Participation

Starred review from September 5, 2022
Novelist, poet, and translator Moschovakis (Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love) delivers a brilliant and prescient story of an intellectual woman’s engagement with two book clubs amid climate catastrophe and political strife. As E, founder of the now-defunct group Anti-Love, theorizes about her own desires, she experiences dueling erotic impulses toward S, whose full name and gender are unknown to E, and who belongs to another group, Love, which has transitioned from IRL to virtual meetings; and a man she nicknames “the capitalist,” whom she knows through one of her jobs. The two clubs’ binary names highlight E’s ambivalence about love and partnerships; she reflects on the Love group’s choice of a text about Aristophanes’s view that each person spends their life searching for their other half. Meanwhile, news alerts of marching white supremacists and extreme weather events flash on E’s computer
screen, which she describes as a “stack of small explosions, almost registering, then, compulsively, swiped away.” Often, E breaks the fourth wall, anticipating and toying with the reader’s expectations (“I love it when you try to guess. Sometimes it’s exactly what I need”). Throughout, Moschovakis brings her fierce intelligence to bear in the structurally surprising and impeccably executed narrative. This is formal innovation at its finest. Agent: Akin Akinwumi, Willenfield Literary.

September 1, 2022
Amid environmental and economic uncertainty, two reading groups, Love and Anti-Love, merge syllabuses and members as they redefine what it means to participate--in community, in relationships, in humanity. E is a member of two reading groups--Love, which has recently begun to meet solely in virtual spaces, and Anti-Love, which variously bills itself as "resistance, revolt, revolution," and which meets at a village cafe 150 miles from the city where E lives and where Love is centered. The syllabus for Love ranges from Aristotle to Badiou, and E is behind in her reading. She attempts to catch up while on a temporary break from one of her three jobs (the mentor who is training her as a mediator has vanished midcase with no explanation), and through her interactions with the group's listserv, she finds herself increasingly fixated on fellow Love member S, whom she has never met in person. Meanwhile, the weather has become unpredictable, a part of the cycle of news reports that "[appear] at the top right of the screen, a stack of small explosions, almost registering, then, compulsively, swiped away." As E burrows into her reading and through her memories--of Pablo, the gadfly interpreter; Giorgos, a talkative Greek poet; a cherry-lipped bookstore clerk who's "an acquaintance from a time past, when drugs and love intersected in a clear and particular way," and more--the general sense of apocalypse coalesces in the form of Tropical Storm Ezekiel, much bigger and farther west than meteorologists anticipated, which wreaks havoc in the village where Anti-Love meets. As the diverse characters of E's life converge on the flooded region, the methodology of Love versus Anti-Love transcends its binary to become something at once more complex and more humanely simple. Theory-driven, opaque, and formally experimental, the book risks abstraction that can be alienating, allowing its characters to exposit their thoughts on their lives, surroundings, memories, and expectations rather than explore these ideas in-scene. However, Moschovakis' take on what it means to form community in opposition to the expectations of hierarchy, anticipated outcome, or even narrative that have been indoctrinated in readers feels timely, perhaps even prescient, in an era when the only thing that seems constant is the incontrovertible need for change. Densely intellectual, the novel forces an alert reader to reconsider what it means to participate in the very act of reading.

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