The Oldest Bitch Alive, Morgan Day’s debut novel, is a story of contents and containers: the two worms inhabiting the gut of an old French bulldog named Gelsomina, who lives in a glass house with a couple of architects, somewhere in rural upstate New York. The novel nests life (and death) within life (and death).
As a foreword, a matricial symbol, a yonic image, an open vulva—({i})—around which the narrative revolves. Saturating the novel, the quasi-algebraic formula courses through the pages much as it has traveled through human history. It conjures a constellation in the mind, a kind of “musée imaginaire” or, rather, a panel from the Mnemosyne Atlas. Iterations of ({i}) drift into one another, anachronistically superimposed. Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World stands beside the almond-shaped halos that envelop Mary in medieval Nativities and the abstract genitalia of Mesopotamian fertility goddesses. The book opens like a matryoshka: a doll bearing a second, which bears another still. Or, the imbricated ruse of Koshchei, who, by the force of a magic spell, kept death at a distance—sealed in a needle, in an egg, in a duck, in a hare, locked in a chest, buried on the mythical island of Buyan.
“({i}) is the standard representation of life. The figure is made of three parts:
i—the self
{}—cosmic matter
()—the physical form”
The book lays out its program without veils. It is about laying bare the universe’s secrets: the continuum of life, its beginnings, its endings, its reproductions, its persistences, its meanings, and its essences—the entwinement between consciousness (the Ego and its subterranean workings), things (beings and objects) and physical substance (the elementary particles and their choreographed assemblage).
Moving from first-person voices—Gelsomina and the worms—to third-person narration, weaving scientific studies on cognitive ethology with Albert Camus’s Sisyphean reflections, Day returns to metaphysics’s good ol’ questions. From within the Anthropocene, she strives to think anew about the nature of existence and the divide between particulars and universals (what contains what, what accounts for the distinction between container and content), meditating on forms of symbiosis between beings and their environments, both natural and built, and probing the line Western thought has long drawn between the human and the animal.
.
At the heart of this interlocking daedalian lies Gelsomina’s story: one of revolt against the containment imposed upon her by domestication, against the way breeding—mankind’s intervention into nature’s designs—forced her into a form ( () ) her Self was never meant to have, condemning her to a life both painful and meaningless. With her recessed nose, praised by dog-show juries even as it leaves her struggling for breath, and her sturdy legs, whose calcified joints burden her with agonizing stiffness, Gelsomina gazes from behind the glass walls of the house out toward the open spaces she will never roam and the wild animals she will never chase.
“Over time, Gelsomina quietly accepted her dim life in the glass house […] She was destined to relive the same day. With her head on her paws, she then faces the blue sky above the glassy lake, longing for something.”
Her anguish teeters between the presentism of Groundhog Day and the romantic reverie of Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Yet trapped within this house resembling a terrarium, she experiences neither the thrill of consequence-free action nor the vertigo of the abyss. The sublimity that repetition and melancholic contemplation might have yielded dissolves into a glass-filtered dullness.
By granting Gelsomina the interiority of the modern human subject tormented by monotony, the novel collapses the Cartesian partition between Homo sapiens’ Cogito and animal mechanism. Day reserves the first-person perspective for the dog and the worms, and the third-person for Wendy and John. In this reversal, The Oldest Bitch Alive revisits the Aesopian fable and extends the anti-anthropocentric literary tradition born of the Darwinian epistemic wound—from Colette’s La chienne trop petite to Rudyard Kipling’s The Cat That Walked by Himself, from André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs to Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog and Perumal Murugan’s The Story of a Goat. Where those writers endow their animals with singular temperaments, Day flattens distinctions between voices: the worms, Gelsomina, and even the third-person narration blur together within the same abstract register, a tedious chain of lapidary, solemn sentences. Gelsomina observes: “A more viral hunger. Flipping over. There it is, shimmering cover of the water body once again. Moving toward it wanton.” One of the worms ponders: “There is no peace because there is no light. Forward and backward have no meaning. Vibrations are muted.” Though it might precisely be the point—to gesture toward a collective consciousness uniting all living beings—the uniformity of the style makes the book slip from the reader’s hands.
Gelsomina’s awareness grows ever more acute after ingesting the orb from which the two worms hatch. Carrying within herself, like embryos, those creatures of decay that return the dead to the earth, the aging dog sways like a drunken ship caught in existential undertows: “Could I ever return to how I once was? Before I became a container for miniatures? I thought I was a small being. Surrounding objects with their unreachable heights.” She comes to recognize herself as more than another object in the collection amassed by the couple, something that doesn’t belong to the feng shui of their interior: “I have dealt with them, the objects. I narrowly exist in a space with sixteen large ones. From the man and woman, I have learned their names: couch, coffee table, dining table […] The altogether glass structure we reside within looms larger than we.”
Yet, no! She will not be taken to the vet to be put down, even as her body fails her and she loses control of her bladder. She is a sentient being, not some disposable object, a sofa too worn for use, an appliance fallen into disrepair. And there, in the heart of the maelstrom, submerged in her swirling thoughts on finitude, discovering within memento mori a vital impulse, Gelsomina escapes the glass house and disappears into the wilderness. By becoming an environment herself—a vessel for the worms—she comes to understand that becoming fully oneself depends upon a fragile harmony between individuality and an empathetic mode of being-in-the-world, one that approaches otherness through care.
And it is precisely in Gelsomina’s flight from the glass house that the book reaches its culmination, outlining an ethics of ecological interdependence that interrogates, through sustainability, the consumerist premises of homemaking.
Such a critique, however, carries an ambivalence. Much like Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, its indictment of creative-class domesticity—its fetishism for “design” and mid-century modern furniture—slips into a form of narcissistic self-flagellation. If it offers a lucid recognition of the superficiality and ultimate meaninglessness of these desires, in which “pretty,” “authentic” objects function chiefly as signifiers of economic and cultural capital, it also perversely indulges in the virtuous fetishization of that very fetishism. This contradiction extends beyond aesthetics and into the social horizon of the novel itself. One cannot help but notice the insularity of the world it depicts: Why should this existential malaise afflict solely the purebred dog of an aesthete bourgeois household, and not equally the working-class dogs employed by the neighboring farms?
.
Against the totalizing logic of globalized capitalism, The Oldest Bitch Alive attempts to imagine other kinds of bonds between humans, animals, vegetals, and minerals—an alternative network of relations no longer governed by economic value and its endless circulation. The ambition is to restore transcendent forms of interconnection between beings and things, prying them loose from a regime of objectification that abstracts everything earthly into commodities.
This is a commendable intention. In some respects, it is well executed. Morgan Day, architecture critic by profession, depicts with subtlety—if at times in the didactic tone of an introductory seminar—how the glass house redraws the line between interior and exterior, interior and exterior, making palpable how human beings, for all the walls they build around themselves, remain embedded within and dependent on the ecosystems that surround them:
“The 1,500-square-foot historic Farnsworth House is a glass rectangle with all the living on display. It was designed as a weekend retreat and remembered as one of the most important works of the Modernist movement. The Glass House by Johnson is similar […] Both were realized as spaces for viewing the surrounding landscape. Neither has interior walls, though there are rooms. Philip Johnson said The Glass House is the only place where, while seated in a swivel chair, you can watch the sun set and the moon rise at the same time.”
In Experience and Poverty, Walter Benjamin imagined glass architecture as a step toward the abolition of the bourgeois way of life sustained by private property. But these revolutionary virtues have long since been reabsorbed by late-stage capitalism. The vitreous corporate towers and luxury condominiums proliferating across the financial districts of megalopolises emerge as the inverse of Benjamin’s utopian vision: transparent structures as frictionless spaces through which capital, information, commodities, and labor flow with ever greater speed. Still, Day’s portrayal of the glass house leaves the ideological ambiguity of transparency in the shadows.
Though the novel seeks ontologies other than the naturalist one of modernity—which, in contrast to animism, totemism, and analogism, allocates humans a monopoly on interiority while consigning the nonhuman world to mute materiality—Morgan Day ultimately forges a cosmology that reproduces the cultural logic of globalized capitalism. Borrowing concepts from Hinduism and Buddhism—the self as a contingent aggregation of processes that arise relationally with the world (anatta), the inseparability of the self (Atman) and the cosmic totality (Brahman), the samsaric cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—she assembles a syncretic patchwork whose elements are lifted from their historical contexts, blended, and regurgitated into a New Age spirituality.
Not without a measure of grandiloquence, the novel endeavors to recover the idea of the Sacred, lost to Western societies under the imperatives of rationality, casting this recovery as a broadly Hegelian project: the sensuous self-recognition of Spirit in the world, the residual sacred function art bears after religion withdraws from collective life. Preoccupied with the commodification of art, following the path laid out in Lectures on Aesthetics, Day shows how the two architects turn to aesthetic contemplation in search of higher meaning, only to realize that works of art have become assets, mere vehicles of investment and speculation:
“Wendy finds religion in the possibility for a person to meet an artist through the essence of the objects they make. For John, spirituality surfaces while engaging with 15 untitled pieces by Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas […] The couple’s analysis ends with the point that the pastor is essentially a performance artist, that both churches and museums take money, and that they are consumers of art.”
If these observations are not untrue, they retain a compelling naivety. The form proves more ambitious than its content. When the text turns explicitly theoretical—outside of its strongest architectural passages—it sits awkwardly against its own poetics, the language running ahead of its meaning. Though she writes in a Hegelian key—“the essence of objects”—Day often reads as someone newly awakened to the realities of the art market, discovering with disarming surprise that art, too, circulates as capital, and that its aesthetic value bears little relation to this circulation.
In many ways, because of its posture of sophistication, in its eagerness to encompass too much while often knowing too little about the specificities and nuances of religious and philosophical traditions, the novel’s redemptive motifs—the contents and the containers, the very ones meant to open access to a renewed Sacred—collapse into Western mystica and white-lady spiritualism. In the end, the book ironically proposes nothing other than “world culture” as an alternative to the global: the world is one, We Are the World, every soul contains multitudes, a worm is the universe, the universe is a worm, and a litany of other mantras one might just as easily find in a wellness instructor’s personal-development manual. In this sense, the novel is emblematic of a broader Western predicament, marked by the decline of religion and the erosion of supramundane horizons of meaning—what Martin Hägglund has described as the search for value and purpose in a fully secularized world.
The Oldest Bitch Alive may ease readers of some existential dread, but no more than a hot yoga class.
Joséphine Haillot
Joséphine Haillot is a writer and academic based in Brooklyn, New York.