When you attempt to write a plotless novel, your protagonist better have a hell of an internal dialogue.
For her debut novel, “Ask Me Again,” Clare Sestanovich clearly took a cue from the likes of Sally Rooney’s and Elif Batuman’s meandering coming-of-age stories. She focuses on a college-aged girl grappling with the world around her through a series of mundane events, made colorful and gripping by the perspective of the characters. In “Ask Me Again,” Sestanovich ups the ante. Or, I guess, subdues it.
The novel opens with protagonist Eva roaming a hospital in the wake of her grandmother’s suicide attempt. She is an inquisitive and scrupulous narrator, exacting in her narration, detailing the minutiae of her interactions and offsetting the vague construction of 2000s New York City around her. From here, she continues roaming through life, working toward a degree from a nameless institution and a job at a nameless newspaper. Her environment is stripped of any blatant identification. Every effort is made for us to focus on Eva. We meet Eva; and then, she meets Jamie.
It’s often hard to decide what sprawling and plotless novels like this one are actually about. The blurb will tell you that this book is about their friendship — Jamie, assured and scattered, Eva, self-conscious and restrained — and the way their lives intertwine, and how Jamie opens Eva up to the world, contributing to her coming of age. I found this misleading. It sells the book as a sort of platonic “Normal People,” but while somewhat accurate in terms of style and structure, the comparison is entirely lost when we turn to the scope of this novel and who it is really about. Jamie is not the Connell to Eva’s Marianne. He has no chapters with his perspective. Eva is the center of this stage.
Eva’s direction is fairly linear: She graduates high school, then college, gets a job and then quits. Jamie skirts around her — living in tents and warehouses, joining social movements, working at a tech company and at a small church — existing all over Eva’s thoughts and nowhere in her life. In the second half of the novel, they go months without talking. The only remnant of Jamie in Eva’s life becomes how Eva measures herself, her actions and her thoughts by what he would think of them.
The events that shape their respective paths feel very far away. Eva’s stream of consciousness takes center stage, and it is easy to see Sestanovich’s experience writing short stories in the simplistic and anecdotal nature of Eva’s thoughts. The purposeful neglect of worldbuilding and focus on the minute rescues the novel from becoming another mindless entry into the list of pretentious and empty-feeling plotless novels that I’ve encountered since the popularity of “Normal People,” and into something more significant.
It’s these moments when the book is at its most entertaining. Eva is commentating — finding small and solid things to react to — and describing their impact in captivating, bordering-on-pretentious ways. Being in Eva’s head is like being trapped in a John Green novel, but with no blatant character motivations beyond a vague inclination toward connection with others — just significance being placed on everything she comes across, a question posed and rescinded.
The event most resembling a climax occurs later in the novel. Jamie is hospitalized due to a fire in the abandoned warehouse he is squatting in with his religious congregation (He is just … a lot!). This event is delivered to the reader in past tense, Eva recounting it instead of experiencing it. Jamie is already in the hospital; the damage is already done. She is separated, always observing, chronicling and comparing her life to the lives of those around her. That is where the meat of the story lies, and Sestanovich’s novel comes alive.
Sestanovich’s prose thrives in these small moments. What in another novel is a simple description, serving its purpose to set the scene before being promptly forgotten, in Sestanovich’s hands it becomes insightful and discerning. Eva’s innocence is illuminating, and thrilling to read. A hookup with an ex-boyfriend inspires:
“Over time (Eva) had discovered that this kind of closeness could inspire recklessness: there were some things that were effortless to say when someone’s breath was in your hair, when you couldn’t look them in the eye.”
And a single kiss at the end of the night leads to Eva ruminating on the nuances of the experience:
“(T)here was no next thing. Lips forgot their clumsiness, tongues performed their full symphony, a hand explored the many ways to hold a face. This kind of romance was a delicate art, determined by the smallest changes in pressure, the precise tilt of the head. Your eyes were closed the whole time.”
Truthfully, it’s hard to like Jamie. His parents are rich, but he spurns their wealth and privilege. He lives in a tent behind Eva’s parents’ house for a time and joins the Occupy Wall Street movement for — what seems to Eva like — unconvincing reasons. He’s framed as a sort of misunderstood genius, too intelligent for the world and kicking his can from strange place to strange place as a result, but this characterization also makes him feel uncaring. Jamie consumes Eva’s thoughts, what he would think, what he was doing, why he hadn’t called. Even when he isn’t named, his presence in her thoughts is felt. Jamie kind of sucks.
When a novel has a more subdued plot, such as this one, it’s hard to avoid clinging to the characters and trying to find meaning in their journeys. I spent the entire novel wanting Jamie to become interesting, and it is only when Jamie is absent from the story and existing only as a meter stick for Eva’s thoughts to measure something by that he really succeeds at that.
So sure, Eva learns and grows because of Jamie, but she does so even more captivatingly with the other characters in her life: friends, coworkers and even her parents. The people in her life don’t just answer her unasked questions, declaring a right answer and a way of thinking that changes on a whim, but ask them to her. The people who might not know who they are, espousing like Jamie, but instead are who they are and offer themselves up to Eva to evaluate, challenge her opinions and change her.
And it is with these relationships that Eva tackles some of the largest themes in the novel. Eva talks with her friend Jess about honesty and virtue in politics and how much having the correct opinion or emotions actually matters without action:
“You think caring is something you do in your head. You want, like, empathy in a bottle … But even if you found it,” Jess challenges, “even if you felt it — who would that help? Who except you?”
And her coworker at the newspaper, Judy, sends her advice columns to email responses to, which reinforces the Sally Rooney and Elif Batuman connection a bit. “Beautiful World Where are You?” and “The Idiot” both prominently feature email correspondences which are ultimately one of the most vital sections of the novel. We forget Jamie’s obtrusive seeking for meaning via the different costumes he puts on. Instead we are thrown full force into the demanding of answers from the people around Eva, which pushes her toward making decisions. Over and over again. It’s the whole novel.
So, yes, while reminiscent of the more recent popular literary fiction authors through the grounding of itself in Eva’s perspective and the lack of blatant plot, billed co-star Jamie is more of an anti-heroic set piece than a true companion to Eva. It is the sections of the novel when she is not bogged down by Jamie, and instead entranced by the whims of the people around her that are truly successful. In these instances, what our plotless novel that meanders and confuses is about becomes concrete and incredibly simple: how the people around us affect who we become.
Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
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