THEY ALL FALL IN LOVE AT THE END, by Haili Blassingame
What freedom does a woman have? What freedom does a Black woman have? What choices does a woman, a Black woman, really have in a world that slices at her skin and soul every day? What option does she have but to conform in order to survive? What does survival look like, and is it worth it, when the world can’t hold all the valiant, messy feeling inside her? These are the questions explored in Haili Blassingame’s provocative debut, “They All Fall in Love at the End.”
At the center of the novel is a 24-year-old Black woman named Cat St. Clair. It’s 2024 and Cat is living in Washington, D.C., with the genocide in Gaza and the threat of another Trump presidency buzzing in the background. Through all of this, Cat is working slowly and torturously toward her M.F.A. in creative writing. She’s also navigating the polyamory she begged her longtime boyfriend, Jay, to tolerate.
Exploring other people is something that she needs. “This feeling of endless paths electrified me. It was this charge I was courting, its power to crack open the world.” But Cat knows her desire is viewed as treacherous. “I understood the imperative of caging this animal want,” she thinks. “Who was to say what would happen if it got loose, loping crooked-legged, yellow-eyed through the world, sizing people up then eating them whole?”
Blassingame introduces us to Cat and her world in short, zippy chapters. Jay lives across the country, and Cat develops an illicit attraction to both Jay’s best friend, Tristan, a supposed staunch monogamist, and Tristan’s girlfriend, Nia, an alluring painter determined to capture Cat on canvas. But as each comes to learn, Cat is not so easily defined. She doesn’t see herself in visions of marriage and kids, nor in the many discussions about poly relationships that tend to focus on white people.
Blassingame mixes spare, aseptic language with ambrosial observation (“His voice was like something being scraped from a can”). This proves fitting, as much of Cat’s story is about reconciling what she’s feeling with the harsh, inconstant world she’s feeling it in. Cat knows exactly what she wants, but she’s painfully aware that society is not designed to give it to her. “We were a vision of ideological incompatibility,” she thinks during a conversation with Tristan. The same could be said of Cat and her parents, Cat and her boyfriend, Cat and her best friend, Cat and her country.
Cat’s desires are the centerpiece of the novel. Cat wants love, badly, but she also wants choice. “Women before me did not wrest this strip of freedom for me to tie my wrists with it, to play prisoner, play girlfriend, play doll with some man centuries later.” She doesn’t want to lose Jay, no matter how uncomfortable he is with the couple’s poly arrangement. And she does want Tristan, despite how treasonous such a choice would make her. How far can Cat go without pushing the reader away? Plenty of white antiheroines have done worse.
What makes the novel so refreshing is Blassingame’s seeming lack of interest in explaining away Cat’s behavior. We see her parents’ marital issues, her economic instability, the encroaching dread of the 2024 news cycle. None of these is Cat’s motivation. She just wants what she wants. She is who she is.
In some of the novel’s most poignant chapters, Cat trades cutely inquisitive emails with a Palestinian man, Anwar, living in the West Bank. They communicate across a language barrier, sharing music recommendations and commiserating over the violent politics shaping their days. They both grapple with contradiction — how it feels to go about their lives as children’s limbs are blown off and student protesters are taken into ICE custody. It’s an impasse the novel analyzes through Tristan, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy. “Agency isn’t an individual issue, like, your decisions are made inside a system,” he argues.
Throughout the novel, Cat faces an impossible question: Should she contort herself into something familiar to others — her parents, her lovers, her teachers, her friends — if it would help her better navigate the professional and social systems around her? Or should she stand firm in who she is, even if it brings distress? Cat is chronically misunderstood. She’s desperate, in her writing and her life, to grasp some way to communicate the essence of who she is and what she sees. At the same time, she doesn’t want to be neatly summed up or contained. “In art, in life, love, I was chasing something that spilled out in your hands.”
Ultimately, what Cat wishes, more than anything, is to not lose touch with the groping, wanting, unruly animal that is herself. In Blassingame’s hands, this pursuit is probing and unpredictable. Her novel is a mournful love song for anyone afraid of being lost in translation.
THEY ALL FALL IN LOVE AT THE END | By Haili Blassingame | Scribner | 372 pp. | $29
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