Actually Pretty Good: The Visitors
On Jessi Jezewska Stevens' Great Recession systems novel, and/or, the end of the end of the novel of love
The systems novel – think Pynchon, DFW, Gaddis, and DeLillo – has nearly petered out in the new millennium; the tidy corresponding trend might be ‘access to and expansion of the internet in everyday life.’ If, as Christian Lorentzen recently simplified in an essay on DeLillo, the systems novel is characterized by “(1) too much information; (2) the inescapability of science; (3) the incomprehensible scale of things; (4) the limits of any man’s perceptions; (5) the need to see things whole; (6) the impossibility of mastery even when it’s the artist’s duty,” well, the internet came to be a big place to sort a lot of information. In other words, there’s always a Wiki or a forum for something, and there’s also some tracker somewhere cataloging it. The novel, in comparison, doesn’t feel like as much a capacious vessel for information as it once did. The systems novel is a periphery player now, pushed aside in favor of autofiction – someone’s individual experience being something one cannot find on the internet – and more speculative genre bending – alternate histories or future stories with new facts that could never be found via search engine. A post 2000 survey of systems novels look like a bunch of celebrated character actors; beloved by some, a bedrock in the community, but never featured on the poster. Jonathan Franzen wrote a sort of goodbye-to-all-that with The Corrections (2001), and then pledged fealty to traditional novelistic forms and interests; Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004) might’ve been the last big-event systems novel, its stature and notoriety embiggened by his untimely death; and then there are the minor blips of Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006, somehow now the most underdiscussed and underrated Pynchon novel after the critical resuscitation of Vineland), Sergio De La Pava’s Naked Singularity (2008, a book that has grown in estimation without seeming to ever get read more), Jim Gauer’s Novel Explosives (2016, Joy Williams tipped me to it, written by “possibly the world’s only Marxist Venture Capitalist”) and, reassuringly recently, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood (2023, rec’d by all the right people, absent from a lot of big year end lists, such is life). I’m sure I’ve missed some, and just until last week I had missed a very good one in Jessi Jezewka Stevens’ 2022 novel The Visitors, a novel which does not concern itself with the encyclopedic urge of larger systems novels but instead uses the inscrutability of the undergirding systems that prop up our society – finance and energy – as key plot engines in the story of a woman’s unraveling amid a city’s unraveling. The systemic aspect of the novel is yoked quite elegantly to a more traditional (at least novelistically) love story, filled with things unsaid and messages never received, missed connections, reviving the spirit of the pre-modern Novel of Love as it positions love as yet another impenetrable system for its characters to struggle against. On a sentence to sentence level, it features some of the finest writing among the contemporary set of fiction writers,1 and there’s also a palpable sense of inventiveness and temerity in Stevens’ narrative swings, which is a roundabout way of saying: there’s a gnome in this book. Could even be a real gnome, if that’s not an oxymoron!
The gnome is one of the titular visitors, appearing in our main character, C’s, apartment
unannounced, sans knock, a few weeks before, as though he’d come straight through the wall. C was sitting on her daybed, knitting, when she first observed the little man, noting the distance between his bare feet and the floor, his diaphanous body, his crumpled cravat.
C’s a lapsed textile artist, unused loom looming in a corner of the apartment, behind on rent both at home and at work, sailing through the Great Recession in perhaps the least seaworthy and most elastic ship possible: an art supplies store. “Revenue less store rent, less apartment rent, less healthcare and food and self-improvement. She calculates it again. The result invites a frown.” From the “prow” of her oddly shaped store on 6th Avenue, C watches the newly broke world walk on by, the odd shopper stopping here and there for poster board, letter beads, or googly eyes. The more professional supplies are shunted to an ever shrinking corner (everyone only ever wants pink paint, anyway), and the most consistent moneymaker is C’s weekly painting class, where the children of the privileged few have their (non)talent developed. Life at home is hardly any better; C’s recently divorced and unmoored from any sort of local community. Thus, gnome in the house. If this were just a story of loneliness in a lonely country, the gnome might be more of a reassuring companion, offering gnomey bromides and some sort of understanding; instead, the gnome is dudded out in suit and tie, as if he came straight from Wall Street, and he (it?) is really into complex electrical grid systems, market inefficiencies, and watching the news, learning as much as he (it?) can about the world of humans:
‘In the baser sediments of the collective mind,’ he explains, ‘a quiet rage settles, and, deeper still, through the bedrock, there stirs a tremor, an urge to destroy, to prove that the systems at the surface are in fact contingent.’ Poof! It is only through their destruction that one reveals conventions were never the natural state. Until then it is better to be involved, integrated, to have a stake in life as it is, to only occasionally peer into the abyss.
He’s a little half-phsyical manifestation of capital’s strange mythic underpinnings, becoming more present in C’s life as her money problems deepen, even heading out of the apartment here and there. Evidence of psychosis or not, he does bring a certain cold systemic je ne sais quois to the novel, as well as another thing for C to think with and through:
Is it possible to imagine something so fully that it takes on a life of its own? So many systems run only on belief. The entire economy. The gods made the world and walked away, forgot. C is fairly certain that the gnome originated from her, somehow, less sure that he is in any way dependent. Like a work of art, he has peeled away. She hardly recognizes him as part of herself, something she’s made. She marvels at the red glow atop her dresser, the forlorn face. What artisanship! The eyes, so wide, so deep, seem to cancel out the lamp. She admires the mind that made this face, terrifying though it may be.
C has an on again, off again friendship going with her childhood best friend, Zo, one of the few traders able to see the sham of the subprime mortgage market and short it accordingly; she and her ex girlfriend, Francesca, come out of the crash pretty well-off, an awkward spot to be in as Zuccotti Park fills with occupiers and the rest of the country bottoms out. C and Zo are practically sisters, growing up nearly inseparably as first generation immigrants, but a different feeling begins to grow between them in the newly precarious times – a growing attraction, though who can say what’s what between the solicitude of friends and love. There’s too much else going on for the two to ever figure it out – Zo is dating a French professor of economics, and - oh la la - a man at that, C’s never been with a woman before, and between her failing store and some health issues, consistent communication is difficult, not to mention the gnome thing, and is there really any graceful or non-terrifying way to move a deeply important friendship into something more (or less?) serious? As C thinks to herself:
She suppresses her hope, which she shouldn’t entertain, not for a friend who is the closest thing to a relative – a sister –that she still has … Really, it’s obscene. She imagines this soupçon of desire, confusing, illicit, as not so different from the pain itself: a glitch in internal machinery already assigned to other jobs, a foreign agent in her blood. How to kill it, she wonders, without doing additional harm to herself?
And so Zo and C’s relationship ebbs and flow like its own financial market, rising and falling based off of differences of information and every “inefficient transmission” of an unsent text. Unlike many other contemporary love stories – Normal People and its ilk – which rely on contrived separations between their characters and an assiduous devotion to avoiding clarifying conversations, Stevens keeps Zo and C apart or non-communicative in ways that make narrative sense, and knows when to set her characters up to see the wrong thing at the right time, or to have two people think they’re doing the right thing at exactly the wrong time. It’s an old-fashioned love story, maybe more in the vein of Tess D’Urberville than Elizabeth Bennett, rescuing the contemporary novel from the mopey and murky situationships that they’ve devolved into describing.
With business not exactly booming in the Great Bust, and prospects of a loan or line of credit dwindling, C gets drawn into the orbit of Occupy Wall Street, at first a curious onlooker and then a more active participant in just whatever is being human microphoned around down there. If that sounds too Recent Historical Fiction-y to you, well, C and the gnome are also just as entranced by the burgeoning and mysterious militant eco-hacker activist group GoodNite, who have run a number of attacks on utility systems around the country, their actions escalating from curios buried deep in the paper to front page stuff as the novel progresses. As C’s crises heighten, GoodNite heightens the country’s, leading to a radically different version of the past we just left, a systems collapse that presents an alteric vision of what the country could’ve fallen into – or risen into – in the choppy wake of capital’s excesses. “But just think: to watch the world go dark. One imagines people spilling into the streets, walking down highways, scattering into the night disappearing once and for all. Alone, they muse, What would I make of a night like that?”
This spirit of radical possibility is imbued throughout the novel, not only in plot and language2 but in structure, as the novel is itself presented as being manipulated or hacked or remixed by some outside force, juxtaposing strange fragments of technical language or switching the book’s focus with a gleeful, liberatory streak. The systems novel may have dead, but long live the systems novel, which still has the ability to upend the tired old form when it falls too far into a rut, to dispense some kind of wisdom out of the morass of information we take in daily:
What is there to teach? This is an age for the monologue, for wisdom gotten cheap, the flimsy forms of people speaking nonsense. There’s not so much in one’s control, not much to do but crouch at the loom and draw the shuttle through the preloaded pattern of the warp. WYSIWYG!3 And What You See Is All There Is. The challenge is to think in threads, never see the whole. Don’t look up. Every creation fails its original conception, especially when everyone already knows what you’re going to become; they’ve been watching, anticipating.
The Visitors is at once enmeshed in the system but also finely attuned to the threads of life, every random blip and swerve; it is an exciting work in its whip-smart inventiveness, one that seems of the future, or at least one that points towards a new future. Even if it never happens, we still get to read about it now, lucky us.
You can get The Visitors at your local bookstore, library, or online at Bookshop dot org, where all purchases support independent bookstores around the country. The paperback comes out in February if you can bear to wait.
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Stevens can share the honors with her And Other Stories compatriot Robin McLean.
not one but two instances of the very fine word carapace!
What You See Is What You Get