Actually Pretty Good: Present Tense Machine
Gunnhild Øyehaug's novel blends a high concept sci-fi hook with a decidedly grounded family story
Most contemporary fiction is awful. Actually Pretty Good highlights new books that are, like the title says, Actually Pretty Good!
“Behold, I tell you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed,
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye…” I Corinthians 15:51-52
When was the last time you bought a book based on the blurbs? A lifetime of looking at blurbs on book jackets has left me extremely suspicious of them - how many combinations of ‘heartbreaking,’ ‘staggering,’ ‘haunting,’ ‘shimmering’ and ‘beautiful’ can you see before the whole enterprise seems fishy? Dig in enough and you can see they’re mostly favors from friends, insincere quid pro quos for someone’s upcoming book, the backroom work of a PR person at the publishing house, or the most positive line from an otherwise tepid critic’s review.
Sometimes, however, the hook gets ya. While shelving some new releases, I looked at the back of Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Present Tense Machine, and saw blurbs from Mary South and Catherine Lacey, two writers who may very well get their own Actually Pretty Good entries pretty soon. (South’s You Will Never Be Forgotten: Stories and Lacey’s Pew are great, if you’re interested). The blurbs themselves are fine, but it was more the names that got me: it was something like walking into a party and seeing the right people there. Now, I might be one of the ten people in the world who’s buying a Norwegian author’s book because of a South / Lacey blurb combo, but there I was.
Present Tense Machine follows a mother and daughter, Laura and Anna, who get separated into parallel universes without knowing it. The only thing they retain from their previous life together is a sort of indescribable longing for one another - a feeling that they are missing something, but they can’t say exactly what. They don’t remember any of their previous life – at least not concretely – but still retain some part of it beyond memory, a bodily sensation of something lost. Joy Williams (the patron saint of our newsletter, our shining star) once talked about this feeling in her Paris Review interview:
“There's a word in German, Sehnsucht. No English equivalent, which is often the case. It means the longing for something that cannot be expressed, or inconsolable longing. There's a word in Welsh, hwyl, for which we also have no match. Again, it is longing, a longing of the spirit. I just think many of my figures seek something that cannot be found.”
Anna and Laura go through their day-to-day lives wracked by this feeling; an incompleteness at the center of their being. The memory of the parallel universe acts as a quite literal way to signify the universal desire for more, the universal feeling that something’s missing, something important, if you could only remember…
There’s something to be said for the mundanity of the plot. If I say ‘parallel universe,’ visions of spaceships and Marvel superhero plot contrivances might fill your head, but Present Tense Machine is extremely grounded: one moment there’s one world, and a second later there are two, changed in only minor ways. Laura and Anna live very ordinary lives outside of their shared nonpast; Anna raises her two post-universe-break children, and Laura prepares to have her own child and move into a new place with her boyfriend. The stakes are pretty low, besides the whole ‘your world could completely change in a second without you ever knowing’ deal. This approach serves the novel well; though Øyehaug does explain how the parallel universes form, the book doesn’t get bogged down in technical details or elaborate scientific machinations, and instead just explores what it might mean to actually live in a world with forking paths of existence. Thomas Pynchon (maybe the other patron saint of this newsletter) has apocryphally always wanted to write a book about the insurance adjustor who comes in after Godzilla destroys a city - the figure who must do his extremely boring job in the most extreme scenario, the one who must work in the aftermath of the fantastic climactic scene. (This scenario briefly appears in Vineland). It’s in this (non)tradition that Present Tense Machine works in – the speculative fiction of the mundane. The world can change in the blink of an eye, but we’ll keep living in it, without any promised reconciliation or reunification of the timelines. That’s unlike the dominant strain of the parallel universe narrative, as smartly noted by Tony Tulathimutte:
Laura and Anna aren’t special individuals, or at least any more special than you and I, just two people with a deep-rooted, inexplicable feeling of loneliness with a quite tangible reason for it - if they only knew.
For fear of a thousand pedants jumping down my throat, the novel is not quite a novel of ideas, but is definitely an ideas novel, with layers of meta twistiness. Anna is a pseudonymous Ferrante-like novelist working on a novel (that could be the very novel you’re reading) with a sort of Wittgenstein’s Mistress view of language: that its iterative and creative power would continue even after the end of civilization. Both Anna and Laura come up against the idea that words and language have the ability to create other worlds; the novel as a form becomes, to borrow from a favorite Reverend Howard Finster painting, another world with real life. The event that triggers the parallel universe ‘break’ is the misreading of a word, the brief moment when a word exists as something else, something new, and quite literally creates a different world. Small misreadings like this continue in the text, suggesting ever more parallel universes with nigh-imperceptible changes, making for a continually unstable, continually expanding text. There are various plot threads that pop up in both universes, spooling out to different ends, and this is where the book has the most fun with its own device – what does it mean to ‘tie up’ a plot when something completely different could be happening on the other side? What’s a character, really, if their entire circumstance changes?
The figurative becomes literal as Laura and Anna approach the same scenes in their own separate universes, glimpse the same small moments, come as close as they can to each other and their previous lives as they can. Laura even returns to the house she unknowingly grew up in, giving a bottomless weight to deja vu, not just already seen but already lived. These crossings – these asymptotic approaches that Anna and Laura unknowingly make – are what give this ideas novel its animating heart. The novel, stripped of all its meta maneuverings, is a story about a mother and daughter with an otherworldly connection, an invisible strand between them that keeps them from ever getting too far away, even if they’re literal worlds apart. They’re soulmates, making the novel into a high concept Nora Ephron flick – no matter how long these two are apart, or no matter how much space separates them, they will find eachother, or at least eachother’s echoes, and will end up ‘together.’
Early in the novel, Laura and her boyfriend talk about the proliferation of alternate universe media – Interstellar, Dr. Strange, Arrival, Everything Everywhere All at Once, etc – and Laura “thinks [their ubiquity] means that we’re living in a time of transition, that we’re living in a paradigm shift, and perhaps not for the better, but hopefully… a new world will be born from the old.” If Present Tense Machine is read as a kind of soulmate story, we might think about this plot's current ubiquity as well - I’m thinking mostly of the ecstatic ending to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, though others are out there. The soulmate plot – as high or low as it gets – is a reassurance, a promise that someone will be there even in that born anew world. In the many dislocations of our current world – habitable planet on brink of destruction, an ascendant worldwide right wing, continual worldwide pandemic, the daily cosmic weirdness of just existing – the most comforting thing is to have someone with you, or to imagine that they’re out there, in that West Side Story ‘Somethin’s Comin’ way, just around the corner. You could bump into them anytime, if fate has its way. The characters in Licorice Pizza run, and run, and run towards each other, and Present Tense Machine’s Laura and Anna sit in the same seats and play the same songs on the piano and keep on longing for eachother without even really knowing eachother. In the new world born from Covid, or from Trump, or from the CERN particle smasher doing its thing in 2016, there is at least, always, you and them. Did I mention I’m getting married soon?
You can buy Present Tense Machine from your local bookstore, check it out from your local library, or order it from Bookshop.org, where every purchase supports local booksellers across the country. (And possibly me as well if they ever approve me as an affiliate.)
Meta twistiness! Well played indeed👏🙌