What if you were nothing but monstrous desire? Hanna Johansson’s ANTIQUITY (Catapult, 215 pp., $26) considers this question with carnality and guile. The unnamed narrator is a 30-something journalist looking back on a torrid summer holiday on the Greek island of Syros. Helena, a wealthy older artist, has invited the narrator to stay indefinitely with her and her quiet teenage daughter, Olga. The trio quickly establishes a domestic idyll of swimming, cooking and wine. The narrator trains the spotlight of her obsession on Helena, who we gather is accustomed to hero worship. The spotlight will eventually shift to Olga.
Our narrator views affection as zero-sum and her own selfhood as minimal, if not absent. She’d rather vault through life than experience it. Here she is on a past relationship: “I wanted immediately, as soon as possible, to get to the point where it would feel as if we’d known each other forever, as if the boundaries between us were blurry, ideally erased altogether, so that it would be impossible to picture her without picturing me at the same time.” Repeated invocations of the horizon hint at the lines she’ll cross with Olga. For Johansson, ardor and denial are mutually reinforcing. Time produces nostalgia, not wisdom.
The publisher dutifully name-checks “Lolita” in the book’s promotional material. While Johansson is as mordant and hypnotic as Nabokov, she opts for restraint over pyrotechnics. (Credit is also due to Kira Josefsson’s deft translation from the Swedish.) This is a novel to savor and argue with. Is the narrator a parasite? A predator? Merely someone whose emotional reach exceeded her grasp? I’ve come to think of “Antiquity” as a Polaroid of the ocean at night, a deep-time abyss, an intimate menace.
A fascinating bit of history fuels Julia Malye’s PELICAN GIRLS (Harper, 354 pp., $30). In early-18th-century France, the Catholic Church dispatched hundreds of marginalized young women to the Louisiana Territory to marry bachelor settlers and sire a new generation. Those who couldn’t find husbands or were widowed young joined the convent to preach to Indigenous peoples, with whom the colonists shared a fragile détente.
Geneviève, Pétronille and Charlotte barely survive the trans-Atlantic journey, encountering pirates, disease and rape; this brutality continues in the New World. The novel also devotes chapters to a Parisian nun and a 17-year-old member of the Natchez tribe, and spans a little over a dozen years.
Malye is not interested in the stations of a bildungsroman. She focuses instead on fugitive moments of solitude. Characters frequently stare out windows, revisiting memories of excitement and agency in their otherwise circumscribed existence.
The author has previously published three novels in French — the first at age 16 — and her pages brim over with research. Flora, fauna, weather and ritual are meticulously cataloged. But this assiduousness, in addition to the distancing third-person perspective, reduces the characters. The busy cast blurs together; pivotal changes occur mostly offscreen. Worse, the central characters’ anachronistically progressive attitudes — toward abortion, enslavement and colonialism — strain credulity, and then break it. Hilary Mantel said that historical fiction’s value is in “the contradictions and the awkwardness. … And allowing the reader to live with the ambiguities.” “Pelican Girls” doesn’t grant us this regard. Its anxieties engulf its purpose.
Scott Alexander Howard’s THE OTHER VALLEY (Atria, 290 pp., $27.99) is a mind-bending take on time travel. In a placid Francophone village bound by tradition and bureaucracy, teenage Odile Ozanne trains to become a conseillère, part of a select group who approves monitored visits to the surrounding valleys. Their borders are heavily policed, and we soon learn why. To the west is a replica of the village, living 20 years in the past; to the east, 20 years hence. Grieving parents might travel west to glimpse a child who has died in their present, though they must wear disguises so as not to alter time (and life in the east). One day Odile thinks she recognizes two visitors to her own valley. This moment will have lasting consequences.
While the early chapters hew too close to Lois Lowry’s “The Giver,” the tone shifts to a slow-boiling philosophical thriller when Odile reaches adulthood. She’s confronted by an escapee from the east, which disrupts Odile’s past and future.
The ending winks at Chris Marker’s film “La Jetée,” and, like so many time-travel stories, the conceit exerts heavy gravity. This reader almost broke out the whiteboard: Wouldn’t there be more secret migration, given the cartoonish venality of some of the border patrols? Forget plot. The novel’s lasting impression is not its ideas, but the rich landscape. Howard has a naturalist’s gift for the pastoral.
The title of Scott Guild’s PLASTIC (Pantheon, 293 pp., $28) refers to the physical makeup of the figurines populating its world — call it George Saunders Barbie — as well as a pliable approach to narrative. It tells the truth very, very slant. We have Erin, a young woman whose radicalized sister has gone off the grid, and Jacob, a blind teenager who spends much of his time in V.R. space. They meet-cute, as it were, at Erin’s retail gig — amid a mass shooting by an eco-terrorist group.
This narrative is interwoven with episodes of “Nuclear Family,” a sitcom featuring talking robots, a toy-size Jesus Christ and human-size anthropomorphized waffles. Its punning name, in a novel full of puns, alludes to an atomic detonation on U.S. soil a generation ago. As if this weren’t enough, Erin’s scenes are described through camera shots, monologues and even musical numbers. Dialogue is contracted to a pidgin English. (“No need apologize. It awful day.”) Guild commits to the bit.
This elaborate framework bears a few cracks. Invented brands like Tablet Town exist alongside references to Stephen Sondheim, Prada and Brad Pitt. (What would “Sweeney Todd” look like in this world?) The last third leans into a Hollywood genre too facile for Guild’s talents, though we end in wondrous disbelief.
The novel’s sustained W.T.F. brazenness deserves applause. While its debt to David Foster Wallace is apparent — and perhaps too much for some — “Plastic” also earns comparisons to works by Tom McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro and even Bertolt Brecht. Its rigorously superficial world manages to raise urgent questions about climate change, political violence and spirituality with high intelligence.
