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2025 icebreaker
Renee Gladman is an experimental writer and artist. I haven't read her other works, but this particular novel has some buzz around it: towards the end, she mentions how she started talking about the novel in an interview with the believer back in 2017, and an excerpt was published in The Paris Review in 2024. A few writer friends of mine picked this up and were really excited about it. My own feelings are more muted. The question of, "why is there not a lesbian novel that's good AND romantic and HAPPY?" is one I had little patience with when I was a journeyman lesbian and now that I'm not one any longer I'm like, I guess novels are fatal and I am fine with that answer and don't feel like I need to elaborate on that, but lol what's a book blog for if not needless elaboration. Let's goooooo
My Lesbian Novel is more interested in process of writing and examining the tools and material that novels are made of than producing a completed conventional romance novel. I do think there's something fun and jaunty about it: the tone is conversational, wry, and sincere, and it is enjoyable reading Gladman list tropes and common stock signifiers of romance novels, then flip to describing art and non-romance novels a few pages later. The bits where Gladman recommends her favorite novels is also a lot of fun and make me go, oh, okay, yeah I would totally pick that up.
Here's a sample of the novel that I liked:
R[enee]: I kept wanting to pull myself out of it, but I made myself stay. It's hard to write this way. To write wanting to say something. Or rather, to write wanting to produce something in particular.
I: Like a certain mood?
R: Mood with consequences.
...
I keep pulling out Marguerite Duras books, mostly interviews but also these more obscure texts where she's reflecting on the making of a film or writing anecdotally about her companion Yann Andrea Steiner. I love the way she writes about the houses she's inhabited in her life, about the sea, about how her living leads to her writing, how she writes her films. I can no longer tolerate how she talks about her relationships with men. She seems too enamored with mistreatment. It's weird though. I don't know why I didn't see this before in the twenty years I've been reading her books. I'm not sure why it looks different now. I've been thinking about the times I taught her books to young women, and I'm berating myself over a recent memory. It was last summer. I was teaching my favorite text of hers, an essay-memoir piece called "Writing," and I remember I kept saying to this class of women and non-binary people: ignore this, ignore that, ignore what she says about men and love. Ignore her drinking, too. And what was left was this life-long dedication to writing and the sea, but you can't really teach like that, and, apparently, I can't read like that any longer either.
I don't even know why I took that detour. I guess I'm thinking about what it means to let an interview become a novel and to let one's talking about the making of one's work become fiction. And the delight that comes from regarding oneself as a mystery, a mystery protected by a vigilant writing practice. Taking space to write. Starting and finishing books. Having a story to tell for each one. Duras does this brilliantly but also complicatedly and, from the current vantage point, a bit insensitively with her obsession with cruel lovers--past and imagined.
You can probably see the things that interest and frustrate me here: mood with consequence. That's great. I have more charged feelings about the reflection on Duras and the bit where she's teaching Duras and making impossible demands for the students to not see the parts that might spoil the delightful effect Duras has on her. From Duras, Gladman takes inspiration from the interview format and--importantly--a vision of the authorial self as "a mystery protected by a vigilant writing process." Teaching, however, exposes her to the students in an awkward way. In seeing Duras through the eyes of a teacher, the text is no longer a work that speaks directly to her: it is now the heirloom from a beloved but complicated parent, and the mystery--and her love of this process and author--is vulnerable to the hatred of her students. Do not hate my mom!
As a reader, though, I'm kind of like, we all know Duras is kind of fucked up. This is not a secret to people. I think Duras occupies that particular awkward space white female writers of the early and mid 20th century often do: my god, you have some severe problems, but it's compelling as hell! I don't think it's a worthwhile project to separate Duras from her obsession with cruelty. Part of it is probably a character flaw, sure, but heterosexuality is marked by the ease in which cruelty passes from men to women; is it right to say that Duras is "enamored with mistreatment," or that she had been conditioned by love to expect and relish mistreatment? Gladman says she can no longer not see Duras purely as a writer who loved the craft and the sea: she sees the cruelty and the fucked up view on love, and she doesn't understand how she couldn't see it before. In her pursuit of writing a lesbian romance novel, she finds herself butting up against the cultural script of romance that undergirds romance novels and the larger instruction manual of heterosexuality.
A writer actively engaged with this project of how to write a good lesbian romance novel will notice romantic scripts everywhere; a writer thinking not just about writing and its processes and how to integrate interviews into fiction but also about love and romance and how to integrate those into their fiction will inevitably have to confront Duras and what she says about men and love. Gladman reencounters Duras as a complete person, not just a writer, and her initial response is remorse: she wishes she could withdraw that vision and insight. Duras' protective writing persona could not protect her from Gladman's disappointment, and that disappointment betrays, I feel, a problem with Gladman's process of writing this. I know that Gladman knows what the tropes of romance are, but the question of why do we have these tropes goes unanswered. Like, are lesbian novels free from these scripts of heterosexual cruelty? Is cruelty an essential quality of romance? Would it be more queer for books to NOT have climaxes because climaxes imitate the male orgasm and sex is about connection, not jizz?????????????
I'm on record with my impatience with experimental novels, and I often feel bad about it. Like, thinking about the reception this novel gets from normies (like me), I can imagine that it's pretty gutsy to go, I'm going to be a writer and I'm going to write things that defeat your expectations of what a novel is or what it should be. At the same time, I can't help but feel like it's an evasion from the actual task of writing a good romance novel. Is the task of writing a good literary romance novel with a happy ending that impossible? The metafiction lets you say, "well I wrote the get together scene. Here are all the moves I need to end it. Wow, all the possibilities!" But actually selecting those moves, giving them form and structure and reality and still making them good and experimental, is infinitely harder than giving someone an outline, even if it is under the guise of the metafiction. Thinking back to Everett's Erasures, another novel within a novel (within a novel I guess, depending on how we're counting it), I respect that Everett bothered to compose an entire ass novella with a beginning, middle, and end.
I really do think of it as a failing on the novel's part to not include a complete work; the references to time passing, the problems of composition, the difficulty of tropes, are not, in my mind, the same as having a novel. And you might say, a book is a book, but I say that the point of having a novel at all is to create a particular space with particular problems that must be dramatized and resolved within the sphere of that drama. Why is it that we read the last fifty pages of a novel and go, wow, I'm kind of frustrated and annoyed with this? I guess because it's ending, endings are hard and it sucks to write them; the beginning and middle, with their endless complications and tangles, are always more fun. But the work itself will stand as long as the ending resolves matters in a manner consistent with the author's vision; the work cannot be complete, the full judgment of how the author manages the problem, the success of the author's efforts and powers, is not complete without the ending. and after finishing My Lesbian Novel, I'm like, well, I guess since this is a book more about process than novel, the quest continues for the both of us
Final verdict: enjoyable but ultimately makes me go, "oh okay... fine." Readers less dickishly devoted to the traditional form of a novel will probably enjoy this more than I. I've picked up another one of Gladman's novels... I'm curious. I'm a curious bitch
I'm a Fan, Patel - I'll be honest, I would've liked this more if it had been published in 2017 or 2018 or if it were a memoir. I'd like it better if it were nonfiction. As it is, it's a fictional book that eschews longer structure for short, 1-3 pagers, lots of white space, high degree of concentration. One chapter in its entirety (titled ":|"):
I can absolutely feel as if it were inside my own body, how excruciatingly happy the woman I am obsessed with is from her Instagram. She is busy homemaking, posting photos of her geranium houseplants in the Marfa light, views from her windows exclaiming how near she is to The Chinati Foundation, comparing the landscape to the Accona desert in Tuscany, asking her community if they know any framers who specialise in 'high end' or 'custom framers' of posters, of her matching Arne Wahl Iversen teak lounge chairs (about $1500 each from what I can guess), her matching Cesca dining chairs, her nineteenth-century Zapotec rugs and her antique face jugs. She is buzzing with a kind of maddening ecstasy that is almost too much to bear. It feels high-pitched and overwhelming. It is very annoying how happy she is at the moment. Then I am reminded of how old she is and how single she is, how much she wants children and how far away that is right now for her, and I draw some comfort from that.
I find the tone admirable from a technical perspective: tonally the work is basically air-tight bitterness, envy, emotional sadism, and hurt. The narrator's obsession with the woman she's obsessed with comes from her real flop of an affair she's having with an older male artist, referred to in text as the man she wants to be with. The man she wants to be with is married to another woman and is cheating on her with at least three other women at any given time. He tells her this during one of their first encounters, and this only enhances his appeal. This affair with the man she wants to be with goes on for. years.
You can probably sense the but guillotine hanging all over the review... let's bring it down.
First, to address the "I'd like it better if it were nonfiction" -a few things driving me to this point. The fragment structure has been "in" over the last few decades: think Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, Carson, Maggie Nelson, Koestenbaum, etc. The fragment essay pushes against the traditional argumentative essay format and lets the author work through association, a different type of language, and juxtaposition. In that context, I sometimes feel a bit of relief. everyone has read Bluets, but only the meganerds have read Hegel (I haven't read Hegel).
In fiction, the short chapters and this associative mode often represent a psychic breaking point: think Offill's Department of Speculation or Wang's Chemistry. In this case, I think the short chapters are meant both the narrator's psyche cracking under the weight of her intense loserdom and calls to mind the length of an Instagram caption. For the most part, the chapters have specific triggering events or characters or social media moments, but the novel occasionally pauses to drop in declarative passages that enter a mode familiar to essayistic forms:
For an algorithm not built by us, for a platform not designed for us to attract a cultural system which excludes us, do we commit further harm by performing our Otherness--by Othering ourselves for likes, for reshares and approval, to gain a following, to build a fanbase? What are the effects of this alienation, do we even care? Is the need for fervent fans a deeper expression of the fear of being anonymous because we know in an uproar there is protection. We do not want to disappear inside a nameless mass if Something Bad Were To Happen. If we remain part of the masses, we know we will suffer the double injustice of institutional neglect by the police or the justice system compounded by the original crime--like with our murder (Stephen Lawrence, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry but also too many others) or a history-making miscarriage of justice (the Post Office scandal and Grenfell), the thread of deportation from the Home Office (the Windrush scandal) or stripped citizenship (Shamima Begum) for making a terrible mistake when you were a child. Are the cravings for a fanbase an expression of how politically powerless we feel? Or is it something else entirely? Though we insist we are Socialist and Marxist in our ideals, is social media and our pursuit for fame within this structure not the purest expression of individualistic, Thatcherite neo-colonial politics where we transform into scripted individual brands, launching ourselves like start-up companies while masquerading as being ' in service' to our 'communities' by 'taking up space' as if by being true to ourselves, we're doing everyone else a massive favour?
At this point I looked up from the book and wondered, wait a second, who is the narrator addressing? why does this chapter feel like it could be dropped in from a number of other sources--NPR? Substack? the Gram itself?--when most of the other chapters have defined triggers and targets? I don't even disagree with anything here, but I find this mode disagreeable in a novel. The narrator is ostensibly skewering other "creatives" who are also non-white and by implication herself, though the rhetorical stance of, "I'm right, I can diagnose, I can define" also puts distance between the narrator (and awkwardly, the author) and the others... this is naturally a class that includes me so lol, sprinkle some salt.
There's a funny tension between the theory-informed language and maneuvers and the project of writing novels. Critical theory, applied too often, ends up revealing the writer's architecture instead of the novel's world: no need to dramatize when you can theorize, no need to let the reader process theme or arc when you can deploy the tools yourself and more or less fling it into the reader's face: here it is, packaged in its best form by yours truly! And it's awkward as hell! The author's strengths are on display (theme, feeling, tone) and are the limitations of this mode and style. we're not going to be able to self-aware psychoanalyze critically theorize ourselves out of this problem. If we keep trying, we might be stuck here forever.
Final verdict: mixed feelings
I know it sounds like I'm not too hot on either book... I did like them?! just conditionally/comingled with feelings of annoyance... I did find it useful to read them both back-to-back and think about what I want out of novels I read and write... anyway, hopefully soon. soon I will pick something to reread... book blogger out