The Fated Family
I first learned of Sophie Madeline Dess’s work when a friend sent me her story “Unfathomably Deep,” then just published in The Drift. It was sent without comment, though with the implication, I think, that here was something striking and original, that stood out from the crowd, without my friend quite knowing what to make of it. Or so I soon surmised. Reading it, I entered a Cronenbergian tale of trainee gynecologists (I since have it on reasonably good authority that Dess does not know Cronenberg’s movies) and of the female narrator’s lust for one of them, building to a violent yet comic ending that sealed its departure from strict realism in favor of the stylized and mythic.
What stuck in mind was the tone—including, in the narrator, a beguiling mix of sexual insouciance and voraciousness, and, in the narration, a slight irreality, with its exaggerations (“I held my breath for 72 hours”); very strange images (“Daniel smiled at me. I shivered, died, came alive five times in a row. I noticed his eyes were huge, grape-green, with teeny seed-like pupils”), including a fall down some dimension in the narrator’s own brain, suggestive of a neurological storm (“Eventually, I’m pretty sure I crawled back up my brain.”); and flashbacks to her earlier life in Utah that built out the story convincingly, if almost too adroitly, in the round. But also, there was the story’s mythic template, or deep structure. Not artificially imposed, though activated by its epigraph, this suggested a different vantage point from which it could be read: as a re-enactment of the story of Jason and Medea, though one that subtly varied its archetype. (Consummation, childbirth, infanticide, and husband-murder were, notably, condensed into the single moment of its climax.)
This was literate work, but wore it lightly—not in the sense of art that conceals art, but of one that hides its depths. Which is also to say that it recognized, in art’s expedients and tricks, a plumbline dropped down to primal impulses. Maybe one or two superficial things about it were fashionable. The same was not true of its core. Really written (as T. S. Eliot, decades ago, said most fiction is not—as true then as now), with a propulsiveness to the language that I have since encountered in others of Dess’s stories, it was so in an elliptical way, sustaining but not occupying the center of attention. It was wild, finely tuned, and, above all: enigmatic.
***
To turn from such stories to Dess’s debut novel, What You Make of Me, feels in some ways like a move earlier. Given a novel’s longer gestation period, this stands to reason; it doubtless precedes the stories, despite appearing after them. Elements of the latter, their temperament, are recognizably there, though in something like prototypical form.
The publicity materials, which lay stress on the novel’s plot and the moral questions supposedly in play in it, give little sense of its actual qualities, in which plot plays a scanty role, dialogue—typically witty and elliptical—a very great one, and which—despite its determination, shared with its protagonist, to be entertaining —orients itself towards liminal, even occult dimensions of experience. The sense you get is one of sleight-of-hand. The magician’s patter is one thing, but the real action is hiding in plain sight.
The story is simple enough. It follows two precocious siblings, Ava and Demetri Stern, from their childhood up through their teens and early twenties, and ends in their twenties and early thirties, when Demetri’s life is cut short by brain cancer. The book begins with Ava writing—not her congenial mode, she is a painter—two weeks before the day when “they’ll be killing” Demetri—that is, taking him off life support. (There seems to be an echo here of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which is narrated, though not explicitly written, on the eve of in that case a lover’s execution, for which the narrator feels obscurely responsible.)
Almost from our first meeting of them, the Stern siblings are haunted by tragedy: their mother has just committed suicide by walking into Long Island Sound. The opening scenes find the Stern patriarch, in the aftermath, taking his eight- and nine-year-old daughter and son on a desultory vacation in the Virgin Islands. The mood, however, far from glum, is one of comic mishaps and hijinks—“in the way that tragedies can make you really rambunctious,” as Demetri later explains. A local woman, the resort’s resident portrait painter, flirts with their father in ways that excite Ava’s curiosity and her resentment, not least at the woman’s presumption in calling herself a painter, and in referring to their ostensibly shared calling as a “hobby.” Ava’s next creation is the offspring of that resentment, plus desire: for a beautiful male flight attendant on their plane there, whom she immortalizes in a painting that—like the sea in the Ashbery poem—wrecks the canvas she has stolen from her rival. This act of artistic vandalism promptly finds the obnoxious Stern children, dazed father in tow, kicked off the resort, though Ava is allowed to keep the painting.
The episode is prophetic in several ways. If the erotic and the destructive will remain fused in Ava’s art, the episode also inaugurates a tendency toward the performative, the ostentatious, clamoring for attention, at least at the level of the artwork, if not the self. For Ava’s insistence upon the authenticity of her own desires tends to solidify in response to threats from outside. Throughout the novel, she will be haunted by the fear that her impulses are not really hers, prompting her to double down on them, with the aim of besting her rivals and thereby certifying herself as self-originating.
What has not yet crystallized is the love-object—what, for Ava, is one and the same with the art object. You could say Ava, like the young Augustine in the Confessions, is in love with love, desiring desire, yet without object or source. Or rather, with none apart from her brother, who is doubly prohibited—as incestuous, and because he has literally forbidden her from painting him.
This prohibition on representing the focal point of libidinal interest—imposed after the college-age Ava wins a self-portrait contest by having Demetri submit, as his own work, a portrait she made of him, whereupon he makes her swear never to paint him again—may be one explanation for her artistic restlessness, for her bouncing from project to project. Meanwhile, literally in the footnotes of the novel—the conceit of which is that Ava is composing it as a catalogue for her first solo show—is told the story of her real artistic progress. “All of the paintings are of my brother,” she tells us. “You would not recognize him in them.” For these are paintings, not of Demetri’s image, but, you might say, his moments, his energy.
In yearning for her brother, Ava’s yearning is for his yearning. She wants what he wants; he is her mediator, not just with the artworld (in which he acts as her critic and promoter), but with life itself. And so it is not altogether surprising that, years later, after Demetri’s stint at Harvard, where Ava improbably tags along without enrolling, when sister and brother are bent on launching themselves in New York, Ava finds herself falling in love or lust with Nati (Natalia), the Italian owner of a gallery in Rome who is courting her (professionally) and at the same time being courted (romantically) by Demetri. (Apart from Nati, Ava is attracted to men, though her sex with men is exclusively random encounters. Symbolically, the book reserves its male presence to Ava’s father and the fey and willowy, yet clearly also magnetic, Demetri; though the “oversexed” Ava could also be said to bring to her pursuits a certain masculine brio and initiative.) Ava’s affair with Nati, partly repeating, partly altering the pattern, shows her beginning, for the first time, to best Demetri, to stand forth clearly as a separate person. And she does so not only through the affair itself, but through another secret betrayal: when she persuades—effectively, seduces—Nati into letting her paint her nude portrait.
From this point on, the plot proceeds by fits and starts—punctuated by gallery openings, by Nati’s comings and goings to and from Rome, and, as the story progresses, by the discovery of Demetri’s illness and its progression. In a story concerned with the sources of desire and creativity, what happened when, under whose influence, as surmised from what evidence, conveyed by what intermediary, and influenced by what rivalry, it can be hard—essentially impossible—to decide what is mimicry, what originality; what is conjecture, what rock-bottom fact. Suffice it to say that the arc is that of the shift in relative powers that sees Ava, who begins by idolizing her brother and producing art derivative of his concepts, surviving and indeed vanquishing him.
The inevitable image to describe this shifting of power is that of waxing and waning, the rising and setting of celestial bodies—with the twist, prepared at a deeply implicit level by an early reference to the moon as, impossibly, the source of all light on earth, that the reflective body has become its own originating, dominating, and altering source of light.
This shift derives poignancy from our gathering awareness that Demetri suffers his own, more classic moonlike dependency. A documentary filmmaker, who is thus beholden to fact, he also places obstacles in front of himself, working for others rather than making his own films. Ultimately, he does make two: one based on found footage, about their mother’s death, and the other—though his involvement here is murky, and seemingly by proxy—about Ava’s art. (Demetri, too, it seems, has no subject but his own family.) By the end of the book, Ava will feel that Demetri has squandered his promise: though, in love with youth, he could also be said, in dying, to have immortalized himself as pure potential (and as such will turn out to have one more card up its sleeve). If there is any sense in Nati’s accusation that Ava is “the one who killed” Demetri, it can only be in this symbolic sense: that her triumph over him requires his death. That his death is in some way his “revenge” on her merely frees her further: in receiving this punishment, Ava pays her debt.
***
It might have been because I had just seen it, but in reading Dess’s novel I couldn’t help thinking of Alfonso Cuarón’s 1996 modernized adaptation of Great Expectations, with Ethan Hawke as a Floridian Pip, there a painter called “Finn,” plucked out of obscurity and rocketed into NYC gallery life thanks to the backstage machinations of Robert DeNiro’s “Lustig” (the novel’s Magwitch), and with Gwyneth Paltrow as a haunting debutante Estella. Dess’s book recalls the movie not in its particulars, but in a deeper ambience. Like the movie and the Dickens novel, What You Make of Me inhabits the magic circle of childhood, with its limited cast of characters that no outside force can penetrate, unless admitted on sufferance; in this case, on condition of being loved by Demetri, which first allows Nati to become a figure in Ava’s life, even if Ava usurps her brother’s precedence.
The magic circle of childhood—or the 1990s. Though literally set in the present (and even the scenes of Ava and Demetri’s childhood are likely somewhat later, the early 2000s), the novel retains some of the charmed ambience of that time. The outside world barely registers. Ava’s artwork appears on a local news website; otherwise, a newspaper is purchased once—for protecting the floor while painting. The internet likewise plays little role. Though Ava remarks at one point about the incongruity of conversations carried on in parallel in person and online, with their differing degrees of intimacy and formality, for the most part, the characters live analog lives. They create artworks in the physical world; their doorsteps pile up with paper mail when they hole themselves up in their rooms; they look for sex in bars (and, once, in an elevator), not on apps. Another curiosity: besides the passingly registered fact that the Sterns are Jewish—they are, after all, named Stern—and the rather more significant one that Nati is Italian, the book is quite uninterested in identity categories. And no wonder: these are superficialities, whereas Ava wishes to peer down beneath the social self, beneath the skin, into the viscera, the bones, the neurons.
(There are other, more amusing aspects of the book’s disdain for pedestrian realism. Ava is either a liar, or has, in the universe of this novel, traipsed through a Harvard whose Puritan chapel has stained-glass windows, whose dormitories have guards, and whose students—apparently capable of and interested in feeding themselves—have kitchens in their dorm rooms.)
This slight irreality can give rise to a certain puzzlement. The book never quite makes up its mind about Ava and her art or her rise in the art world. Critics’ boilerplate, with its sometimes fawning, sometimes ambivalent praise of her, is clearly shown as ridiculous, though some of Ava’s absurder projects, like Live Streaming, where she paints watercolors while having sex with men, rendering in abstract form the feelings that course through her mid-act, must be regarded as satirical—of ubiquitous commercial self-exposure; perhaps, of Ava’s here perfunctory gestures towards the non-literal; certainly, of the reception context that makes this, in a running gag, one of her most commercially successful works. (We are not, I think, to see Ava as utterly self-traduced by this, notwithstanding Demetri’s claim that she has “prostituted” herself and her life; if she “has no sense of privacy,” as she tells Nati when she tries to pump her for secrets, this OnlyFans-like stunt is “not near her conscience”—except insofar as it shows her failure to find her true subject.)
But if Ava’s art is often opportunistically and hastily embarked upon, half as a joke, or for the sake of ginning up publicity, this joking has an energetic core—it partakes of the same logic by which Ava, as both painter and narrator, peers down through the surfaces of things via strange verticals and tangents. And the gags sometimes transform themselves into projects undertaken in earnest: Ava does not so much commit to the bit, as take the bit within her teeth. (This slippage between opportunistic and real is a family trait. Demetri is both hype man and aesthete. The siblings suspect their mother, a commercial actress, would never had killed herself had their father not bought a video recorder to surveil himself and prove he wasn’t cheating during their games of chess, thereby giving her the technical means to make her own death a performance.) Yet the spirit of the book is cheerfully Nietzschean, that of the gaya scienza, the worshipper of the god who knows how to dance.
Its real subject is the charisma of Ava and her brother, just the same as that charisma is the subject of Ava’s paintings, which Dess’s footnotes render with a strangeness that spills over into the main text. Here is Ava describing her brother in his sickbed: “His eyes turn in a slow methodical movement that I know he can’t control. I stand still and watch him until, in some kind of prismatic shift, like someone’s pinched the center-plane of reality and tilted it, I feel myself seized, caught and unable to speak, my shoulders heaved up, because shaken loose from the back of Demetri’s skull, back where they’d imprinted themselves, are my mother and father, wheeling in and out of his eyes.” Descriptions such as these chime with a muted register of violent fantasy, intrusive thoughts of mangled limbs that are, crucially, not objects of horror to Ava so much as of more than half erotic fascination, akin to that wish of hers to physically inhabit, literally to get up into, the bodies and selves of others. (“Once you really see into things, once you understand everything, […] you know nothing can be done. You become a sociopath,” Nati muses. But who in the book is gifted with such insight, if not Ava?)
Principally, though, the book regards such attention as tenderness. The novel’s morality lies, first, in its commitment to that esoteric dimension, to the energetic and erotic charge within its characters, individually and together. (At a time in which many writers are turning to explicit religious commitments, it might be added that there is nothing religious or “woo” about the way the narrator speaks of “energy.” “Energy” exists in the book as objective fact, not as part of a system of belief.) Its second commitment is to family. Like Great Expectations, even in its nominally “happy” revised ending, this is not a story about liberation from one’s fate, so much as one about going down and deeper into it—a value that may be expressed in the palpable love linking the Stern siblings to each other and to their father, even after he goes off to Los Angeles to rot in a corner and die.
The book’s greatest commitment, however, is to laughter. Death-haunted though it is, it remains comical, a scherzo (the Italian for “joke,” as Nati teaches Ava), albeit maybe in the spirit of the “laugh test” game the Stern children play in the pool in the Virgin islands, in which you try to make your opponent laugh because, as Demetri explains, “‘when you laugh your muscles relax and you breathe out really hard and you can’t swim anymore […]. And so you drown and die.’” When the novel’s final twist—which is also a return to the submerged mythological thinking that is characteristic of Dess’s writing—sees the appearance of an “Arion,” the mythic singer who found an ultimate security in casting himself in the waves, borne off on the back of a dolphin charmed by his voice, it affirms that art can, literally, carry you away. But that late salvation gains meaning from this early, fine reminder of how laughter connects us to the pleasures and risks of the physical world.
***
As in the portraits that compose it, and in Ava’s erratic career, there is tremendous energy in this novel, as well as some question how it ultimately hangs together. The plot lurches at times (there are many references to “during this period,” “three weeks later”; its events advance as frog-marched by Time, which sometimes produces changes in the characters and their relations that seem unaccounted for, except on the basis that they happened to happen)—understandably, since what it really wants to do is leap from set-piece to set-piece. Just so, there is indeed a gust of laughter in these pages; though it might also be—as suggested by her array of later, extravagant projects—that of the author letting the door slam as she exits the scene.
Paul Franz has contributed to Bookforum, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, among others.
