NYRB Help Wanted Book Review

 

Human Resources

Laura Marsh

Adelle Waldman; illustration by Ciara Quilty-Harper

Reviewed:

Help Wanted

Norton, 276 pp., $28.99

by Adelle Waldman

There’s a moment in Adelle Waldman’s new novel, Help Wanted, that delivers a sharp comment on the status of literature in a culture gripped by app-enabled conspicuous consumption and next-day delivery. The novel is set in the warehouse of a big-box store, where each morning a group of nine workers clocks in before dawn to wrangle the endless flow of goods and the accompanying detritus of pallets, Styrofoam, and ever more cardboard. One by one boxes of tiki torches, mini gas grills, pool noodles, DVDs, and luxury quilted toilet paper fly from the truck. Finally the workers reach their last, sad package:

Short and squat with red stripes on its sides—it contained books, from the publisher Penguin Random House—the last box seemed, in proportion to the number of eyes that turned to look at it, almost comically insignificant, like a limp penis overpowered by pubic hair.

When people are wrecking their backs lugging packages for minimum wage and no benefits, what’s the point of another literary novel?

This is quite an about-face for Waldman. Her debut, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013), was celebrated for its immersion in the pretensions and self-deceptions of a certain species of literary Brooklynite, the kind of emotionally ruthless aspiring writer whose major work is his good guy persona. For Waldman and her contemporaries, the imperative to write what you know often meant turning a keen eye on insecure creative types, from Ben Lerner’s anxious poets to Elif Batuman’s philosophicalundergrads. A frequent criticism of such works is that they are too insular, more curious about their own social rituals than the world beyond. But their look inward is also a strength: when writers make good protagonists, it is not because their jobs are the most interesting but because they are the characters most immediately available for study, the nearest targets for shrewd dissection and psychological portrait.

In the years that followed Nathaniel P., Waldman entertained doubts about this intense inward focus, namely that it does not serve a clear social justice agenda. “I love nineteenth-century novels and used to think like Jane Austen that writing about the romantic and psychological problems of middle-class people was a valid way to spend a career,” she recently told Publishers Weekly. Then “the 2016 election happened and it jolted me.” She felt she had not paid attention to the major social forces that were shifting the direction of the country. She went to work at a big-box store near her home in Rhinebeck, New York, for six months as a form of research. And though she expected the job to be demanding, she emerged, she recently wrote in a New York Times op-ed, appalled by “the subtler and more insidious” ways she saw corporations mistreat their employees.

From this set of observations she might have compiled an exposé of low-wage work in the vein of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (2001) or, more recently, Emily Guendelsberger’s On the Clock (2019). And indeed Waldman’s novel shares many of the features of these books, packed as it is with details about scheduling, employer-provided benefits and the lack thereof, nonsensical corporate policy, and the minimal opportunities for initiative and self-expression in the American workplace. But Help Wanted is also an attempt to imagine the inner life of the warehouse in fiction—a bet that it’s possible to draw out the fleeting interplay of habits, aspirations, and disappointments in her characters mainly by sketching their working conditions.

One of the challenges of writing a social novel set almost entirely in a warehouse is that the characters do not have much time to talk to one another. At this fictional superstore (which is named Town Square but sounds a lot like Target), the warehouse shift starts at 4:00 AM with a frantic race to meet the “unload time” set by corporate; everything must be off the delivery truck by 5:00 AM, or a manager has to send a “failure report” to the higher-ups. The workers spend the rest of their shift breaking down the deliveries, unpacking and setting them up on the shelves and displays of the shop floor. They rarely have a chance to make consequential decisions together—to debate or plan anything. They are scolded if they try anything new and labor under the constant threat of getting written up.

When Help Wanted opens, however, the employees of Town Square Store #1512 have a special reason to huddle during their breaks. They learn that the store manager, Big Will, is leaving the fictional Potterstown, a depressed small city in the Hudson Valley, for a store in affluent suburban Connecticut. His departure creates a vacancy. An obvious candidate for the job is Meredith, the executive manager of the warehouse, whom everyone hates. But an executive manager in sales, Anita, “who no one loves but no one hates either,” also has a serious chance. Ordinarily such a decision would be made over the heads of the rank and file, in a glass cubicle far away. But in this case the company wants to move quickly: instead of conducting an open job search, which could take months, they plan on promoting an internal candidate. And in an unusual extra step they decide to send a few executives to interview the store employees about the frontrunners.

The workers on Meredith’s team have every reason to sink her candidacy. She’s often out of her depth, intimidated by the longtime employees who know more about warehouse operations than she does, and she is too proud to ask for their help. Insecure about her precarious authority, she compensates by giving high-handed orders and sometimes resorts to cruel mockery of her subordinates. She insults an employee (“she’d called Nicole ‘slow,’ as in retarded, and imitated the supposedly imbecilic expression on Nicole’s face”) and then threatens to discipline her for her “bad attitude.”

The workers also hate Meredith because she represents the worst of corporate culture. Town Square is the kind of company that is willing “to cheat employees in any way that was technically not illegal (and call it ‘performing its fiduciary duty to stockholders’).” Cutting hours and staffing levels are time-honored strategies. Big Will reminisces that when he started, the store had twice the number of employees. Nothing runs as smoothly as it used to, as customers often complain. The store prominently displays “help wanted” signs, as if to suggest that they are always just a few new hires away from getting up to speed—if only they could get the staff. The real problem, the sign implies, is “the tight labor market and/or a lazy populace’s unwillingness to work service jobs.” And worse, Town Square is far from the toughest employer. It’s better than Walmart and better than the conspicuously unnamed “online retailer” that has eaten into a large portion of its market.

Meredith is simply the most proximate spokeswoman for this woeful economy. She wields management jargon like “Smart Huddle” and “mandate” to justify stupid decisions. She refuses to give her team extra hours even when her deputy, Little Will (who is taller but lower-ranking than Big Will), informs her that they’re so shorthanded that whole sections of the store are sitting empty—at a potential cost of thousands of dollars a day. Judging that corporate will reward her solely for staying on budget, not for maximizing revenue—which is someone else’s responsibility—she refuses. “That means working harder and smarter with the hours we have,” she decrees. Never mind that Diego’s phone has been cut off because he can’t pay the bill on less than twenty hours a week. Meredith is impervious to guilt. “Wasn’t this what welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc., were for?”

Yet this isn’t a novel about a set of disgruntled workers airing heartfelt grievances about their boss. Because instead of voicing their true feelings about Meredith, the employees decide to try to get her promoted.

This twist is what sets the novel in motion and allows Waldman to imagine each of her characters breaking out of their routines to make a series of subtle calculations: weighing their own prospects against Meredith’s, estimating their chances at Town Square and their chances in Potterstown.

The idea comes from Val, a woman in her late twenties with strong convictions who is often the first to speak her mind. She has a habit of hiding the offensive T-shirts the store sells (those with “camouflage backgrounds and images of guns”) and placing nicer ones (with slogans like “Be Kind” and “Wine Mom”) in front of them. Her pitch to her coworkers is this: if Meredith got the promotion, she’d no longer be managing them directly. Little Will, who is widely respected and has always stood up for the others, would likely get her position. And Little Will’s promotion from group manager to executive would open up a vacancy at the most junior level of management, a rung on the ladder that could be just within reach for someone like Val or one of the others.

In short, while Meredith’s promotion would bring her an unjust reward, it would improve everyone else’s lives to some extent. Jobs with benefits and above-minimum-wage pay for people who do not have a college degree are exceedingly rare in Potterstown, a city hollowed out by deindustrialization. If Meredith and Little Will stay in their current positions, it may be years before a similar opportunity arises. During this time most of the team would continue to contend with the many and varied problems of scraping by—not just the creeping despair (“some invisible mechanism ensured that when one source of unhappiness lifted, another fell,” a worker thinks) but the practicalities of paying for medical treatment and childcare and getting to the store without a car. (Diego walks to work in the dark, along a treacherous highway that has no sidewalk.)

One of the pleasures of Help Wanted is seeing this realization sink in for each member of the team. This is a novel that distinctly avoids having a main character, neither the charismatic Big Will nor the villainous Meredith, and though Val is something of a ringleader Waldman devotes a roughly equal amount of space to each of Val’s eight coworkers, whose names appear in a line at the bottom of the org chart. The narrative hierarchy is, like the hierarchy among these nine workers, flat. There’s Diego, who muses that if he could get the group manager job, he would finally be able to show the “regular, predictable income” needed for a car loan; Ruby, who doesn’t really care what ultimately happens but shows up for the meetings because it adds some variety to her day; Nicole, the strongest holdout against the plan, who resists it owing to her “instinctual, moral” conviction that Meredith should be punished, not promoted; and Milo, and Joyce, and Travis, and Raymond, and Callie.

The plot is notably light on moments of high drama—no extravagant meltdowns or shop floor injuries. (An air of light industrial menace is often present, as when “every few seconds, high pitched squeals tore through the dark space”—though it turns out the sounds are not human screams but tracks that need to be oiled.) The book’s interest is in following each character’s train of thought as they work, pondering their lives up to this point and what they might be able to change. The main action takes the form of secretive meetings during smoke breaks and carefully planned one-on-ones, as Val and her faction (who label themselves “pro-Mer,” short for “promoting Meredith”) attempt to recruit the others to their cause.

The trick of this plot is that the excitement that builds around the campaign creates a heady sense of forward motion, until the same excitement becomes the novel’s saddest feature. The sheer amount of energy expended on bringing about such a small improvement underlines just how limited the workers’ options are. The pleasure of using their new skills—to develop and strategize and win support for a course of action—only emphasizes how much talent and ability are going to waste at a workplace that punishes employees when they show initiative.

It’s also hard not to sense a union plot haunting Help Wanted. The workers repeatedly show their capacity for collective action, yet the pro-Mer campaign only ever aims to exchange one boss for another, not to bring about a permanent change in the terms of their employment, as a union would. The anticlimax isn’t lost on Nicole when the campaign is over and she feels “a little wistful…for what things had been like only a few weeks ago.” Instead of heralding a transformation in the workplace, Waldman traces a subtler story of the deftness of corporate union avoidance and the staff’s unanimous resignation to these tactics: the faintest mention of forming a union draws grim laughter among the workers. “Don’t even joke. Then we’d really be in trouble,” Ruby warns. They’ve seen an employee fired “for ‘time theft’ after he’d been spotted talking briefly to a union organizer during his shift.” A very nice executive named Katherine has taken care to lay out corporate’s position on unions “in friendly, upbeat terms,” accompanied by pizza parties at a store where “organizers were afoot.” She calls her approach the “well-crafted carrot.” The stick goes without saying.

As you can probably tell by now, it’s hard to miss the political points that Help Wanted sets out to make. At its core, the novel is an impassioned case that the people of store #1512 deserve not just better working conditions but also better provision of health care and housing, and better access to education and freedom from debt. But it becomes clear, as the pro-Mer campaign gains traction, that Waldman places more emphasis on intricate systems—whether the corporate structure of Town Square or the machinery of the employees’ scheme—than on a set of equally intricate characters.

When Waldman fills out each worker’s backstory she tends to focus on how they have run up against yet another systemic problem. There’s Raymond, whose girlfriend is addicted to pain pills and steals the money earmarked for their electric bill; Ruby, who has been disguising the fact that she cannot read, a difficulty that may go back to childhood lead poisoning; Nicole, whose “food stamp card hadn’t refreshed at the beginning of the month like it was supposed to.” There’s nothing wrong with these details per se, and a novel that is attempting to capture a broad sweep of life surely has to acknowledge at least some of them—except that the characters who experience them never quite come to life. If literature can deliver flashes of recognition, here we recognize an unjust situation rather than a fully formed person. As Jess Bergman recently observed in The New Republic, “without a fuller picture of their lives,” the Town Square workers can “feel more like cardboard cutouts than fully realized people”—a set of walking issues, appearing smaller than the hardships they’ve endured.

Nowhere is this flatness more jarring than in the description of Travis, a young man who has spent time in prison. He is in conversation with Milo, who needs little encouragement to talk at length; when Travis raises his eyebrows, Milo continues “as if Travis had put another quarter in the slot.” Waldman adds: “(as an ex-con, Travis had a lot of experience with pay phones).” It’s a strange break in the narrator’s perspective: the third-person narrator in this novel is mostly staying close to the characters in the scene, telling us their thoughts, but this comment doesn’t sound like it comes from Travis or Milo. What might be a clumsy attempt to connect moments in Travis’s daily life to his experience of incarceration lands instead as a joke at the character’s expense.

The fascinating thing about humans is that nine people with the same job in the same town might do and want all kinds of inexplicable, extravagant, unique things. But there’s a failure here to imagine their aspirations beyond the most obvious variations on the American dream. Big Will just wants a suburban home with “a swing set and a trampoline in the backyard”; Diego dreams of “a spot of land that was his, somewhere where he could drink a beer and look at the sky.”

The pared-down prose can read as simplified rather than plain. Generic references to pop culture provide a shorthand throughout: handsome Big Will is “like a teen idol turned awards show emcee” and, later on the same page, “like the guy in the teen movie who drives the fancy red sports car and wears mirrored glasses and gets all the girls,” while the also-handsome Little Will has “a Ken-doll face.” Comparisons are often made to figures in entertainment: “Big Will’s voice was smooth and sonorous, like a professional DJ’s”; “His expression turned somber, like that of a television news reporter interviewing a hurricane victim”; “He looked like he was playing a homeless person on TV.” The emotional palette is similarly limited. I lost count of how many times these characters “grinned” at each other.

Some of the novel’s tone-deaf moments might be a product of Waldman’s relatively recent venture into the world she is writing about. In an interview with New York magazine, she spoke of her worry that she would not fit in at the big-box store where she worked for a short time as research for the novel. She points out that having a degree from Brown University might have raised questions in the hiring process. She notes that while many of her coworkers had to bike or walk to work (as Diego does in the novel), she had the relative luxury of arriving in her own car. She made “flubs” like poking fun at the store—a place others were proud to work. She reports ultimately winning them over by bringing in banana bread. But the novel is written from the distance and with the awkwardness of an outsider who is conscious of her own advantages and appears wary of speaking out of turn.

This may explain why there’s little conflict in Help Wanted beyond the easy dislike of Meredith and some of the sinister execs who drop in from HQ. There are few tense relationships among the characters, and no one acts unreasonably or has an inexcusable flaw. In fact, Help Wanted often appears to strain to present the rank and file in a good light, as if its mission to draw attention to their working conditions depended on the reader’s seeing what good people they are.

I found myself thinking back to Waldman’s comment that “writing about the romantic and psychological problems of middle-class people” no longer seemed to her “a valid way to spend a career.” To some extent one’s opinion of Help Wanted may boil down to your sense of what fiction is for. Did the election of Trump, and a series of disturbing developments in American and global politics more broadly, render the closely observed novel “comically insignificant,” like the box of books from Penguin Random House that the workers unload from the truck? And if so, is the only type of defensible novel one that resembles a documentary—a log of social conditions and their most visible effects? Or is there an intrinsic value in the careful observation of other people and in the work of imagining their humanity? I am inclined to think that there is and that the people of Town Square Store #1512 might have benefited from the kind of unflinching exploration Waldman devoted to the lives of Nathaniel P. and his friends.

NYRB Reviewed: In Ascension, 496 pp. by Martin MacInnes

 

The Long View

Daisy Hildyard

Martin MacInnes; illustration by Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva

Reviewed:

In Ascension

Black Cat, 496 pp., $18.00 (paper)

by Martin MacInnes

Astronauts often return from their missions with stories of what is known as the overview effect: an intense, sometimes spiritual feeling of awe or love that overwhelmed them when they looked down on Earth from orbit. The image of Earth seen from space, in which the planet appears as a luminous blue-green object floating in darkness, was important to the modern environmental movement at its beginnings in the 1970s, because it showed how fragile the biosphere is.

Others have interpreted the same view differently. The English poet J.H. Prynne has called the picture of Earth taken from the surface of the moon an “unbelievably gross photograph” and a “piece of sentimental whimsy.” (It was, he said in a 1970 lecture, “in all the soap ads.”) More influentially, the American philosopher Donna Haraway’s 1988 essay “Situated Knowledges”—in which she proposes “embodied objectivity,” an approach to the origins of rational knowledge—has been applied to photographs of the planet. In this interpretation, they are examples of “disembodied vision”: Earth becomes “an illusion, a god trick” when seen “from above, from nowhere,” suggesting humanity has transcended the planet—but we haven’t, yet. (Not even the tech billionaires, who are doing their best.)

In that sense the view of Earth from space may do the opposite of what the early environmentalists hoped, insinuating that we don’t really need the planet after all. Haraway’s thirty-five-year-old idea is still discussed because it addresses the workings of power—how certain positions assume and gain authority. Space has long been associated with dominance, in part because it is thought of as empty and neutral, a nowhere.

You could say that a novel is the opposite of a view from nowhere—good or bad, realistic or fantastical, it is always set in time, place, and body. When Leigh, the protagonist of Martin MacInnes’s science fiction novel In Ascension, looks down from her spaceship, Nereus, she doesn’t seem to have any sense of overview. Instead, she begins a halting conversation with ground control about their impressions of life back on Earth. She asks her colleagues down in Florida to talk about “the sound of raindrops bouncing off the roof, the first folds of color in the sky, steam rising from the forest verges as the storm begins to fade.” Leigh is nostalgic, a trait she despises in herself.

Perhaps her nostalgia stems from the fact that she didn’t intend to become an astronaut. Leigh was a marine biologist specializing in algae when she moved to California to lead a program developing food for future missions to space. She happens to be qualified for mission training: tall, experienced in extreme deep-sea diving, hardworking, emotionally unattached. Her voyage, when it comes, is bigger than anything anybody has ever undertaken before. Leigh’s world is a speculative near future of climate catastrophe, in which a major leap in jet propulsion has suddenly made long-distance space travel possible. The new engines are powered by a concealed mechanism that the inventors themselves don’t understand—unsettlingly, the technology came to them in dreams.

Leigh is intelligent, cool, aloof. She is a researcher before she is a partner, daughter, or friend. Her shying away from human relationships is presented as a consequence of her early life growing up in Rotterdam with her violent father, Geert, an aspiring architect who failed his entrance exams and “never got over this,” and her mother, Fenna, a mathematician who retreated into her work. Geert’s aggression was directed only at Leigh—not at Fenna or at Leigh’s younger sister, Helena—and Leigh never fully understands why. As her calm, collected voice narrates the events of her life, she returns several times to question what was driving or haunting Geert and why Fenna let the violence continue. The family never discussed “the threat”—it was “implicit, clear in the bruises on my arms, neck and face. I had been thrown repeatedly against a wall. The worse the beatings got, the more withdrawn Fenna became.”

At the age of ten, Leigh finds a sense of release when she is permitted to swim in the local river, the Nieuwe Maas, alone. One afternoon in early autumn she arrives there in a state of desperation: “I felt particularly hopeless. I saw no realistic escape from the situation with Geert and I lived in constant terror of him.” She walks into the chill water. “As I reached the point where my shoulders became submerged, my chest started to convulse and I swallowed mouthfuls of bitter water, and very faintly, as if from a great distance, I sensed that I was about to give way.”

At this point the story that Leigh is telling swerves, and we go somewhere entirely different. The moment of despair that she seems to be walking into opens, with an almost literal flourish, onto a whole other world. As Leigh pushes herself further underwater, her eyes open, and she finds that she can “suddenly see everything very clearly. The larger rocks on the river-bed studded with worms, sponges, limpets and lichen. Beyond them the tufts of floating green and purple riverweed.” She experiences a moment of complete silence:

I realised, suddenly, with appreciation, that absolutely everything around me was alive.

There was no gap separating my body from the living world. I was pressed against a teeming immensity, every cubic millimetre of water densely filled with living stuff.

She senses the “fraternity” of millions of invisible microscopic organisms all around her:

I didn’t look through the water towards life, I looked directly into water-life, a vast patchwork supporting my body, streaming into my nostrils, my ears, the small breaks and crevices in my skin, swirling through my hair and entering the same eyes that observed it.

The novel doesn’t belabor the implied connection between this epiphany and the calling to marine biology that will ultimately allow Leigh to escape from Geert. There is something here that lingers, though—throughout, MacInnes contrasts Leigh’s parched human relationships with her thriving and magnetic attraction to the universe and its systems and ecosystems.

From the beginning of her career, Leigh is carried away from other people by her work: though she goes to university just a few miles away, she doesn’t see her parents or sister often. A few years later, traveling alone on a graduate research project to collect phytoplankton in the Azores, she feels herself to be “in close contact, as I saw it, with the stuff of the world.” She resolves that this work will be “the objective and the priority of my life, more so than family, than relationships, than any other form of knowledge or attainment at all.” Soon after the Azores she is offered a position on the ship Endeavour, sailing into the mid-Atlantic to gather information on a deep-sea trench that seems to have pulled open. The next time we see her she has already landed her post at ICORS, the space agency.

Weird things are happening everywhere Leigh goes. When she works on strains of algae at the space agency in California, she is surprised to discover that the laboratory technicians have been given orders to splice a new gene into her samples. She also hears about carved rocks in the sky, a blip in the Voyager spacecraft records, and erratic readings from gigantic satellites in the desert. Her superiors clear her to receive pieces of classified information, which she puzzles together with a gradually rising apprehension that something big is happening to her world. But her fascination with aquatic biology changes little from that moment in the Nieuwe Maas. One of the central subjects of her research—and one of the central figures in the plot—is one of the least fantastical. She works with an ordinary, widespread, apparently humble life-form, archaea (“the ancients” in Latin), “small, structurally simple” micro-organisms that are ancestors to all complex forms of life, seemingly antedating even bacteria, and exist today in ice sheets, deep-sea vents, and the human stomach.

In Ascension is the Scottish writer Martin MacInnes’s third novel, and it is a substantial work, carefully paced and plotted. Each of its five sections—four narrated by Leigh and one by Helena, plus an epilogue—covers an expedition, moving the action from Rotterdam to Ascension Island (via two mid-Atlantic voyages), Jakarta, California, French Guiana, and finally into space. There is an elegant symmetry to the novel, which balances Leigh’s stratospheric career against the collapse of her personal relationships: she fails to sustain a connection with Helena and an almost nonexistent romantic attachment. Later, Fenna, living alone in Holland, starts behaving strangely. Leigh becomes aware of an increasing responsibility toward her aging mother and distances herself. This distancing, like the faltering of Leigh’s love life, slowly reveals itself through her few reticent allusions to the people she cares about, and nearer the end of the novel we see it again in Helena’s differing perceptions of those relationships.

There is a thought-provoking turn at the end of In Ascension that draws the ordinary and extraordinary parts of Leigh’s life together. The novel as a whole has a Möbius strip construction; a mind-bending image of circular experience is stitched into everything. This is common to MacInnes’s books, each of which features a formal arrangement around a central image or concept. His first novel, the surreal thriller Infinite Ground (2017), is set in an unnamed Latin American country after the disappearance of a young man from a family meal in a restaurant. Concerned with images of absence, it follows a manhunt for a savage murderer who may not actually exist, via a trail of fictional microbes.

MacInnes’s second novel, Gathering Evidence (2020), is a dystopia set in Westenra, a fictional wildlife park in the Congo Basin. Shel, a biologist, is sent into Westenra to find out what’s happening to the small residual population of bonobo monkeys that have survived widespread extinction events and are endangered by some mysterious threat. Back at home, Shel’s partner, John, is recovering from a violent attack. The novel is also, elegantly and uneasily, the story of “the nest,” a powerful, ultimately malevolent form of AI that records and silently harvests the traces of movement or interaction that each life imprints on its surroundings.

In Ascension opens itself to a larger readership than its predecessors, and it was long-listed for the Booker Prize. As a work of science fiction, this in itself would have made it an exception until recently. Science fiction has always had a wide readership, of course, but the past decade has seen a new audience emerge as prejudices about genre fiction lift. Yet it’s rarely acknowledged that genre fiction has its own forms of technical sophistication that a reader of literary fiction won’t necessarily grasp. (Perhaps this is a hangover of the old condescension.) Readers may, for example, need an eye for the profusion of new terms and concepts that often come with worldbuilding, and an ear for the allusive constructions beloved of science fiction and fantasy, or they’ll lose their way (and lose interest).

MacInnes’s first two novels are more invested in body horror and surreal detours than In Ascension, which is concerned more directly with character—how Leigh’s life progresses from childhood and through her career. The new novel alludes to some of the greats of its genre, from Arthur C. Clarke to Ursula K. Le Guin. Speculative settings and technologies are worked out and communicated with sufficient clarity to be grasped by even the entry-level science fiction reader (this one, anyway). But it’s also an assured literary novel in the nineteenth-century mode—fat and heavy, concerned with character and society, and delivered in Leigh’s quietly conversational voice.

MacInnes was born in 1983 and belongs to a generation of novelists celebrated for being clever and funny—for autofiction and sharp satire of hyperliterate individuals in Brooklyn, London, or Berlin. Compared with these urbane approaches, MacInnes’s writing seems to come from another planet. It’s more violent, and more fantastical, but the distinction is more immediately tonal. His novels have an unusual sobriety, a serious atmosphere, and a searching quality. The prose is clean and spare but rarely designed to impress; there’s wisdom rather than cleverness in the storytelling.

Where his peers can do brilliant parodies of how humans behave on social media, MacInnes invents his own species of AI. Where they refer to psychoanalysis, thinking about how parents influence their children, MacInnes refers to biology to describe the full evolutionary inheritance of the human and human society, from the origins of life to the emergence of the cyborg. (Each of his novels has a passage or plotline that runs back to the origins of the human.) In Ascension has its scenes of ordinary life. Sisters meet on Zoom to argue about their mother’s care. A tense work dinner relaxes with “the first hit of the chardonnay.” But the story also frequently pulls back for a wider view of a person on a planet, in space, in deep time. MacInnes treats this view as continuous with the experience of a person eating her dinner or checking her phone—the big room all this happens inside.

If MacInnes’s writing goes against certain trends, that’s not to say he’s alone out there. The publisher and early readers of In Ascension compared it to Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018),Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998). These are intriguingly diverse: Powers’s is a heavyweight state-of-the-nation novel; VanderMeer’s is the slim first volume in a violent dystopian sci-fi trilogy; Chiang’s shorter work falls somewhere between Borges’s fiction and the Alien movies. But they are all part of an explosion in cross-genre ecological literature that builds on the work of an older generation of radical women: Haraway’s writing on cyborgs and hybrids; sci-fi and fantasy fiction by Le Guin and Octavia Butler; the biologist Lynn Margulis’s work on the significance of symbiosis and interconnection in evolution. (A minor character in In Ascension is named Ursula, and Leigh gives a talk at a lecture hall named after Margulis.) The different fictions of Powers and Chiang, VanderMeer and MacInnes, all present lives as profoundly interdependent in ways that are explicitly ecosystemic or otherwise connected with nonhuman ways of being. Such environmental stories seem to lend themselves to speculative or fantastical treatments—The Overstory is the only realist work—and they are all imaginatively far out, with psychedelic concepts, unusual narrative approaches to time, and sudden changes of scale.

When In Ascension was first released in the UK last year, a friend drew my attention to another similarity between these stories: their protagonists are all exceptional female scientists, all women deeply involved with academic research but cut off from human relationships. Louise, the heroine of Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” is a linguist and has a composed presence much like Leigh’s. She narrates events in the second person to her dead daughter, delivering a compressed, factual account of her daughter’s fatal accident and the disintegration of her marriage, interspersed with appreciations of logograms, calculus, and Fermat’s theorem.

The unnamed biologist who narrates Annihilation is, like Leigh, enthralled by the ecosystems of her professional specialty—rock pools, a patch of urban scrub, an abandoned swimming pool—but she absents herself from human relationships. Of her parents: “Sometimes it felt as if I had been placed with a family rather than born into one.” On friendship: “I didn’t cultivate friends.” Patricia Westerford, a tree biologist, is the main character of one of the braided narratives in The Overstory. As a child, hearing aids and speech difficulties curtail her interactions with other people. Instead of listening to human conversation, she pays attention to, and cares about, trees. As a teenager she declines a potential prom date because of “a white-oak stake through the heart.”

A cynical reader might see in Leigh and her peers the figure of a woman who has been tidied up by someone named Martin, Richard, Jeff, or Ted. If tradition placed a white man in the role of astronaut, scientist, thinker, or simply hero, this newer writing puts a woman in his place—but her streamlined character dictates a story that doesn’t mention ordinary feminine experiences. (Sexism, friendships, and periods, for example, are left out of all these speculative fictions.) This contrasts with the gendered, race-aware science fiction of Butler or Le Guin, both of whom engaged with what Le Guin called “privilege and power and domination,” even in their most fantastical stories of parallel universes.

Leigh’s account of herself—“I immersed myself in study, and excelled”—also feels far from the real-world career of a biologist like Margulis, who talked about how her research into evolution was rejected on political grounds, who expressed glee in her public intellectual disagreements with male peers, and who can be seen on video breaking into her own version of the disco hit “Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now” as part of a lecture on prokaryotic evolution. I remember my own doctoral supervisor, a historian of science, telling me about traveling to Holland to collect an award for one of her books. She felt a pang of terror when she entered the reception—an event held in her honor—and the panel, the governing body, and the other nominees turned unsmiling faces to scrutinize her. She was the only person in the room who didn’t have a white beard. My supervisor recounted this as a funny story (and humblebrag), but I think it was also a shrewd kind of training—professional preparation for a female graduate student in that field at that time. Leigh never walks into a room like this, and aside from one characteristically minimal reference to a female mentor being “patronised, or worse,” by male colleagues, she doesn’t seem to be aware that such rooms even exist.

That’s okay. Characters are people, not equations, and they can’t be incorrect. It’s the fact that these elite, isolated women are central to several different stories that suggests a new stock character, and somebody to think about. Readers will have mixed feelings about them, but among those feelings there will be a sense of relief. These women don’t experience misogyny because they are just too busy discovering new species (the biologist), cracking alien languages (Louise), making scientific breakthroughs (Patricia), or flying into space (Leigh).

This isn’t just a matter of misogyny, though, or even of gender more widely, but a question about identity and how it can drive a story. In Ascension, “Story of Your Life,” and Annihilation also leave out race and class. (Identity is absented from Annihilation to the extent that the characters don’t have names.) There is undoubtedly something unnerving about the way these speculative settings are so quiet on human difference, as though something were being obscured, an artificial nowhere cultivated. What sort of power is at work in the neutralized, emptied spaces that these stories seem to be creating?

There’s a telling exception in The Overstory. Patricia Westerford, unlike the other characters, encounters obstacles. Like Margulis, she is derided by male colleagues for her groundbreaking claims about ecological networks. Patricia loses her job and writes a hugely successful general-interest book about trees. She becomes an eccentric, living in the woods in a happy, cranky marriage to a man who has his own house but visits her at lunchtime with spinach lasagna or rainbow trout.

Patricia’s narrative has a messiness that is absent from Leigh’s finely calibrated ascent. Perhaps this difference has something to do with genre. In The Overstory, a realist novel, Patricia is buffeted and knocked around, as all real lives are, by society and circumstances beyond her control. But In Ascension, Annihilation,and “Story of Your Life” are each set in their own speculative universe. Looking for realism there misses the point. Leigh seems to absorb this soon after she takes her first job at the space center. She applies herself to her work and spends time at the gym: “Sometimes I didn’t recognise myself.” It’s not only the new muscles but something deeper, a “blank expression” she has acquired. “This isn’t you, I said, but a character entering another kind of fiction.”

What this blanked character, this other kind of fiction, brings to our stories is room to look at different things. There is a fictional scale effect at work in speculative fiction, like an overview effect. An astronaut in orbit can look at the planet, but she can’t see an individual person or a fish, a monkey, an iceberg, a tree down there. Speculative stories often do something comparable, stepping outside the mess and complexity of personal relations to look at wider surroundings. A feeling of and for the world can be induced precisely because it’s estranged from reality, as the astronaut knows.

This could be why speculative environmental fiction and environmental fiction about space (I thought of Samantha Harvey’s “space pastoral” novel Orbital) are flourishing, along with a cohesive new genre of climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” Leigh has a story to tell about this planet’s algae and deep-sea vents, the human microbiome and the sixteen layers of steel and water that make up Nereus’s walls. VanderMeer’s biologist describes an exchange between the personal and the environmental: “Sustenance for me was tied to ecosystem and habitat, orgasm the sudden realization of the interconnectivity of things.”

This “sudden realization” of interconnectivity could be a description of Leigh’s revelation on the riverbed. In Ascension is full of the interconnected planet. Amoeba under a microscope; constellations over the Atlantic; a city mystified by morning smog; a tide of turtles; the “sap-full” smell of an oak-paneled corridor; bright green lakes in the craters of dormant volcanoes. All this is seen, heard, smelled, and felt by Leigh and Helena. The novel is sci-fi at heart, but the genre has room for the luminous, caring descriptions of life in detail that I associate more readily with Proust or Karl Ove Knausgård.

As an adult, Leigh stays at Fenna’s flat while between work contracts. One night she wakes up in the early hours to hear “the noise of plates slipping in the sink.” She creeps out of her room and stands in the dark hallway, peering into the “edge of light [that] filtered out from the kitchen.” It’s 3:38 AM, and Fenna is doing the washing-up. But Leigh had washed up and put the dishes away after dinner. Inexplicably, Fenna is repeating the operation: “The same two glasses and plates. The same colander and lemon squeezer.”

The scene is a turning point in our understanding of Fenna, and it’s an emblem of the circular or looped experience of time that runs through In Ascension. There’s also a quality of atmosphere that is harder to pin down—the suspense as Leigh stands secretly in the dark hallway, close to and separate from Fenna in her nightgown at the sink. It’s an eerie moment, disconcerting and also sleepily familiar.

The story draws this intensified attention out, with quiet extravagance, into space. As the novel expands, it forms a constellation of colanders and meteors. We see a close-up view of Jupiter’s “soft milky” surface and Fenna at the sink in her nightgown, “the material hanging from her shoulder blades, a distant, bewildered expression on her face.” In Ascension has it both ways, as fiction can: we’re there in Nereus with Leigh looking down on Earth from space while we also, at the same time, hear the rain on the roof.

As Long as You Both Shall Live NYRB Anatomy of a Fall Review

 

As Long as You Both Shall Live

Merve Emre

Sandra Hüller in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall

Les Films Pelléas

Reviewed:

Anatomy of a Fall

a film directed by Justine Triet

Unlike her contemporaries, Justine Triet, the Academy Award and Palme d’Or–winning writer and director of Anatomy of a Fall(2023), is not interested in the jeune fille. The women at the center of her first three feature films are unmarried mothers just shy of middle age, brisk, pragmatic, professionally self-assured, and sexually magnetic. Each is orbited by a cast of mostly inept, self-absorbed men who clamor for help and approval, and who provoke in her conflicted feelings of exasperation and tenderness. They are, however, handy babysitters. Casually, she asks or expects them to hang around her dirty, cluttered apartment and look after her daughters, whom she loves—about this, there can be no doubt—but with an air of constant preoccupation. Much of her attention is absorbed by her work, as a journalist, a lawyer, or a psychoanalyst and novelist. More than a wife or mother, she identifies as a person who manipulates the conditions of reality with her words.

In the stressful docu-comedy Age of Panic (2013), the woman is Laetitia, played by Laetitia Dosch. She is a Parisian television journalist who must cover the 2012 national elections on the same day that her estranged ex-husband insists on seeing their daughters. Laetitia bustles from task to task with an abstracted, almost dazed sense of efficiency—trying on clothes, giving instructions to the bewildered babysitter, smiling for the camera—while her ex heaves and shouts and stalks her around the city. In the romantic comedy In Bed with Victoria (2016), the woman is Victoria, played by Virginie Efira. A brashly sexy lawyer, Victoria is often filmed from above as she sprints from one scene and one man to another: to court, where she defends her ex-boyfriend against the charge that he assaulted his girlfriend at a wedding; to a community center, where her ex-husband performs a dramatic reading of his autofictional blog about her to a room full of eager men; to her apartment, where a former client, a puppyish drug dealer, sleeps on her couch in exchange for babysitting her daughters.

In the psychological thriller Sibyl (2019), the woman is Sibyl—Efira again—a novelist and psychoanalyst. She becomes obsessed with a patient, a young, pregnant actress who must decide whether to have an abortion, a decision that recalls Sibyl’s own choice nearly a decade earlier to have the child of the man who abandoned her. Leaving her daughters in the care of her boyfriend, Sibyl accompanies the actress to a film set and gets caught up in the triangle formed by the actress, the actor who impregnated her, and his wife, the film’s director. The surreal encounter—we never quite know who is acting, who is not, or what the difference might be—serves as the source material for the novel that Sibyl will write.

For Laetitia, Victoria, and Sibyl, life is a perilous high-wire act, with work serving as the pivot point, the anchor for their sense of self and reality. When their work starts to wobble, they do, too. Laetitia, drained by her day of reporting, turns violent with her ex, then hysterically horny with her lover. Victoria, whose license is suspended for unethical practices, reads the collected works of Nietzsche and overdoses on pills. Sibyl, who transgresses every boundary between an analyst and her client, drinks compulsively. Their men, never reliable to begin with, disappear. The children turn weepy, petulant, and sullen, or, worse, they remain entirely indifferent to their mother’s struggles. As the woman’s world goes to pieces, a void opens beneath her feet, a blank where meaning and identity had been etched in the always artificial and unforgiving language of professional competence.

What does she see when she looks down? Her downfall, her shame, yes—but also her chance at freedom. When one’s past suddenly feels so distant, so foreign, so violently estranged from one’s present, it is possible—indeed, it may be necessary—to imagine oneself anew. And so Triet’s women start to play make-believe: to act; to perceive themselves, in essence, as fictional characters, and to perceive others as characters, too, who might be corralled into a grand literary act of self-reconstruction. “I see very clearly now,” Sibyl thinks in the film’s final voiceover. “My life is a fiction. I can rewrite it however I want. I can do anything, change anything, create anything.” She starts to write in the French tradition of autofiction, while Victoria sues her ex-husband for the autofiction he has written about her. But what kind of fictions are their lives? And how will their power to do anything, change anything, create anything infringe on others?

Anatomy of a Fall, Triet’s fourth feature, combines all the familiar motifs of her earlier ones but without the comedy or the sex. In their place we have a marriage between the novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) and Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), a teacher who aspires to write a novel. Sandra is not only aware of the freedom that Laetitia, Sibyl, and Veronica discovered; she has exercised it to tremendous success. Her critically acclaimed autofictional novels narrate her father’s death, her mother’s illness, and the accident that caused her eleven-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), to lose almost all of his vision. Her novel describes the accident in “such detail, like in a documentary,” observes Zoé, the graduate student who interviews Sandra at her house in the cold, glittering, desolate French Alps. In the scripted version of this scene, though not in the final film, Zoé, fascinated and irritated by Sandra’s relationship to “the real,” interrogates her reliance on life. “Your stories never come purely from your imagination,” Zoé accuses her, to which Sandra replies, blithely, “As soon as I start writing I destroy what I know.”

Anatomy of a Fall deals with the consequences of making a name by destroying what one knows. Among these consequences are the rage and disappointment of Samuel, which have curdled into a resentment so acute that it is unspeakable, uncontainable. It is atmospheric. We do not see Samuel, but we hear his hammering over the song that he plays upstairs on loop, presumably to disrupt the women’s conversation—an instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.,” a song that is at once embarrassing in its datedness and more than a little pathetic, especially if one imagines Samuel trying to identify with its refrain: “I’m a motherfuckin’ P.I.M.P.” “P.I.M.P.” starts and stops, starts and stops, grows louder, until Sandra and Zoé cut the interview short. Zoé leaves, as does Daniel, who goes for a walk with his seeing-eye dog, Snoop, trudging far enough for the music to fade and to be replaced by the sound of their feet in the snow and Daniel’s gentle commands. They stumble back to the house, back to the deafening noise. There, by the side of the shed, they discover Samuel’s body.

The discovery and examination of the body is the only time that the film shows Samuel in its present. The autopsy turns him into a series of photographs, of bruised and fractured body parts; the investigation into his death resurrects him through videos and recordings—as a mere reproduction of a human being, a man turned into moving images and distant sounds. His speech and his actions are recreated by lawyers who rehearse the events that led to his fall. They film a polyurethane mannequin, Samuel’s double, falling from the window. They restage what Sandra tells them was her last conversation with Samuel: two investigators read the couple’s lines flatly, and a wobbling handheld camera records their performance as the harsh white sunlight pours in from the window, washing out their features.

The investigation, which attempts to understand, through visual and aural technologies, the truth of what happened to Samuel, permits Triet to indulge her obsession with cinema’s mixed mediums. Across all her films, her characters film, tape, and photograph, revisiting images or recordings of themselves to grasp the truth of who they were in the past and who they are now. Like Sibyl (or like François Truffaut’s Day for Night, to which Sibyl pays homage), Anatomy relishes its metacinematic twists. The film populates its world with professional actors who play at being amateurs, who act well by acting badly—as prosecutors, as lawyers, as witnesses—for the cameras within the camera.

Daniel, who must prove to the investigators that he heard his parents speaking peaceably, not fighting, when he left the house, is filmed confessing that he made a mistake about where he was when he heard them. Sandra, awkward and hesitant, practices her testimony in front of her lawyers, Vincent and Noor; they film her as she insists that she will “protect Samuel’s image,” not build a case for her innocence. “You need to start seeing yourself the way others are going to perceive you,” Vincent tells her—a line rich in irony given that she has made a career doing just that, but with the plausible deniability that writing affords the novelist. The technologies of cinema seem to offer no such cover.

Or do they? When the story shifts from the investigation to the courtroom, almost every scene, every testimony is keyed to a video or audio recording made in its first half. The film starts to loop back on itself; like “P.I.M.P.,” it seems to be stuck on repeat. With each repetition, its earlier scenes accrue new meanings—meanings that the prosecutor, the defense, and Sandra argue over, in French and English. Now the audio of Zoé’s interview with Sandra, when played for all to hear, makes Sandra’s voice sound hollow, exaggerated, flirtatious, and desperate. Now the video of Daniel, expressing his confusion about where he was when he heard his parents speaking, looks like the video of a guilty child trying to squirm his way out of an unpracticed lie. Now the film of the falling mannequin, played in slow-motion, appears comic in its crudity. Yet whether the original or its repetition, these are all simulacra; the truth of what happened to Samuel does not exist here. Far from establishing the definitive story, the film’s self-cannibalizing structure forces its mediums and its multiple languages into the same instability as the autofiction that Sandra writes.

The closest a recording comes to persuading us that we can know the truth is the recording that Samuel secretly made of the fight he and Sandra had the day before his death. They fight in the kitchen, where he has prepared a meal that she eats greedily. Ostensibly material for his novel, the audio casts them in rigid and unforgiving yet recognizable roles: the conquering woman, the thwarted man. She is a shameless careerist, a cheat, a bad mother. He is pathetic and self-victimizing, a man with big ideas and no follow-through who has “blamed himself on a loop,” Sandra claims, for Daniel’s accident. His guilt and his martyrdom to his son are choices, she insists, inoculating him from taking real artistic risks. The fight seems like the sum total of every fight they have ever had—the sum total of all the fights, in all the marriages, in all the world—with every accusation, every counteraccusation compressed into ten minutes. It is a stroke of genius and an act of sadism to make the dialogue as precise and loud as “P.I.M.P.”; to let us hear every bite and every chew, every pour of wine, every breath, hiss, and slap. Watching two people fight is as excruciatingly intimate as watching them have sex, and much more interesting.

But what does it prove? A day in the life of a marriage cannot be substituted for the day before or the day after it. People do not live on a loop, and even if they rehearse their arguments, even if they tell the same stories again and again, their performances almost always deviate from the script. “That recording is not reality. If you have an extreme moment in life, an emotional peak, and focus on it, of course, it crushes everything,” Sandra insists. “It’s our voices, but it’s not who we are.” Yet in a courtroom, under the eyes of the law, with its faith in evidence, this is exactly what marriage becomes. Marriage is a song stuck on repeat; an endless dress rehearsal in which one plays the most abject and cruel version of oneself; a trap that one falls into—bang—over and over again; an infinite simulacrum of a real and fulfilling life.

It is less pessimistic, although not optimistic, to observe that all marriages settle into their patterns. Looking back, as Anatomy of a Fall forces us to do, one wonders how these patterns become well-worn grooves; when, exactly, they began to wear one’s patience thin or simply shred it to bits. One also knows that the pattern does not tell the whole story. “Sometimes a couple is a kind of chaos,” Sandra insists. The truth lives within this chaos on the other side of what can be made visible and audible, of what can be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt.

What kind of fiction is her life? One startling answer to that question is that Sandra is a supporting actress in someone else’s fiction—her son’s. The children in Triet’s previous films are too young to be much more than comic accessories; they cry, scream, play, and mimic what the adults around them say or do. To rewatch Anatomy of a Fall is to attend to the child; to what Daniel can or cannot see; to how his lack of vision stimulates his imagination. Incapable of seeing the evidence that the lawyers and investigators have generated of his father’s fall, he possesses the unique freedom to choose what to believe and what type of story to tell about his family—a choice that eluded his parents, who were trapped in the same loop till death did them part. This is the obvious yet shocking revelation that anchors the film: every parent’s marriage plot is her child’s Bildung.

If Daniel is placed front and center, a different story begins to unfold—one in which justice is not a parade of simulacra but, quite literally, blind. The film begins not with the interview but with an all-encompassing darkness. We hear before we are permitted to see, and what we hear, then see, is Snoop panting, fetching a ball to give to Daniel, who prepares his bath, while Sandra and Zoé speak to each other. The two scenes, with Daniel upstairs in his private dark and his mother downstairs in her Alpine light are equally important, if entirely disconnected from each other. Day for Night, indeed.

How much can Daniel see? Or how, exactly, do he and Snoop see together? We do not have a clear sense of his point of view until the trial begins, one year after his father’s death, when he has had time to grow up, to rehearse what happened on that day in his mind. As he listens to the experts testify, the camera cuts first to his face, up close, and then shows us a flash of a scene that no one could have witnessed—his mother striking his father, his father alone, falling to his death. Where do these scenes exist?

Triet’s camera work suggests they exist deep in the child’s mind, which is as dazzlingly and finely illuminated as the snow in the sunlight. When his mother testifies, the camera occasionally sits near Daniel’s shoulder, and although he cannot see her on the stand, what she discloses sharpens his point of view—of his mother, of his father, and of the crimes committed within their marriage. Listening to the recording of their fight, the exaggerated soundtrack, we suspect, is how Daniel hears it. The film’s visualization of it does not represent how it really played out, but how he imagines it.

A startling amount of Anatomy of a Fall seems to take place in Daniel’s consciousness, which is shaped by his active and intelligent imagination. It revolves around a single question: Is his father a suicide or his mother a murderer? “When we lack the ability to judge something, and this lack is unbearable, the only thing we can do is decide,” Marge, Daniel’s court-appointed guardian, instructs him, a little too bluntly. The narrative that Daniel reaches for to decide between these options is seeded early on, when Sandra steps outside to take a phone call, and, believing that Daniel is absorbed with practicing the piano, tells Vincent that one morning a few months earlier she found Samuel passed out in his own vomit and suspected that he had tried to overdose on aspirin. “If they indict you, it’s probably our best defense,” Vincent tells Sandra, although he does little to prove Samuel’s suicide.

It is Daniel who uses Snoop to see the truth. We expect the dog’s vision and the boy’s imagination to converge; Triet’s close-ups of the dog’s face draw attention to his eyes, pale blue and amazingly vigilant. But we do not expect Daniel’s willingness to put Snoop at risk. He tests the scenario his mother narrated, giving the dog aspirin, then telling the court that Snoop’s strange behavior tracks with his strange behavior on the day after that alleged suicide attempt, when Snoop might have eaten his father’s vomited aspirin.

The testimony that Daniel gives in court, after the recording of his parents’ fight, is proof of his decision to believe his mother. Daniel tells a story about taking Snoop to the vet with his father. As he begins to speak, the camera cuts to the image of Samuel in the car with Daniel in the passenger’s seat. The scene, which is shot partially from the back seat, cannot represent the child’s visual memory; only Snoop is back there. We see Samuel’s mouth move, but we do not hear his voice, only Daniel’s narration of the story that his father allegedly told him in the car. The story is about Snoop, “an outstanding dog,” whose existence, Samuel explains to his son, is defined by the submission of his vision to someone else’s demands. “He spends his life imagining your needs, thinking about what you can’t see,” Daniel’s Samuel says. It can only end in exhaustion: “Prepare yourself. It’ll be hard. But it won’t be the end of your life.” We do not need Daniel to tell us that his father is not really speaking about Snoop, who yields his vision to Daniel with generosity, without pity or regret. We know Samuel is speaking about himself from the look of resigned, gentle bitterness on his face—the last time we see it, but through his son’s imagination.

The story is, quite obviously, fictional, but by no means untrue. What Daniel narrates springs from a hard kernel of truth, a decision about who his father was, even if he cannot know what his father did. The story also seems rehearsed, with the same impassive determination with which we see Daniel playing the piano throughout the film, working the same tricky phrase until he gets it right. The clear, unfussy style of Daniel’s narration; the subtle and unsentimental allegory he offers his listeners; the family car as the setting for this moving exchange between father and son—this is the realist story as courtroom testimony, an utterly flawless performance of showing, not telling (or of telling, not showing, on cinema’s terms). It has to be. Daniel knows that he has no evidence. He is the only witness without a corroborating medium—no photograph, no video, no recording, no simulation, no notes. Yet Daniel’s story will be accepted as true by all who hear it. We know this from the slump of the prosecutor’s shoulders and his flat, unsneering observation that the boy’s testimony in no way qualifies as proof. The claim the story makes on its audience is not evidentiary; it is moral. To deny a grieving child his choice—to believe in his mother’s innocence, to reunite with her—would be an act of unbearable cruelty. We know what the verdict will be. We do not need to hear it announced.

What kind of fiction is her life? The mother is a writer of autofiction. Her son is a visionary of realism. Autofiction needs realism to save it from destroying what it knows; from solipsism and self-indulgence; from destroying other peoples’ lives in the pursuit of self-creation. Realism needs autofiction to liberate it from the imagination; to charge its claims to reality with truth, even if they are not, strictly speaking, real. Anatomy of a Fall is not truly a story about marriage, good, bad, whatever. It is a story about how cinema can reconcile these estranged genres of prose. More prosaically, it is about how a mother needs her son, and how a son needs his mother, even—or especially—when their visions of life diverge. Together, they can do anything, change anything, create anything. For some, this may be an ennobling prospect. For others—a husband and father, perhaps—it may be a terrifying one.

But let’s spare a sympathetic thought for husbands at the end. There is, of course, a more literal answer to the question “What kind of fiction is her life?” Sandra’s life is a fiction written by Justine Triet and her partner, Arthur Harari, winners of the 2023 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Harari, who also cowrote the screenplay for Sibyl, has appeared in all of Triet’s films, in increasingly diminished roles. In Age of Panic, he is Arthur, the calm, competent, handsome, and charming law student who helps Laetitia’s ex see his daughters. In In Bed with Victoria, he is “Le dresseur de chimpanzé,” the handler of the chimpanzee that performs at the wedding where Victoria’s ex-boyfriend is accused of assault, and that serves as a witness at his trial. In Sibyl, he is Dr. Katz, Sibyl’s analyst, who speaks torrentially, maniacally, in the film’s opening, but soon fades from the story.

In Anatomy of a Fall, Harari is “La critique littéraire,” a literary critic. We glimpse him only once, on the television program that Daniel and Sandra watch, simultaneously but separately, as they wait for the verdict. He explains to the audience that people are excited by the trial because it inverts the expected order of things; suddenly life is vulnerable to fiction instead of the other way around. In this state of vulnerability, the truth of what happened to Samuel does not matter. What matters is which version of the story people find more persuasive, more intriguing. “The story of a writer who murdered her husband is a lot more interesting than a teacher who committed suicide,” he concludes, before echoing Sandra’s words to Zoé at the film’s beginning: “Fiction can destroy reality.”

Triet’s casting of Harari as a lawyer, a handler, an analyst, and a critic points us to a way out of the film’s obsessive loops and toward a more optimistic vision of marriage. Marriage is a contract, one that secures every person’s right and responsibility to care for the family they have created. Marriage is an entertaining social performance, in which one escorts a mostly well-trained primate from one party to another, encouraging him or her to perform tricks. Marriage is a conversation, during which one person talks incessantly, then shuts up and listens. Marriage is like a nightly television program; you tune into it for brief, illuminating stretches of time before it fades into the background of daily life. Marriage is an inside joke between cowriters, a director and her critic—the trick is to find new ways to deliver the punch line. Marriage is a way of recruiting a thwarted man for your creative project rather than, say, murdering him.

Which marriage you are in depends on which story you want to believe. And that depends on which story you find more interesting.