SHASTRI AKELLA

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Nobber has an exceptional opening act, one that removes the conditional out of John Gardner’s oft-quoted idea that all great novels begin either with a stranger arriving in town or a character taking a journey. Oisín Fagan’s novel begins with four characters taking a journey, and then the novel shifts point-of-view: these strangers arrive in the town of Nobber, and their arrival is shown through the eyes of the locals. The novel, at first, shifts perspectives from one chapter to the next, bringing Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to mind, but as the story progresses, the point-of-view starts to shift within chapters, and at an increasingly dizzying pace, leaving readers with the distinct impression that Nobber is the schizophrenic monster-protagonist and we are stuck inside its head, an experience that anyone familiar with a small town and its incestuous intimacies and flawed loyalties will recognize. It is a setting that in Stephen King’s works is often the source of horror and that, in Fagan’s hands, also has a distinctly Dickensian feel, the claustrophobia of the setting accentuated by the epic scale of the narrative that plays out in such a tight space.

The novel is set during Ireland’s black plague, but its temporal distance does not make its characters feel any less familiar. de Flunkl and his men are on the move in pursuit of real estate in a time of economic slump; their goal, to buy property on the cheap so they can sell it for a higher value once the plague has ended, holds a strong presence in literature set during the Depression. The men have two encounters as they are about to enter Nobber: the first one is with a band of Gaels, a people who have been displaced from their lands and into the wilderness, and who are now perceived to be ‘savages’. The tension of the prolonged dialogue between the men and Gaels, made possible with the assistance of a translator, William (who is a part of de Flunkl’s retinue), hints at social tensions that, in the present political moment, feel close to home (no matter where, geographically speaking, home is). The second encounter, which I will focus on, brings up a striking instance of the animal dysmorphia that runs like a thematic thread throughout the novel. On the outskirts of Nobber, the men see “a cruciform of wood…on it, thickly laid like a skeleton’s musculature, are reams of dead crows, and they give the form a certain plumpness and lifelikeness from a distance.” The crows, which at first de Flunkl assumes are dead, are “nailed into the wood”. As Harold, another member of the itinerant group, persuades de Flunkl to retreat, warning him that such a ghastly sight can bring no good tidings their way, one of the birds starts to flap its wings, and several others follow suite, and a horrified de Flunkl realizes that they are, in fact, alive. The cross, they notice, is topped with a peasant’s cap, a detail which becomes a lens to read the broader narrative implications of the sight.

Throughout the novel, Fagan uses animal dysmorphia alongside a disintegrating human psyche to place the human and the non-human on a level plane. The conjunction becomes a powerful device to show how the victimized responds to a loss of control by distorting the reality of someone less powerful then themselves. A character who enters Nobber with two lambs, two calves, and a badger (all of which are stolen or captured), reflects: “if animals are jumbled up too greatly in species, and confined too closely, disastrous things happen…Beasts, who should emerge into the synechdocal perfection of predator and prey, too closely combined begin to act in an erratic and unpredictable manner. Both of the lambs think one of the calves is its mother. One of the calves thinks [he] is its mother, and the badger, who should prey on the lambs, instead wishes to prey on him.” Earlier in the novel, a local of Nobber is approached by four men who are naked and who have “sheep skulls tied to their heads.” Mary, a Gael who is kidnapped by Colca (another local of Nobber, and one of the more notorious characters in the novel), kills a horse, but this act of cruelty too is inseparable from human depravity. Colca, as readers find out, practices bestiality, and the novel hints at him having sexual contact with the horse. Rather than the plague taking a toll on both man and animal, it messes with the minds of the humans who then act against the animals.

The action of the novel, once de Flunkl and his men arrive in Nobber, takes places almost exclusively inside the houses of locals. Behind each locked door are an unlikely pair or group of people who parry for power. At times the dead and the dying are trapped in the same space, and the corporeal effects of the plague create for tremendous moments of body horror like the following one:

 

“Dervorgilla’s arms, held above her head, are shivering with such force that they are almost a blur. Amidst the matted hair of her armpits are swollen protuberances with smooth surfaces. The swellings are hairless, yellow and thick, one under each armpit, like hidden apples growing out of her. One of them is covered in stale pus that has erupted at some former point. Around each buboe is a purple circular bruise, perfect as the concentric ripple of water…[And] Tedbalt[‘s] putrid carcass is decomposing, sunken beneath his work clothes. Steam rises off him, blending the little light above him into a wavy mirage, and his face is covered in a blanket of sleeping flies.”

 

In the final act the action shifts to the town center, bringing all of its residents together. Colca becomes the focal point of everyone’s anger. Throughout the novel, he enforces a curfew on the people of Nobber to keep the plague from spreading. He kidnaps a Gael and hold her hostage as his ‘wife’, and he has an abnormal relationship with animals. Yet, the conversation he has with his mother and her grief as she watches the plight her son is subjected to makes us wonder if the vigilante form of justice is deserved. And in the process dehumanizing Colca, the people of Nobber dehumanize each other.

Christopher Higgs (2017)  poses the rhetorical question of ‘what does it mean to be human?’ and then responds to it to the following effect: “one is not born a human, one becomes human,” for to be human is “not a natural fact. Instead, it is the result of a certain history, a certain civilization, which has resulted in [his or] her current status” (8). Being human, Higgs notes, is a social construct. He adds that “we must not be fooled into believing a human is a human and a monster is a monster outside of or isolated from social and historical contexts” (9). If the notion of what it means to be human has historically been a patriarchal construction—the patriarchy placing a boundary around what it means to be a human civilization and deciding on the laws of governance that decide who qualifies and who disqualifies—then dehumanization, as Peter Grosvenor (2014) states, is the “psychological capacity to relegate people to the status of non-human animals, and to deprive them of the protection normally accorded to fellow humans by moral codes” (154). Thus, “to become a human,” Higgs states, “one must participate in a system of belonging…one becomes human by sacrificing autonomy in favor of participation…those who are human make this agreement. To break this agreement is to become Other” (31). As a socio-cultural construct humanity is, Higgs notes, an act of membership. The shifting points-of-view in Nobber show how each character is, in turn, dehumanizes/is dehumanized. In the face of the plague, the system of belonging that the locals of Nobber participated in, and that the Gaels were kept out of, has fallen apart, leaving the former with no familiar system to work within, thus reducing them all, in status and behavior, to non-human animals. Their treatment of animals is reflective of their own psychological and social condition.

The novel is highly relevant to our current sociopolitical and environmental reality: where on the one hand, the surge of right-wing regimes has narrowed and tightened the boundaries of the systems of belonging that keep some people in and everyone else out, environmental collapse, on the other hand, is on the brink of erasing all such known systems, creating new ways of life—a hitherto unknown chaos—where those who dehumanize the Other also dehumanize each other because the system that once held them together has fallen apart. Indeed, the locals in Nobber dehumanized the Gales until the plague hit them and then they started to dehumanize each other. One need look no further than the fact that Syrian refugee crisis that began because of an environmental disaster created mass migration into Europe, and the attitudes towards these migrations in turn caused a split between the U.K. and the rest of Europe, precipitating the coming about of Brexit.

I began with a famous literary tenet, and I would like to end with one. Ursula K. Le Guin once remarked that all fantastic narratives ultimately address the ills that ail our present social reality, ills that have become background white noise to us and that, therefore, when exaggerated and placed in strange new spaces, far removed from our reality, startle us into paying attention. That, I think, is where the genius of Fagan’s novel lies. In making us pay attention to the black Plague in the 1300s and showing us how some complex, well-wrought characters react to it, it makes us pay closer attention to our own disintegrating reality, to those around us, and ultimately to ourselves. It interrogates the systems of belonging we participate in and it creates a powerful experience of empathy for our future selves who might no longer have access to those systems and who will, as a result, be Othered. And seeing our future Othered selves might exactly be what we need to empathize with the Other in the here and the now. Nobber is an ode to precarity, one that I think will live beyond its generation, serving as both an instructive allegory and a highly readable work of fiction.

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Shastri Akella earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) where he is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. His story won the Bridging the Gap fiction contest at the Slice Writers’ Conference in 2018. His works appears in Guernica, Electric Literature, The Common, Rumpus, World Literature Today, LA Review of Books, Danse Macabre, and European Stages, among other places. He is currently seeking agents for his novel, The Elephant Songs, queer novel set in 1980s India with an an interracial love story at its core.

[REVIEW] Kansastan by Farooq Ahmed

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(7.13 Books, 2019)

REVIEW BY J.D. HO

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One of the important projects of contemporary writers of color or writers belonging to marginalized religious groups is to reclaim and rewrite histories that have largely been recorded and imagined by the majority. Farooq Ahmed’s Kansastan is one such reclamation. Ahmed weaves an alternative narrative of Kansas during the Civil War. His unnamed narrator lives in Imam Bahira’s mosque, slaughtering goats and doing other chores, while around him Kansans defend the state against Missourians. Like a less wholesome Forrest Gump, complete with leg braces, our narrator meets historic figures like the abolitionist John Brown. While the setting is America during the Civil War, on the border between a free state and a slave state, Ahmed incorporates narrative elements from the Qur’an and Islamic history, drawing in particular on the story of Hajar and her son Ismail, ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims populate Ahmed’s novelistic universe, and the mosque stands without comment in Kansas. In the Civil War period, Muslims were, in fact, present in the U.S. because a significant number of slaves came from Islamic regions, but that aspect of history is not directly addressed in this narrative.

The narrator of Kansastan at one point proclaims: “If I inherited the mosque, I could retell our stories!” Thus, the main character ostensibly shares a goal with the novel itself. But what is the purpose of retelling and reclaiming history? The tone of Kansastan leans more toward satire than historical illumination or giving voice to unheard witnesses. The retellings seem to be important primarily to gratify the narrator’s ego. In the text, the narrator often feels overlooked, unjustly treated, incorrectly perceived. His sense of injustice increases with the arrival of a woman named Maryam, whom the narrator claims is his aunt. The members of the community regard Maryam’s son, Faisal, as a healer and prophet, while the narrator is the butt of jokes. When Faisal strikes a geyser in the parched landscape, the populace shower him with gratitude, but the narrator complains that no one acknowledges the fact that he was the one to make Faisal play the game that led him to discover the well. That link, he says, “was lost between the storytellers and the told.” The narrator exists only as “the cripple” in songs about Faisal. To combat that injustice, the narrator schemes to take over the mosque by defeating his oppressors one by one.

We know little of our narrator’s past, though we know he is an orphan, that he has a malady that prevents him from walking easily, and that he possesses some knowledge of the Qur’an, though that knowledge is perhaps as unreliable as he is. He doesn’t know Arabic, and calls “ignorance—my shield and my sword.” Despite the character’s ostensible religion and time period, he smokes cigarettes and marijuana (which he calls his “analgesic seasonings”), commits murder and rape, and is generally unsympathetic. In this he resembles some of Vladimir Nabokov’s narrators, whom we are not necessarily supposed to like or trust, and who often have an exaggerated sense of self-importance and a shifty moral compass. Ahmed’s narrator is similar. He seems to bend facts to cast his ethically dubious actions in a positive light. He is our storyteller and our archivist, the compiler of all the information we know about the novel’s world.

As I began this novel, I had trouble getting my bearings because there is little exposition of the factions and historical background of this particular universe. I found myself wishing for more world-building and exposition. I turned to the Qur’an for direction because Kansastan so constantly references the Qur’an and the people in it. Though my reading of it is incomplete and certainly not deep, the Qur’an helped in two ways. First, as I looked up many of the novel’s quotations from the Qur’an, I began to question the narrator’s knowledge of scriptural context. Second, thinking about how to read the Qur’an was helpful for thinking about how to read Kansastan. In his introduction to my version of the Qur’an (Oxford), M.A.S. Abdel Haleem states: “An important feature of the Qur’anic style is that it alludes to events without giving historical background.” Haleem goes on to say that the Qur’an relied upon its readers’ knowledge of events that were, at the time, current. Ahmed employs a similar style, perhaps purposely leaving the particulars of the Kansas–Missouri conflict vague in order that readers will treat the novel as contemporary fable—or satire. Though Ahmed draws upon the Qur’an and the story of Hajar and Ismail, he does not create straightforward parallels.

From an editorial perspective, I think Kansastan tries to take on too many narrative tasks at once. Its satirical elements often clutter the narrative in a way that decreases their effectiveness. (References to Kansas-specific insider jokes, for instance, are worldbuilding, but not in a meaningful way.) But Ahmed possesses the skills to wield a satirical blade, as when the Imam says, “Whom ye war against, I war against,” and much later Faisal says, “If the Lord be for us, who can be against,” echoing both Romans 8:31 and George W. Bush after 9/11.

Another purpose of retelling in the form of satire is to attempt to make sense of—or find relief from—the present, and I think that is where Ahmed’s aim lies. In mocking disability, religion, and the fight against slavery, Kansastan treats nothing as sacred, revealing a deeply pessimistic worldview. The point may be that the particulars of factions and history will do nothing to make sense of the events of our times or the narrator’s. If our murderous and narcissistic narrator is on the side of abolitionists, what does that say about the other side? Perhaps both sides are Fanatics (the narrator’s term), and both sides believe they are right, but, as readers standing outside the narrative, one side’s fanaticism is indistinguishable from the other’s.

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J.D. Ho has an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas in Austin. J.D.’s poems and essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals.