The Girlfriend Experience
The zany and joyous female embrace of an extreme kind of porn-scripted sexuality is a new literary trend, or maybe a new life trend, seen recently in Miranda July’s All Fours, and now in the disturbing grunge confection Paradise Logic, by Sophie Frances Kemp. Early accolades have hailed Kemp’s heroine, Reality Kahn (get it?) as the manic pixie dream girl of the Gowanus Canal, and editor Olivia Taylor-Smith’s introduction letter to my advance reader’s copy says we have a lot to learn from her, such as learning to “live with an open heart, love earnestly and wildly, find beauty in the mundane and grotesque, and to always, always follow your dreams…” This may be the book’s intention, sort of, but a look at Kemp’s crazy-eyed author photo, intended in jest, but maybe not so much, suggests the con in Reality Kahn is something the reader should look into. Let us not forget that the Gowanus Canal is a neon-green Superfund site allegedly infected with syphilis.
Kemp’s story concerns a quirky young woman in Brooklyn who makes zines for art, supposedly works as “an actress for water park commercials,” and mostly spends her time doing drugs and having casual transgressive sex with men who don’t care about her. Early on, at the suggestion of her drug dealer and sex partner (a man who croons to her “get on the ground on your hands and knees like a dog who needs to have a penis in its tiny little pussy,”), Reality latches on to the idea that becoming “a girlfriend” would provide meaning in her life and, after looking around in ironically awful sites like the Atlantic Terminal Mall, soon meets a young man named Ariel at a party. He rescues her from a supposedly locked bathroom stall like a modern knight errant.
The irritating Brooklyn It Girl factor is less than it might sound because Kemp is hilarious and the writing is clever. The book begins, for example, with the dawn of time, and zooms forward to the birth of Reality, a Brooklyn every-girl, setting off on a grand quest for a boyfriend that name-checks Joan of Arc and Arthurian legend and occasionally employs made-up archaisms like “she was bornth” to humorous effect. Reality’s shtick is an ironice clueless-ingenue voice. A representative snippet tells us her birth is “under the sign of Taurus. May. Verdant growth was happening. A nouveau Cambrian explosion of flora ’n’ fauna—cork elms, daffodils, lilacs, a bobolink’s soprano chirping from a twig.” I was particularly tickled by a passage locating the drug dealer’s house “above a highway called the Prospect Expressway. This is known to be one of our greatest routes. This is known to be the Wall of Hadrian of the 21st c.” Anyone who has seen the monumentally hideous walls of the sunken-highway Prospect Expressway will laugh.
The picaresque mechanism of simultaneous total satire and total sincerity seems to be the Zoomer emerging house tone—the work of Honor Levy also comes to mind—but Reality reminded me more of the character Ditie in Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England. Like his, her simplicity allows her to both partake in and satirize the values of her society. A boyfriend, in her view, is “the kind of man who has bank accounts in different states and countries. You know: he is rich. He will give Reality la vie oh so charmed. It’s not so much that he can buy you items, it is that he is a Provider.” Girlfriends, on the other hand must have “firmness of flesh.” For girlfriends, “a good idea is to be passive.” Girlfriends “wore velvet frocks, blouses covered in pieces of celestial glitter.” Reality, observing couples, thinks “I wanted to be just like them. I wanted to be We. I wanted to be We Are Going on Vacation. I wanted to speak their secret language. I wanted a fine bottle of vino, ice cream, holding hands—they had this and I did not.” The tone here manages to combine all the conflicting factors: Brooklyn hipster society’s contempt for traditional gender roles and traditional benchmarks of achievement such as wealth, plus some of the legitimate drawbacks to those things, but also their ongoing allure and possible superiority to trading sex for drugs by the Prospect Expressway.
The boyfriend Reality finds, however, is neither a banker nor a provider. Ariel, "a doctoral candidate in the history of Mesopotamia, specializing in the Assyrian Empire,” is the typical Brooklyn child of the elite supported by his parents, pursuing drugs and dirtbaggery as a sign of status. He smokes crack, and lives in “Paradise,” a collection of shipping containers by the Gowanus Canal that’s also a music-performance-space. Kemp nails the aesthetic: “He wore baggy shirts and pants that you wear if you are at prep school and shoes that you own if you are homeless.” His roommates are other young men who became friends in college in a class on James Joyce that Kemp brilliantly skewers as “the James Joyce Opinions Class.” They’ve named their shipping container home “Paradise” as a Milton reference.
Ariel and Reality “do sex” a bunch but he’s not quite on board for the boyfriend role—a very funny setup given Reality’s looney idea of girlfriend-activities. Yet here all the Zoomer modernity and edgy prose can’t avoid the situation’s basic emotional truths. Kemp throws Reality with huge enthusiasm into every sexual act and commits the authorial voice to the modern graphic abandonment as well. But when she needs to demonstrate just why this situation is bad for Reality, it’s the sex that does the work. We know things are going wrong from the moment Ariel absentmindedly agrees to be Reality’s boyfriend just after fucking her in the ass, ejaculating on her, and handing her a cum-sock to mop up. (The romantic cum-sock moment!, she thinks.) And then the sex gets worse, though to the book’s credit at no point does it blame Ariel or the patriarchy for Reality’s suffering. He’s a jerk, but she’s 100 percent up for it, and the choice really is hers. In a culminating scene Reality imagines herself on a Catherine wheel of promiscuity, all hands and eyes and parts, a passage that travels though loudness and void to conclude with “I had become a giant wound.”
There’s an obvious contrast between the whee-so-fun tone of it all and the reality, but Paradise Logic can’t quite commit to that, to its detriment. This may be the fundamental difference between a book like I Served the King of England and the contemporary Brooklyn novel—the former truly does renounce the values of the society it satirizes, and the latter doesn’t. In the book’s second half, a gonzo plot line involving a drug to turn you into the perfect girlfriend and a mad doctor emerges, which leads Reality, supposedly, to a catharsis that allows her to accept that Ariel doesn’t love her. The break from realism isn’t particularly interesting as a plot development and serves mostly to sidestep the need to grapple with the questions Kemp has willingly or unwillingly raised. Is Reality’s quest to be a girlfriend a longing after a ridiculous and false cultural construction, as its satiric manifestations sometimes indicate, or is there something to it? Kemp’s prose and styling mocks the idea, but her underlying emotional logic does not. And if there is something to it, might not the hipster-shipping-container demographic, which includes Reality, need to change its ways, particularly when it comes to the super-fun, zany, degrading loveless sex, which the book itself has identified as a problem, while cashing in on?
Kemp (and her editor) think not, and want to end on the rousing note that Reality is a hero for our times. “When you are twenty-three you will slum it for love,” Kemp writes, and “life can be very beautiful when you squint hard from the shit seats.” Here as well the un-reality gets in the way of the book’s insight. Rich kids in Gowanus are most definitely not in life’s shit seats. “Paradise” is a kind of paradise in no jest, a paradise of the unchecked pursuit of self-expressive pleasure and social status grubbing that passes for this group’s value system. Its denizens can, at least on some levels, afford their lifestyles because of the safety their education, money and privilege provides them. But only on some levels. Reality evades the soul-sickness and despair that so often accompanies such lives with her blithe simplicity—and that’s where the con comes in, because actual paradise follows a very different logic.
Valerie Stivers is the books columnist for Compact Magazine. Her book, The Writer’s Table: Famous Authors & their Favorite Foods is forthcoming from Frances Lincoln in October, 2025.
