Lately, I have been interested in reality. In other words, to experience life as it is actually happening without distractions; to view colors as distinct from hex codes. But where can I find this reality? When I look outside my bedroom window, when I look onto the street and the traffic scene below, that’s when I notice it. There is an awful lot of reality out there, in fact; it makes me nervous. But even as my brain itches to return to the confines of my phone screen, my computer screen—the consolatory effects of their frames—I force myself to stare.
The above paragraph is true. But it’s also not true. I stole it, compressed it and changed it, snatching the sentences from a short story I wrote the week before about the difference between reality and art. Increasingly, the line between the two is disappearing. Lies are printed and published in both official and non-official news sources, reported out as facts. In ordinary conversation, the word “novel” is increasingly applied as a descriptor to all books, regardless of their genre or veracity. (Even if this is by mistake, I think there’s something deeper to this.) And on the phone and computer screens with which we spend our days—the screen through which I’m now communicating this to you—we absorb a world that, flat and two-dimensional as it might be, offers us a pixelated alternative, constructed out of HTML tags and Python lines of code, that often feels truer and more meaningful than the events of the three-dimensional world we exist in every day. And in this construction of a parallel reality, a reality in which the rules of the physical realm need not strictly apply—go ahead, type your heart’s desire into an A.I. generator, and see what it comes up with—we all possess the capacity to become digital Schererazades, spinning tales of distraction so that morning will not come.
So what exactly is stopping us from turning into characters in fiction, beyond our own self-mythology? The other day, I saw Emma Bovary lingering over a department store’s perfume counter, sniffing at her wrist. But no, I didn’t, not really; it must have just been someone who looked like her. Emma Bovary isn’t real. (I had to remind myself this as I typed it out.) She never was, not exactly. Flaubert, reading a newspaper article about an aristocratic woman who took her own life, invented her whole cloth from the barest of facts, filling in and adjusting details so as best to suit his artmaking purposes. But wait—isn’t that a contradiction? Do characters walk among us? —As you read this, as I type this—how do you know that I’m telling the truth?
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A number of writers have, in recent years, grown concerned with exploring the differences between reality and fiction. For many, this has manifested itself in the form of “autofiction,” that is, a kind of fictionalized autobiography, a merging of the “I” between character and author. But the American writer Lara Mimosa Montes approaches this question in a new and varied way in The Time of the Novel, her new work of fiction published by the Brooklyn-based indie press and performance space, Wendy’s Subway. In The Time of the Novel, these anxieties concerning what constitutes the real versus the fictional are pushed to their logical extreme: a young woman quits her bookstore job in order to instead, she decides, become a narrator.
What does this mean? “To become a narrator,” our nameless protagonist explains, “was to experience an interiority I sensed had been disrupted by a series of events I did not know how to describe.” Instead of describing them, she retreats. To “become a narrator” is not exactly an action, it’s more a state of being: “It’s not that I wished to write so much as to become written.” What she’s after is an experience that is wordless, but negotiated through words: “I imagined myself in the past tense, conceived in and through language to live an unlived idea. What would I sound like if I were written?”
There is a gentle humor to how Montes has her narrator go about achieving this impossible goal. First, she quits her job, and the joke here is this: in some of our most-loved fiction, everyday actions of living—working, cooking, sleeping—are sometimes excised in favor of narrative momentum. “In solidarity with the narrators I liked most,” observes the narrator, “I was determined not to work.” Real world concerns begin to recede as she begins this process of transformation; “one of the first things I did was stop paying my phone bill,” Montes writes. (Characters, of course, do not busy themselves with such quotidian anxieties.) To exist as a work of fiction, as Montes conceives of it, is to enter into a heightened sense of awareness, akin to a bodhisattva upon reaching nirvana or a saint transcending the petty concerns of the mundane. “HELLO,” reads the out-of-office email one receives when they email our narrator: “I AM CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE. I’M CHASING A DREAM CALLED PROSE.”
In politics, there is a saying that candidates “campaign in poetry and govern in prose,” the implication being that poetry is for the lofty and extraordinary, while prose is the dependable and straightforward reality. But in The Time of the Novel, poetry and prose have collapsed: Montes’s narrator lives in a fantastical, heightened state, a dream-like mimicry of reality to which we might aspire. Literature, as the narrator thinks of it, exists as distinct from the language that we use, for example, for jobs or the news. As the narrator, she is able to manifest her own reality however she imagines it: “I did not want to write in the voice of my time,” she explains, “but a style from which I had become estranged, and it was getting harder and harder to find people who spoke that language anymore.”
People kept yelling, using imperatives, expletives, and acronyms. These proliferated without end, especially the acronyms. Everyone all but said goodbye to words. But I wanted to be of the order who spoke the language of that Other place. And it was a literary language, not a language spoken at work or on the news.
This, it seems, from Montes’s perspective, is an indictment of the current linguistic and political landscape. “Non-literary language,” as this passage implies, sounds remarkably similar to the language that has proliferated alongside the widespread adaptation of text messages, chat speak, and social media accounts. It is innately tied to the time period that produces it. But language that exists outside of the “voice of my time”—literary language—achieves the opposite effect, and slows time down. This can be a relief. But it can also create a new problem: temporality is in fact an intrinsic component of writing and making art. A book is a physical manifestation of time, and many books, too, are innately tied to the time period in which they are written. The much-praised quality of “timelessness” is a near impossible ideal to strive for, because there will often be a detail that betrays a book’s period of origin—a stray piece of slang, a reference to an obsolete piece of machinery, a political event—and yet it is also a much-lauded goal. This tension over time and timelessness is then, in fact, innate to the writing process itself. But how to avoid it? Or—better yet—how to embrace it more fully?
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To transform herself into a narrator, our heroine must gain a different understanding of time. “What,” she asks, “is the difference between the time of the novel and the time of the world?” Both are governed by language; “in English,” she observes, “it is not possible to imagine grammar without time; it’s like reading a clock without a face.” This becomes a problem, too, when the narrator attempts to flee into other languages, for example: when she speaks Spanish with a visual artist, time still follows her and still orders her words. Time is still there. But the time of the novel, she begins to realize, is fundamentally different from the time of reality; the former is past tense, and the latter, present. “I know I’m in fiction,” she says, “because when I look at the tomatoes, I see they are less firm than they were when I first purchased them. Time had passed.”
By the end of the book, the narrator realizes that she has been attempting to escape the most final end of them all: “In layering the past over the present, which was becoming past as I was writing it, I was also trying to infuse the dead with the living so as to make the past feel present forever by calling it writing.” In this new understanding of how her narrator interacts with and embraces time, Montes makes a convincing argument as to why writing and literature can be so meaningful to its readers and authors. In doing so, she also offers a subtle critique as to why autofiction can sometimes feel unsatisfying, even as it succeeds in capturing a specific place and moment in time. Writing is a form of cheating death, in a way: “I was belatedly inserting narrative with the hope that doing so in this way would make the past feel perpetual, alive, so alive it had never been.”
The narrator looks out her window, as I often do. Throughout the book, she has been looking out her window, and watching rabbits at play. But this time, she realizes something different: that that, out there, is where the narrative really is—real life. It is a moment of startling revelation. “I could also no longer pretend,” she realizes, “as if whatever it was I had to say might be more important than the sounds of the birds at dusk.” With that, the book ends. And the real work begins.
Rhian Sasseen
Rhian Sasseen lives in New York. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The Nation, and more.