That Girl: On Kathleen Alcott’s “Emergency”
Kathleen Alcott | Emergency | Norton | July 2023 | 131 Pages
At the heart of every short story in Kathleen Alcott’s new collection is a woman and her mind. All seven are plainly feminine. Sometimes they are “I” and sometimes they are “she,” and, in “Emergency,” the first, best, and titular story, there’s the strange and brilliant use of “we” to talk about one woman who stands apart from “us.” A divorcée’s downfall is the main event, but a few clever lines give the impression of a friend group who bears witness: rich women who met at Dalton, traveled between Ivies on weekends, moved to the city with boyfriends (who became husbands with “fat backs”), carpooled children to Montessori. One member slipped in along the way, accepted because she was beautiful and she thought to do things like thread rosemary through the lemon slices in her water pitcher. She was the Jessa to their Hannahs, Shoshs, and Marnies. Her wildness provided for the group when coffee dates dragged. The summer she turns thirty, what was scary sexy cool has gone rotten, and she crescendos with a shameful act that could be poor judgment if it didn’t read as self sabotage. The chorus of “we” was jealous of her before, but now they’re grateful that they’re not her and never were.
I’m taking liberties, psychoanalyzing. The chorus is not who the story is about, but they give such gravity to it. It’s way more tragic with them as witness. Not only did this woman fail but she failed in front of these women—who seem infallible because their wealth protects them. In addition to a “strong female character,” Alcott’s stories, as a rule, include class shame and wealth preoccupation. Her protagonists are working-class strivers who have assimilated into the middle class without ever shaking the fear that they don’t deserve, trust, or need what they want. The result is a tight and beautifully written compilation that essentially offers variations on the same type of woman in different moments of decision, the outcomes of which are dependent on her particular positioning in the world.
This is how I picture the chorus: they wear wide-legged Rachel Comey to walk Bernese Mountain Dogs in Park Slope. (Alcott, a California native, lived in that neighborhood, in a brownstone owned by her boyfriend; I know, per social media posts, or lack thereof, that they’re not together anymore.) I am always looking for creases in those pants when I watch them carry co-op groceries up their steps. I don’t mean that the written women are real, just that they could be. The best stories are about people who we don’t really know but think we could. Had we gone to that party we missed; had we been born without that mole.
In “Reputation Management,” the remote worker with an ethical dilemma—she revamps the online image of people who’ve been “canceled”—could be any girl at the bodega at dusk, her first venture that day. Alcott’s prose is generous and accurate to human interiority; I imagine her taking secret notes on the Park Slope mothers, too. The people she writes are types, meaning who they are determines what they do instead of the other way around. That they are immediately identifiable is valuable to the short format because the stories can be character-driven without laborious definition or biography. She describes so much with so little, sealing fates with one-line descriptions that tell all.
There’s “a girl with a rough kind of potential,” who was “once a girl with an exquisite collection of impractical dresses . . . and a social smoking habit, a violent way with doors and windows.” In an elderly couple there’s “the one to know what they could afford.” A girl whose father “had become one of those people who lurked around ancestry.com,” and, separately, “a daughter who’d been spanked to welts for swearing against Jesus too often.” The potency of an Alcott story rests on the reader knowing people who fit the mold, or themselves being it. I am the girl with an exquisite collection of impractical dresses and, it happens, a social smoking habit.
I could also be one of the “women who followed their real wishes easily.” It’s not so different from falling in love with a vintage slip you shouldn’t buy, but could, but won’t, but do. This is self-conscious desire fulfillment, and it plagues women in particular: the inability to act on whatever it is that you want without second thought or crippling guilt or worse. The worst is doing nothing, which becomes a vanishing of the self. When Alcott writes about it, in “Worship,” she defines it against a man:
In that room there was already the scent of him, neroli and loamy rolling tobacco, the sweat coming off his running shorts somewhere nearby, and though she doubted the room smelled of her, too, she knew this was part of being alive. Your sense of yourself was never quite accurate. You relied on others to mention who you were at the end, at the bottom, in the dark.
A Nietzschean reading would find the impossibility of an objective sense of oneself, and this anxious “reliance” on others’ confirmation, relevant to all humanity—and it is. But a classical feminist reading would also find it impossible for a woman in a patriarchal system to retain a sense of human identity that belongs exclusively to her.
Often, the analytical buzzword used when reviewing art about women packing up and doing their own thing is “agency.” It’s dull, as reflected in the verbiage of chores: they exercised their agency; pushed its limits. Alcott’s girls—the writer oscillates between “girl” and “woman,” the way women do—are comfortable being in charge of themselves but uncomfortable with the cost. How much will they put up with to swim in the river sans commentary or repair the car sans solicitation? A woman alone is an emergency.
The Guardian recently ran a piece on “sad girl literature,” an explosively popular genre defined by an unlikeable female voice chronicling her dysfunction, the source of which is often mundane. (Examples include My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, Milk Fed by Melissa Broder, and The New Me by Halle Butler.) Author Pip Finkemeyer, a self-aware contributor to the canon, typifies the protagonists as “quite privileged millennial women who don’t have a lot to lose.” Alcott’s women have everything to lose, and her prose makes me believe it. Several of them are white millennials, but they aren’t wallowers. If I may mention cover art, it’s perfect that the book jackets of sad girl lit “probably feature a devastated-looking woman with her hair covering her face or her head cradled in her hands,” per the Guardian. On Emergency is a woman with powerful poise, her naked back turned, short hair slicked, shoulders sharply edged.
Crucially, a textured and sensitive treatment of class emerges over a fraction of the pages. While sad girl lit tends to employ a bad faith argument of the neoliberal strain—whose hidden agenda is judgment of the bourgeois individual’s (lack of) reaction to bleak contemporary conditions—Emergency is forgiving and even open-hearted. When Alcott introduces privilege into the conflict, she does not use it as the sole explanation for bad behavior. To be fair, she also makes protagonists whose financial situations are recognizable, sympathetic. Money comes up through the shadowy, small, persistent ways it does in life, shading the dynamics of our relationships as we navigate their dips and turns, as types of people collide. In “Part of the Country” a psychiatrist emails her ex-husband: “Maybe I hate my life too, but you’re the only person I know who doesn’t hate his money.” I interpreted the end of that story as them getting back together.
In the very American, late capitalist landscape of debt and distrust that Alcott writes, being poor is another emergency. Being rich is only an emergency if you don't know how to do it. “Having enough, probably” is the situation her women seem to be in, and that feels like an emergency for tomorrow. In June, the New Yorker published an essay by a man who grew up without any money and then, once he sold his first book, spent lavishly. “Throughout my childhood, there was the jagged feeling that I was waiting for something, or someone, to come take care of us. I had no idea that it would be me,” he wrote. “I had never known this kind of wealth, and who was I if I lived like this?”
Alcott twines financial and feminine anxieties to create particular women wondering who they are if they live like this. It is seductive to read about money when it is neither the obvious, suffocating focus nor shrouded in euphemism. It is arresting to read about this female experience of capitalism, where that impossible quest for identity includes the perhaps impossible calculation of social standing. The chorus in “Emergency” faults Helen for acting like she deserves beauty and attention; they pride themselves on having replaced beauty with stability somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. Until now, I’ve never had such simple words for an obvious transition. I mention Alcott’s living situation circa 2015—living in the house her boyfriend bought before they were together—because it’s consistent with the framings she favors: age-gap relationships, pasts that encroach on the present, a present that won’t be the future, and other unequal balances that are workable yet defining. Again, I see myself: the girl in love with a boy who knows better than her how to be wealthy.