Kathleen Alcott’s debut novel, The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (2012), published when they were twenty-three, has an epigraph by Frank O’Hara: “If there is a/place further from me/I beg you do not go.” Those lines from “Morning” have continued to haunt all of Alcott’s fiction, much of which deals with loss. The central characters in The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets—two brothers, Jackson and James, and their childhood friend Ida—have each lost a parent, they a father and she a mother. Growing up in their Northern California hometown, they clung to whatever evidence of the dead they were able to gather. Jackson has a picture of his father “blown up to a 14-by-16,” which he hangs “between the two windows we frequently kept open despite the weather.” Ida describes an outfit her mother wore to her freelance gig at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she met Ida’s father, how her “vertical-striped black-and-white pants…further contributed to the impression of a woman who went on forever in every direction.”
Alcott’s sentences, too, strain to hold as much evidence as they can, and often succeed. This maximalist approach to storytelling relies on astounding powers of memory and invention. In Alcott’s work the record will not be sweetened or sanded down. Instead it is reconstituted and reimagined until the urgency of the past comes into full view.
Alcott has been candid in interviews about some of the experiences that shaped their writing, such as growing up poor in Northern California, suffering the deaths of their parents at a relatively young age, and arriving in New York City in their early twenties, hell-bent on making it as a novelist with few connections. Their second novel, Infinite Home (2015), focuses on the tenants of a Brooklyn brownstone who face eviction after the building comes under new management. They include a painter recovering from a debilitating stroke, a comedian who has recently been dumped, a young man with a rare genetic condition called Williams syndrome, and a beautiful young woman named Adeleine, an embodiment of Alcott’s overflowing style and nostalgia, who moves into her room after stumbling on a flyer for the apartment listing, detaching “the unevenly perforated slip with great anticipation, happy for what she could touch and hold.”
The list of Adeleine’s aversions is long: other people, public places, the Internet (she’d hoped not to resort to it for her apartment search). Luckily she gets a job writing a local woman’s biography and finds a safe haven in this building full of people who are just as stubborn as she is, her curmudgeon soul mates. Her room, the novel’s flourishing sanctum, is cluttered with antiques and oddities. The painter, Thomas, observes that “the supply of treasures seemed endless” after the two have become lovers. The shelves sag, the counter space has all but disappeared. Adeleine writes songs about objects she has scavenged from around the city and ferried back to her lair, including:
Rolodex (red)
Photo (three children, one lawn chair, 1962)
Jar of Marbles (19)
Circus Music box (chimpanzee and bicycle)
Infinite Home, with its assemblage of homebodies, is like Adeleine’s room: a vortex that pulls everything inward. In contrast, Alcott’s third novel, America Was Hard to Find (2019), conjures breadth and sprawl, a violent spinning-out. The protagonist of the book’s first half is Fay, who rejects her affluent, conservative upbringing to bartend in the Mojave Desert; later, in the early 1970s, she joins a Weather Underground–style collective. Along the way she has a love affair with a married man named Vincent, who goes on to become the first person to walk on the moon. This setup, zany as it may sound, frees the narrative to maneuver daringly between the small intimacies of sex and the grand isolation of outer space.
Fay becomes pregnant but doesn’t tell Vincent, keeps the kid, and brings him along for the ride as she chases political ideals with her militant associates. Fay and her son, Wright, rack up short stays in American towns and cities (Newburgh, Yellow Springs, Cape Kennedy) and hold on to little. After Fay dies in her early thirties, the twelve-year-old Wright goes to live with his grandparents. The third and final section recounts his early adulthood as a gay man in San Francisco at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s and his attempts to connect with the astronaut father who may not even know he exists. (His new friends are justifiably skeptical.)
Throughout, Alcott’s sentences reach, tumble, and triumph. Sometimes the syntax is finicky to a fault: “Her Luckies she gave up, because they were packed by people too young for not enough money, and replaced with papers and sacks of loamy tobacco.” Elsewhere, as when Vincent thinks back over the years about his passion for Fay, the prose conveys an acute longing for the past to return, a melancholic sense of almost touching it:
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There were certain things he would be glad to remember, as glad as he had been while she lived. How she answered questions with questions, the bit of ink that was always on her face. A day he had parked a mile off and walked in, watched her for ten minutes she believed she was alone performing grand jetés over knots of manzanita, chin threaded to the sun, front toes piercing the future. That she had died almost didn’t matter, he thought. The distance between them was the same.
Late in the novel, Wright finally visits his father’s house for the first time, having packed up his life in San Francisco and driven to Ohio to meet him. Vincent is reticent as always, and Wright notes the same quality reflected in his living space: “There’s almost nothing to look at in the room, brown shag carpeted and furnished in muted oranges and greens.” Wright turns to the television, which shows news about the Challenger explosion. “We’ve never had a tragedy like this, the president says,” and Wright thinks of his best friend in San Francisco, Braden, an AIDS activist who carries in his memory the number of lives claimed by a virus his government refuses to acknowledge. A few days before Wright embarked on his long trip to the Midwest, he’d watched Braden “scrawl the latest in glitter on poster board, 16,116. We mourn seven lives, the president says.”
With their first collection of short stories, Emergency, Alcott has arrived somewhere new. Many of the stories focus on women in their mid-thirties from poor backgrounds who have recently gone through breakups with wealthier men. Many have lost a parent or are distant from their families. As young adulthood definitively comes to an end, some of these women confront the appalling realization that in the eyes of the world, and even many of their intimates, they have been objects, prizes, predictable types. The collection is Alcott’s most accomplished work to date.
In “Part of the Country” the narrator, a woman in her thirties, has recently left her relationship of many years, departing from familiar comforts to live alone in “the burned-out California of nobody’s dreams.” But even in her solitude she is disturbed by a vicious barking from the woods around her house, by a menacing local car mechanic, and by memories of her past selves, distinct as a row of curios behind glass. “Hadn’t it closed too quickly, the window of freedom?” she wonders.
I had been a girl in a classroom, alive to the questions of other people, then a young woman in a bar, budgeting another drink and a walk home or to spend it all on a cab right then—and after that, only briefly, had I been just a person.
Throughout the stories, femininity and money are construed as assets that are too easily spent and that might leave a woman indebted to choices she made lightheartedly or in desperation. In “Worship” a translator named Hannah moves to Nashville to be with Phillip, her boyfriend of four months. The details accumulate like a gathering storm: Hannah worries about aging, Phillip is sometimes too rough in bed, a faded tattoo refers to his ex-girlfriend, and his sexual charisma is a given—“wherever they went, women bent toward him like reeds under hands.” Then, when Hannah asks for more information about the end of Phillip’s last serious relationship, the sky cracks open. He tells her that he hit the woman, just once, and in the moment of confession he looks at Hannah “with the face of someone woken in the middle of the night, the alarm of holding two worlds.” It is one thing to see the intolerable past safely receding from view, another to find oneself suddenly smashing into it.
Then the turmoil subsides for a while. Hannah looks around the peaceful house she and Phillip now share and tries to take comfort in
the brass pot of his grandmother’s, which he revered and polished. A book of poems he loved, a copy of which he’d sent her in the mail—lavender pressed inside, ink on the title page, the word happy scrawled in a rush in his inconsistent hand.
But it only takes one inauspicious memento to reverse this renewal of trust. She finds photo booth pictures of Phillip and his ex, who has a tattoo that matches one on his left forearm.
At first Hannah registers the image dispassionately; she detects no pattern that connects the ill-treated ex to her own blossoming relationship. But soon it comes to trouble her that this woman once occupied the same role of doting, exultant girlfriend. “The worst thing she saw—spread across four frames where they posed in surprise, anger, lunacy, and lust—was happiness,” Alcott writes. When Phillip leaves without his keys to run an errand, Hannah locks him out. Debating whether to answer his pleas and let him back in, she reflects as if from a “nearly scientific” remove on “the change in the form of her life.” Now she would be either “a woman who stayed with a violent man, or a woman so afraid of a man that she left him.” Eventually she unlocks the door.
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The title story also follows a woman—this time named Helen—whose life has taken a sudden, unsettling turn. It is narrated by a chorus of her acquaintances, who think of themselves as financially and romantically secure, whereas Helen has just ended a long-term relationship with a wealthy older Danish man, and with it an entire phase of her life. When the chorus describes Helen’s younger self, its speech is tinged with envy and awe:
At twenty-two Helen Tiel had been beautiful enough that her airfare was often covered, her presence in a room something that rearranged chairs. She had believed in her own essence—a potency that men loved, and might dilute for their purposes, but which replenished itself, and which she could afford to share.
A year after her relationship ends, Helen heads to “some rented farmhouse in Maine,” but the narrating horde continues to track her as she posts about her rural escapades on social media and eventually lands herself in serious, shameful trouble of the sort that’s irresistible to gossips.
Reading the story one feels at times that its voice could be emanating both from anonymous onlookers and from Helen’s own internal monologue. In either case she comes across as a woman whose every action is picked over by arbiters of the social order, as if in a frustrated effort to divest her of her particularity. There is no mercy or even indifference for Helen; criticism alone illuminates her. The chorus diagnoses her previous relationship:
He was so clearly the type, a string of girls before her who also took the lessons in Danish he paid for, also fell in love with his aging relatives during summers in Odense. They all moved in quickly and ended up with the same haircut, a sort of androgynous bob he preferred, and which Helen, to her credit, refused. That she didn’t put it together sooner: some of us thought it was arrogance…. Helen still believed in a notion we had all worked to disavow, as all adults must: that to any rule, she might prove the brilliant exception.
Helen is portrayed as a reckless driver who has missed all the warning signs. She has sped past the period of her own potential without realizing it, and now there is something delusional about her need to be special, to move from New York City to the country and continue striking out for some new thrill, refusing socially sanctioned milestones like marriage and children that could have been hers at any point along the way: “Her age, she might have realized then, had never belonged to her: she’d been younger or older, the thing by which somebody else felt a sense of himself.”
If one imagines that thought in Helen’s voice it seems much sadder and yet also less absolute, a feeling rather than a fact. Coming from the chorus it sounds like blunt cruelty. Yet the rabble is also capable of reflecting on its own tendency toward compromise. This, after all, is what has made Helen the object of its collective interest in the first place. Addressing itself (and perhaps the reader), the chorus declares that Helen
wanted nothing predicted for her. Helen wanted the episodic existence of a man, the new eras of the self encouraged and forgiven—deviations and catastrophes ultimately understood, in her mind as well as others’, not as distress, but as courage.
Some part of Helen clearly wishes that, rather than wince at the baffling array of girls and women she once was, she and her circle would add them up to take the measure of the whole. Yet “in her mind as well as others’” this doesn’t come to pass. She is racing headlong toward her next era, clinging to the damning verdict passed down by her former friends, whose minds she’ll never leave.
“I am generally, in my short fiction, trying to address some formal problem,” Alcott told Catherine Lacey in a 2019 interview for The Paris Review Daily, “something I think I can’t do—a plural narrator, an image the protagonist can see but the reader can’t.” In “Natural Light” the narrator, who teaches a creative writing workshop, encourages her students to consider another formal problem:
We were talking about figurative language, and I wondered aloud how close a simile should get to the character’s actual life and circumstances: in comparing her inner sadness to the color of her dress, weren’t we depriving the reader of some useful speculative distance?
In Emergency Alcott rarely puts much “speculative distance” between the reader and the characters, to whom the stories waste little time introducing us. We already know, for instance, that the teacher has left her marriage and lost her mother. Sometimes she formulates her trials as a series of succinct, winning images (“I left him in taupes, my arches well supported, my thinking framed in apology”), sometimes as a pervasive threat.
Alcott doesn’t hold back either when drawing the reader into the protagonists’ psychic torments, their splashiest ambiguities. With precision and grace Alcott animates the tension between the characters’ need to let the past make extravagant claims on them and their need to protect themselves from the danger those claims pose. Their moods suddenly darken, and departed loved ones enter their thoughts as if no time had passed. They reclaim their freedom as solitude, but regret keeps them company.
The narrator of the collection’s last story, “Temporary Housing,” grew up poor in Petaluma, California, but has since become a psychiatrist and ascended to the professional middle class. Her connection with that past is fraught, to say the least—she has tried mightily to suppress it, although lately she has been slipping into reveries about an intense teenage friendship with a girl named Guin. They did everything together: taking drugs, sleeping nude, spying on neighbors. Both had lost their fathers by the time they met. The narrator recalls that in her mother’s house “the only object that worked as it should was the ashtray, a metal contraption that spun and lowered, when pressed, to conceal the butts in its belly. Guin loved that thing, and called it the Forgetter.”
As time passes, their enmeshed girlhood cleaves into a pair of seemingly opposite destinies. Guin’s teenage drug habit becomes an addiction. The narrator acquires degrees and a boyfriend who can’t imagine the place she came from. By the time Guin dies from a fentanyl overdose, the narrator is alone again and feeling the pull of her former life. Overcome by a depressive helplessness, she takes up her dead friend’s drug of choice. Suddenly Guin’s long absence from her life subsides. “I adore her again,” she says, “she walks deep into shadow, I go deep in my body, lick my tooth where she’s chipped it, she forgives us all distance, we come from the same place, we are parts of the same life.”
