When Reality Kahn crashes to earth, she emerges as so many modern literary fiction heroines do: a 23-year-old girl living in New York, wasting her days away. The similarities largely end there.
Reality spends her free time making zines, being the best waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard and, at the start of the book, embarking on a mythical, predestined and psychosis-inducing quest to become the perfect girlfriend. She has an attitude I can only describe as 200 peps in her step, and she is aided in her quest by the experimental drug ZZZZvx Ultra and her favorite magazine, Girlfriend Weekly. “Read on, man.”
The first half of Sophie Kemp’s “Paradise Logic” is punctuated by scrawled drawings and smiley faces spaced between the stream-of-consciousness paragraphs and tons of situational humor where Reality is, shockingly, not really attuned to her reality. It’s a trip. She’s like an alien that crashed to Earth, was handed a phone with access to nightmarish reddit threads and Amelia-Bedelia-absorbed everything she read. I spent probably too much time reading aloud some of the more excessive one-liners to my friends, and I was kind of in disbelief that this was a real book.
On her quest, Reality follows the instructions of Girlfriend Weekly — which are seemingly pulled from a Stepford wife’s wedding vows— to inform her notions of the ideal girlfriend. As she guides us through her wildering version of New York City, Reality chipperly tells us that, “to be a girlfriend, an amazing thing to do is have your past be a void.” I learned many things from Reality. Becoming a girlfriend is “similar to joining the Franciscans or Freemasons,” she muses, even going so far as to inform about the desires of boyfriends: “They like for their lady to be neither seen nor heard.”
Oddly enough, the men around Reality — oftentimes ones that she has had sexual relationships with and who are the direct recipients of her bizarre behavior — are put off by her frankness in stating these things.
When she does end up sourcing a boyfriend, Ariel, his friend asks: “‘Is she of, ah, how do you say in English? Very idiotic? She has been kicked in the head by a horse?’”
“‘Nah, man, she’s just like that,’” he responds, as any loving boyfriend would. It’s heavy-handed, it’s funny, but more often than not, it’s devastating.
Kemp dives in headfirst, constructing in Reality a clash of misogyny and commercialism left to fester inside a drug-addled mind. Despite the supposed insanity of Reality’s assumptions about the world, a lot of the rules she identifies are not completely out of the realm of the real. What’s so heartbreaking, at certain moments, is that Reality is not an insane woman placed in insane circumstances, but a kind woman who is placed in very real ones, operating on assumptions with extremely traceable origins. Kemp crashes her surrealist main character into a world we recognize, exposing it in the process.
Beyond all of that, the core of the story is her love for Ariel. This love is all Reality cares about and, unfortunately, that care isn’t reciprocated. Ariel to Reality is everything, and Reality to Ariel is kind of just there. Ariel uses Reality for sex, half-hearted insults and not much else.
So Reality’s quest shifts: Her next goal is to make Ariel love her back. This ill-fated adventure is tinged with the question of whether any quest for love can be positive in the corrupted postmodern world, free of the patriarchal violence that came before it and established it. If even Reality, someone who sees this world for what it really is and accepts her place in it whole-heartedly, can’t find a noble love, then should we even be trying? Her infallible optimism and openness to the world that dares to beg this question left me with an impressive fondness for her.
Reality is great. Although she’s misguided, not to mention a bit indoctrinated — almost like a baby raised exclusively on an Alpha bro TikTok algorithm — she’s also earnest and kind, and Kemp knows this. She expertly writes a woman who is making bad choices, but who you can’t help but root for. Reality’s characterization isn’t for naught, either: By creating an endearing Reality, Kemp brings us around to her side when she concludes that, although the choices she’s presented with are bad and the quest for a boyfriend is kind of rigged, maybe it’s worth it just for the thrill of living anyway — to take things as they come and get one step closer to paradise.
So when the book shifts into increasingly incoherent and traumatic anecdotes, the smiley faces turn to frowny faces and the plot loses all sense of place or time, it is Reality that grounds her own zany quest. A frequent challenge for surrealist novels is giving the reader a lifeline in the chaos — a reason to read through the confusion. And Reality, with her relentless outpouring of love and compassion, manages just that.
Kemp crafts a character that is powerfully vapid in speech but incredibly warm and full in heart. Reality slots so neatly into my soul with her relentless outpouring of love that I didn’t find myself minding much when the book’s events became increasingly jumbled and nonsensical. She’s weird as hell, but she’s also an open book, and once things stop making sense, her off-putting and fascinating perspective is what carries you through to the final page. I couldn’t look away, and I can’t wait to see what Kemp does next. This weird little book is very thoughtful and beautiful. I will be thinking about Reality and her noble quest for years to come.
Senior Arts Editor Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
The post ‘Paradise Logic’ and the quest for the mythic boyfriend appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply