Actually Pretty Good: Gretel and the Great War
Adam Ehrlich Sachs brings structural playfulness and metanarrativity back to the novel
As I texted a friend about halfway through the book: new Pale Fire alert! No, I wouldn’t quite place Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s latest novel, Gretel and the Great War, on the same rung as Nabokov’s 1962 masterwork, but it is a useful reference to get a hang on the kind of formal and structural play that Sachs employs. The novel begins with the discovery of Gretel, a mute woman, on the streets of Vienna in 1919; a neurologist studies her, concluding that nothing could explain her muteness besides a “childhood deprived of language,” and, lacking any other leads, asks anyone with information about Gretel to send mail to him. All that arrives is a letter from a sanatorium patient who claims to be the girl’s father, and enclosed is a bedtime story, titled “A: THE ARCHITECT,” and the next day comes a story called “B: THE BALLET MASTER,” and on and on all the way through the alphabet. The novel is simply these stories, which sketch out a portrait of Vienna leading up to the war as well as a playful metanarrative between a possibly mad father and his daughter (or possibly a madman with no connection at all), a vivid tableau of both a man and a society on the brink. While plenty of novels these days feature stylistic and structural interludes – the powerpoint presentation in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, the multiple ‘texts’ of Hernan Diaz’s Trust, or one of my favorite recent examples, the personality test in Isle McElroy’s The Atmospherians – it is fairly rare to see a novel sustain it for its entire course. Alejandro Zambra’s 2016 novel Multiple Choice builds a book out of the form and filled-in bubbles a standardized test, and Olga Ravn’s excellent 2022 novel The Employees is comprised of the transcripts of a doomed spaceship crew, but for the most part, novelists and editors seem to favor the tried and true storytelling apparatus over even the hint of structural whimsy or innovation.1 Writing a good novel is hard enough; standing on one leg, tying your hand behind your back, and putting on a blindfold makes it that much more difficult. Thankfully, some people are still trying! Sachs is good at writing 'regular’ novels – The Organs of Sense, from 2017, was the first book in my bookselling career that showed me the disheartening gap between ‘quality’ and ‘consumer demand,’ as we practically couldn’t even give that one away, no matter how many staffers rec’d it or desperately tried to handsell it – but Gretel and the Great War is another grand step forward, standing out for its combination of quality, intricacy and audacity.
If you’ve read this newsletter for nearly any amount of time, you’ll know I love alliteration and assonance, and Gretel and the Great War has these in spades, befitting its alphabetical bent. Sachs has said in interviews that the form of the novel came to him through the books he reads to his children, and you can see the freeing nature of their logic in this novel: why are we talking about the Duchess after the Choirmaster and the Baroness and the Architect? Because it’s next in the alphabet, that’s why, because someone thousands of years ago decided it went A, then B, then C, then D! (While we’re here: who put Q ahead of R S and T??) Each chapter begins with an alliterative flurry that serves as a kind of tagline for the story to come, like “The hotelier has to play the happy hostess to hurt the man who hurt her husband” or “The lighting technician illuminates the Lieutenant’s daughter,” and while that jampacking of similar sounding syllables doesn’t happen in every line, Sachs’s narrator is always attentive to the possibilities and pure pleasure of language, with baroque flourishes of speech and rhetorical swoops abundant. From the “I” chapter: “Indefatigably, in specialist and nonspecialist periodicals alike, the immunologist inveighs against the municipal authorities as well as the industrialists whose interests they represent, and lets it be known that our must urgent task is to inject millions and millions of young people with his completely colorless serum.”
Amid all the verbal trickery, though, there is a web of storytelling occurring, each chapter a story in itself, each story linked to the other chapters of the novel, and also each story coalescing into a grander schema of a father’s message to his child. Sachs makes this point directly in he first story, describing an austere architect’s attempts2 at sending secret messages to a young princess via floral arrangement:
The municipal authorities, who have the decency at least to execute his recommended floral arrangements, are unaware that by means of these ostensibly delightful arrangements the architect is in reality sending the Princess messages containing information crucial to her continued survival in a city that is already much too complicated and which with every passing moment is only becoming ever more so …
Good night, my dear Gretel!
And so the gauntlet is thrown down, each story’s decoration and invention, a joy in itself, hiding subterranean instructions to Gretel, coded messages, another interpretive layer. Many of the stories are about an adult’s attempt, no matter how excessive, to protect children from the world; some others are about children being exposed to the world too soon; some others grind the axe between Gretel’s mother and father; others plainly explain or allegorize the collapse of empire and the descent into horror that’s taken place over the preceding decade or so of Viennese history. Supra to all that is Sachs puling the strings, drawing parallels between Vienna then and our own late-empire society now, as well as universalizing the parent’s plight, that push and pull between wanting to protect a child from the world while also not smothering them before they can go and experience it themselves. It is a novel at once enamored with the function of storytelling but also wary of its less sanguine uses, another push and pull – fiction can be an escape from the world, but it cannot replace the world. Many of the stories feature a long tale told by one character followed by a quick reversal by another; the speaker is revealed to be compromised in some way, or various levers of power have been pulled in order to discredit them. It’s at once a comment by the father on his own institutionalization but also a wider commentary on how often claims are verified not by their content but by public perception of the speaker, how often the truth is subverted for the convenient. One character is driven to this sad conclusion: “Even the sanest individual will sound mad if obliged to tell a strange-enough tale. So I stopped telling it. I stopped saying anything at all.”
Vienna circa the 1910s is a rich tapestry to draw from, and Sachs ensures that the political, artistic, and intellectual spheres of the city and period are never far removed from the fabulist bedtime stories that are being sent to Gretel. Whether as subject or in the background, there are nationalist bomb throwers afoot, decaying imperial lines ruling into rot, children being sent to certain death, and of host of utopian ideals competing for what the city – and its people – could become with just a couple changes here and revolution or two over there. Nestled a bit clumsily among these various -isms is the creation of Zionism, with Sachs’ failed-playwright-turned-madman narrator bearing some similarity to Theodor Herzl, another Viennese playwright of the era. Not that Zionism was ever an uncontroversial subject, but recent events have made it a special flashpoint, leading to perhaps the most awkward NPR interview I’ve ever heard, in which Sachs tries to discuss Zionism as a historical creation of its era and its place within the novel and is instead grilled on his personal views on Israel. Political theory and deeper historical examination are a bit subordinate to the structure and father-daughter metanarrative of the book, which is not necessarily a negative, but does keep the novel on the lighter side. As one character explains, deep in disguise as a ‘freak’ in order to be closer to his daughter:
My artistic ambitions are dead and gone, I just want to spend time with my daughter. So I tell her whatever I have to tell her: Yes, I want a general strike, yes, the other freaks want a general strike, everyone wants a general strike, a general strike would be a tremendous success, et cetera. All nonsense, of course: the freaks are perfectly content with the status quo and a general strike would collapse before it began. Okay, here she comes! Please don’t tell her! So fellas, that’s why we gotta smash the effing Serbs, yow! Kapow! Oh, hallo again.
Gretel is the great silent cipher at the center of the novel, the question of her muteness left thrillingly open – there are indications that she has stopped speaking for her own protection from the wider world, and other indications that she was kept so removed from the world as to never gain the ability to speak. With such an unreliable narrator, nothing can be known for sure except that a parent will do anything for their children, and that no one can know for sure whether that anything will be right or wrong in the long run. There’s at least 26 different ways of looking at it, and they’re all in Gretel and the Great War, a welcome swerve in the somewhat staid field of the contemporary novel. It’s certainly not easy to write a novel this way, but not much good comes easily. Why try any other way?
You can get Gretel and the Great War at your local bookstore, local library, or online at Bookshop.org, where purchases support independent bookstores around the country. (Buying from that link also helps support this newsletter!)
If you liked this post, please share it with a friend:
Zadie Smith wrote White Teeth with a lot of what she called structural “scaffolding,” and has basically completely given up on all that since then.
It’s hard not to slip into alliteration as I discuss it!
Yu’s “Interior Chinatown” feels like another example of that stylistic deviation, and like Sachs, his is extended and sustained + thus does the work of having to justify itself within the coherence of the whole work — which I think earns spades of bonus points next to the Egan Power Point, which as a one-off always risks feeling more gimmicky and less structurally necessary.