A Light Artist
Jessica Au | Cold Enough for Snow | New Directions | 2022 | 97 Pages
The ambulatory novel—positioned as it is between the flaneurial and the loco-descriptive—is generally a solitary affair. Its narrator moves through space, registering whatever impressions her surroundings make on her. And while other characters might crop up in recollections, the central dialogue will tend to be between the narrator and space itself—which is also to say, between the narrator and herself.
If Jessica Au’s second novel, Cold Enough for Snow, feels like a strange read, it’s because it so clearly wants to be a novel with a solitary narrator, stravaging through space and squeezing experiential blood from the stone of an unfamiliar place. But even as the book goes to painful lengths to establish an atmosphere of dreamy isolation, it makes sure its narrator is never entirely alone. It’s just this curious formal choice that accounts for both the book’s peculiar power and its most serious flaws.
The narrator of Au’s novel is accompanied by her mother, with whom she’s traveled to Tokyo for a brief vacation. Over the course of the novel, the impetus behind the trip is gradually, but never completely, clarified. As far as justification goes, the narrator notes only that “I was beginning to feel that it was important, for reasons I could not yet name.”
Beyond this fundamental narrative premise, the entirety of Au’s novel is shrouded in a sense of ambiguity—desires and motivations are converted into something fine and tenuous, like lace. As far as actual information goes, we learn that the narrator had studied literature in college; that she has a sister; that she and her partner, Laurie, are considering children; that her mother was born and spent her youth in Hong Kong but raised her children in another country.
We eventually sense the narrator has brought her mother to Japan because she’s been beset by a Forsterian craving for personal connection, a desire to achieve some deserved intimacy with the woman who brought her into the world and yet who ever after has remained, naturally, separate. There’s no great wound here, simply the odd nagging itch that comes with the realization that our parents are imbued with the same self-reflexive foreignness as ourselves.
As other reviewers have pointed out, it’s an unusual set-up for a novel, the narrative equivalent of plastering foam bumpers over every sharp surface in the famously well-faceted house of fiction—every movement is dampened and made safe, eliciting only the gentlest of reproofs.
In some ways, this setup is suitable, given that the novel is working within an even more specific subgenre than travel literature—namely, tourist literature. And just as in the ideal touristic experience minor cultural shocks are permitted while real disturbances are safely done away with, there’s little devastation to be found in Cold Enough for Snow. Au’s scenes emit a faint reek of manufactured anticlimax, as though the writing were going out of its way to construct a safety net for itself.
And yet, at times, the novel is capable of a delicacy, a preternatural sensitivity that seems well-worth its self-imposed deprivations. You’d be hard-put to devise a style—outside of the theater or the purely dialogic—better suited to allow the brittler moments of life to go unexamined. When Au’s characters speak, their spiderwebbed intentions hang before them, unprobed and shimmering. The narrator’s conversations with her sister are a perfect example of this tendency. When we learn the sister has visited Hong Kong twice in her life, having met her husband on the second trip, her admission of unanalyzed duplicity is oddly touching:
For some reason, in an early conversation, she had let him believe that this too was her first time in Hong Kong. And indeed it was easier, and she had to admit better, to play the tourist, to enjoy the city in this way. She did not mention her family, somewhere—she still did not know exactly where—in the city, and by the time the conference was ending, she told herself that it was now too late.
Au’s penchant for evocative evasion is crystalized in the almost careless for some reason, as well as in that final, self-sealing she told herself. These phrases render the passage heartbreaking in a very peculiar way—we almost seem to be in Ishiguro’s realm of decorous repression.
What’s strange about the sister’s story isn’t the story itself but how quickly the text moves on from it. It’s hard not to suspect that, in reality, the narrator would have pushed for more details, probed at her sister’s hedgings—that she wouldn’t, in other words, have received these half-formed confessions in a state of rapt, mum’s-the-word nonchalance. For a narrator who’s elsewhere obsessed with communication, the avoidance of analysis here, where it seems so personally relevant, feels artificial.
Perhaps more than plot, theme, symbol, and character, an idea of style feels central to what the novel is trying to achieve. Au’s prose is generally elegant, evincing in its vaguely fusty armature and coolly measured pace the writing of early Ishiguro, pretty much all of Sebald, and Cusk’s Outline Trilogy. But this is the Sebaldian mode stripped of its backward-looking tendencies, its obsessive palpating of the remnants of world-historical devastations. Instead, it reads like Sebald on Xanax. Take the following descriptive passage:
The city was grey and concrete, dull in the rain and not entirely unfamiliar. I recognized the form of everything — buildings, overpasses, train crossings — but in their details, their materials, they were all slightly different, and it was these small but significant changes that continued to absorb me.
At every point in the passage where we might expect to find a pressurized observation or a crisp phrase, Au delivers a dampening vagary: “not entirely unfamiliar,” “slightly different,” “details” and “materials.” Au’s prose is preternaturally muted, leached of even the barest note of significance.
Cold Enough for Snow is hellbent on driving home a sense of gauziness. Like it’s spiritual counterpart, the external world is, to Au’s narrator, an ontologically lacy thing, where rain is always “fine”, and light is always “milky”, and an all-pervading lenity scumbles the rougher surfaces of reality. On nearly every page, something is described as “transparent” or “soft” or “gentle”:
When we left the hotel it was raining, a light, fine rain, as can sometimes happen in Tokyo in October.
The rain was gentle, and consistent. It left a fine layer of water on the ground…
Through the windows came a soft, milky light, like that through a paper screen.
[T]here were a few shops still open, their light glowing like the light from a small house in a valley, seen from a distance.
A milky light had been placed on the countertop, its glow giving the impression of a large candle.
I recognized the pattern immediately, only there was a clear difference with these vases: the shapes were somehow finer, with smooth shoulders and elegant lines, the white milkier, and the blue lighter and faded, as if applied with a brush.
Some of the ceiling was glass and a cold, white light streamed down.
What, really, is the referent of all this lightness? It feels almost impossible to say. Its effects, however, are far clearer. The book’s prose is awkwardly egalitarian, granting everything it touches an equal weight. At times the text’s propensity for allowing pretty much everything the narrator encounters to elicit some sensation or fragment of memory can feel almost parodic. Whether the association is personal, aesthetic, or generally experiential, the writing’s tenor remains essentially the same.
This incredibly heightened, tender state of associativeness is a problem that the text seems vaguely aware of. At one point, the narrator reflects on her youthful bouts of signifying mania: “Much later, I realized how insufferable this was: the need to make every moment pointed, to read meaning into everything.” Naturally, when everything means the world, nothing does. And of course, if a character did happen to exhibit strong motivations or precise thoughts or any act of will denser than a velleity, then the steady faucet-leak of rumination might be interrupted.
Even when the novel achieves something evocative or touching, Au’s commitment to the spectral drift of her prose often allows something deeper, something real, to pass by. The novel is constantly throwing up bits and pieces that seem to frustrate its own design, teasing revelation only to pull back at the very last moment. And then, at other times, the writing leans into moments that simply can’t bear the weight of sustained attention, and the novel descends into a hazy swirl of symbols and signs. At these times, the novel seems to suffer the tyranny of its own style.
Still, there are stunning moments in Cold Enough for Snow when Au pulls back, allowing simple description to take over. For a text so interested in museums and the aesthetic ideologies underlying the act of exhibition, it’s no surprise that some of the best writing in the book occurs when the narrator finds herself in curated space.
In one museum, the narrator and her mother are ushered into a small room, so dark that nothing is visible. Suddenly, a “small square of orange light” appears in the distance, slowly growing larger. When the attendants explain that the visitors can now approach the light, the narrator creeps forward. “Getting closer,” she explains, “I saw that the light came not from a screen, as I had thought, but from a square-shaped hollow perfectly cut into the wall, another thing I had failed to notice.”
Everything in this passage seems to fall into place. A museum, of course, is a fitting setting for dramatizing a failure of attention, and for once the novel’s lightness seems to hint at something deeper, something buried and complex—the looping subtleties of the narrator’s self-involvement are arrived at obliquely. That an exhibit of light art is the subject here feels deeply relevant. Au’s novel, after all, is structurally something like a net, meant to snare the slightest phenomena without harming them in the process. But even more than this, the book sets out to capture that precise moment of observation when the object observed begins itself to change, to react to our attention, bending, fading, and slipping away, like light, or something finer still.