ATTENTION-SEEKING BEHAVIOR, by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo
“All I wanted was control,” says the unnamed narrator of Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s “Attention-Seeking Behavior,” a young woman living in contemporary London. She is an aspiring writer on leave from a graduate program in poetry, working two jobs where servility is the order of the day: one for a P.R. firm run by a posh woman she despises, the other as a gofer for an American journalist whose work she admires.
She maintains a prolific dating life free of commitment or deep connection. Besides the sex, she says, “my favorite thing about the dating was the sense of solitude it gave me. … I liked to think about how I was the only person who knew everything there was to know about me.”
One thing her casual encounters do not know about her is that she’s an unrepentant pathological liar. She’s also plagued by visions of violence: corpses in canals, rooftop jumpers, a murder on the street. Her last serious relationship ended in a trauma she is either unwilling or unable to describe. Avoiding commitment isn’t just about free-spiritedness; it saves her the trouble of keeping her stories straight. When an unassuming charmer she calls Normal Ben tempts her into something like going steady, his earnest interest in getting to know her registers as a psychic threat.
Such threats multiply in the second half of the novel, when the journalist tasks the narrator with digitizing a trove of police depositions from a sexual assault case. The narrator shares the details with us, albeit with the crucial caveat that, for the sake of anonymity, she has changed not only names but all the facts of the case. “The specifics are the only things I will ever lie to you about,” she says. The assurance raises more concerns than it mitigates.
But we are not lawyers or reporters. We are readers of a novel, and the corruption of verifiable reality in pursuit of higher-order truth is more or less what novel writing is. But does the narrator of this novel know she’s narrating a novel? Certainly, she makes regular address to the “you” of a presumptive readership. But are “you” a secret-sharer within the world of the story (a therapist, say, or diaristic conceit) or are “you” the actual reader of the novel in the actual world?
Could the fake details of the assault case be the true story of the narrator’s own trauma, smuggled in under the false flag of fiction? Does that subterfuge extend to the book entire? The issue figures less on a reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief (mine is ample) than on whether there’s any stable narrative ground where belief can be established, and what it is we’re being asked to believe.
Throughout the novel are discursive interludes that explore the history of lying. A less generous critic might call these infodumps, but I’m inclined to take them in the spirit in which the narrator offers them, as displaced autobiography. She is not seeking a diagnosis or cure for her behavior, but rather an intellectual framework in which to inscribe it. So we learn about Darwin’s “Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” the theory of a universal facial language, the development of the polygraph, differences between British and American police interrogation policy, and more. We even get a meditation on the “lyric I” in poetry.
“Attention-Seeking Behavior” is, in some ways, in the cerebral tradition of novels such as Teju Cole’s “Open City” and Ben Lerner’s “Leaving the Atocha Station.” But where those novels simmer, this one boils over with bitter humor, bad sex, class rage, wild rhetorical swerves and metafictional psych-outs, all of which demonstrate Varfis-van Warmelo’s exquisite control over the chaotic proceedings, and make good on the ambivalent promise of her title. This is a powerful, provocative debut novel by a writer who commands, and deserves, your full attention.
ATTENTION-SEEKING BEHAVIOR | By Aea Varfis-van Warmelo | Graywolf | 185 pp. | Paperback, $17
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