I feel privileged to witness the emergence of a type of fiction — not a genre, exactly, but an affect — that I might call, in the manner of a Spotify daylist, “queer millennial midlife multiversal crisis.” In it I would pile Isaac Fellman’s “The Two Doctors Górski,” Aimee Pokwatka’s “Self-Portrait With Nothing” and Jo Harkin’s “Tell Me an Ending” — all books that present selves and universes in a state of fracture, asking what if in a way that also demands why, though.
Universities figure powerfully in these books: As high-pressure places of self-fashioning, aspiration and competition, they promise knowledge to enlightenment seekers like the lure of an anglerfish before devouring all the potential they attract. Here are three books that make a killer triple bill touching on the nature of reality, multiversal selves and the university’s villainous power.
Sofia Samatar’s THE PRACTICE, THE HORIZON, AND THE CHAIN (Tordotcom, 127 pp., paperback, $18.99) is a far-future fable set on spaceships stratified into rigid social hierarchies, written with her usual sly and slicing grace. At the bottom, in the Hold, are laborers bound to one another by an enormous chain; in the middle, in the Ring, are people who are policed via blue anklets but can mostly forget about them; and at the top are people whose movements are completely unhampered, and whose whims shape the lives of the people beneath them.
Samatar’s protagonists have designations rather than names: the boy, the prophet, the professor. When the professor revives a scholarship program for extracting “gifted young people” from the Hold, the boy — an artist — is brought up to the Ring, to be equal parts educated by and exhibited to the faculty and other students. But what the boy and professor learn from each other changes them both, and could transform their worlds.
As both an unabashed fan of Samatar’s writing and a spiteful ex-academic, I am trash for this. Samatar’s work often interrogates pedagogy’s place in confronting or shoring up social iniquities; the question of whether teaching is a liberatory practice or an instrument for instilling orthodoxy animates her novels, short fiction and essays. “The Practice” is a small but perfectly formed addition to Samatar’s oeuvre, a thesis statement leading into her wider body of work.
RAKESFALL (Tordotcom, 304 pp., $27.99) is Vajra Chandrasekera’s second book after last year’s magnificent “The Saint of Bright Doors,” and is fully as exciting though nowhere near as straightforward. A book in 10 parts, “Rakesfall” shifts wildly in structure and narration. Sometimes an audience watches a television show that is perhaps reality or perhaps a window to something beyond it. Other times different omniscient narrators cede to a play featuring beings who reincarnate over thousands of years. Or a cybernetically enhanced near-immortal wakes from an ancient sleep to solve a murder mystery.
Uniting these threads is a kind of oscillating theme: Souls return over time, sometimes as two people, sometimes four or more, engaged with each other over the thorny question of how to endure fascism and kill kings.
The novel’s composition, too, has an element of reincarnation to it: Six of its chapters began life as short stories in various genre periodicals from 2016 to 2021. In an interview, Chandrasekera called the project’s initial phase a “patchwork,” and the finished work is very tongue-in-cheek about the need to “maintain narrative continuity and protect genre boundaries” while careening from life to life and world to world.
Writing about the different things people want from sex, Eve Sedgwick observed that some people seek “cognitive hyperstimulation” while others seek “cognitive hiatus.” This is also true of reading. “Rakesfall” is a book that never lets you forget you’re engaged in the act of reading it and will be enjoyable to the extent that one enjoys a challenge — both in the sense of difficulty, and in the sense of confrontation.
Emet North’s IN UNIVERSES (Harper, 227 pp. $26.99) is a gently devastating debut — an exploration of whether there are parts of us that are more essential to our identities than our experiences, and whether those parts can be carried over to other lives, other universes. The book opens with a gender-fluid protagonist, Raffi, who studies dark matter in an observational cosmology lab; every chapter sees Raffi flinch from some dissonance or disappointment in their life, concluding with an air of desperate or melancholy wonder about who they would be or how their life would change if a single formative moment had gone differently. And every chapter, the world changes with Raffi: Sometimes wrecked by climate disaster, sometimes by alien invasion, it nevertheless offers up small spaces of intimacy for Raffi to inhabit or abandon.
When I read “In Universes,” I paused in the middle of it for a long time — a week — because it was affecting me too deeply to continue. It invited too much introspection into my own life, my own tentative befores and afters, sliding doors and missed connections. It’s a sad smile of a book, haunting and hopeful, precise and lingering as the pressure of a finger in a delicate, vulnerable place.
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