Lost in Lualand

I was having a chat with someone recently about different theories of soteriology—as a former Southern Baptist amongst a bunch of thoroughly-secular-from-birth jackrabbits, I get a charge out of explaining weirdo protestant folk-theology stuff when it comes up—and when I mentioned there's a set of Christians who believe "hell is real, but people in hell are free to repent & be saved from it at any time they choose," he was surprised and puzzled.

"Wouldn't everyone simply choose to leave hell, in that case? Like, if I died and woke up in hell, pretty quick I'd be like... welp, I sure called that shot wrong. Guess I'd better repent."

I pointed out that repentance, in Christian thought, isn't just an acknowledgment of "well, Jesus was right after all." It entails a change of character, an act of submission: ye shall know them by their fruits.

He shrugged. "I mean. I'm still in hell. Repentance seems like the better alternative?"

I mean, yeah, sure seems that way! But the intuitive comparison that made sense to me, back when I was a Christian, was: have you ever done something wrong, and you knew you did something wrong, but you dragged and dragged your feet on making amends and apologizing, because the horribleness of standing face-to-face with the person you wronged felt impossibly painful, even worse than just choking down your own shame and getting on as best as possible? The people in hell feel that way, I imagine.

Anyone who's experienced an act of undeserved mercy knows the surprise and the sheer relief of the thing, I think. All the moreso if it's granted without fuss, without fanfare, plainly and automatically and wholly. But I think they also know how horrible and humiliating it is to get there—to drag yourself before someone else's judgment, to admit plainly what you've done, to face their pain and feel it as your own, and to make yourself vulnerable to whatever judgment they wish to render. I mean, provided you knew and expected and accepted the worst possible judgment as a just and plausible outcome. So you take that feeling, ratchet it up to a cosmic scale, think of how often in our own lives we ghost or avoid or talk around our transgressions and wounds and trespasses, because that's easier than saying the words—yeah, given that particular theological framework, I could imagine someone nursing their wounds unto eternity.

Home by Marilynne Robinson is not about soteriology, not directly, though the characters, being all of a 1950s-Iowa-Protestant bent, do discuss the nature of salvation at length a few times. It is about forgiveness, though—and I don't think I've ever read another book that so keenly captures the pain and complexity of the thing.

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I picked this book up on an impulse, in part due to a pull quote from the WaPo review: "like Marilynne Robinson with a light vinaigrette." Y'all may recall I lost my mind over Gilead a few months ago. I was hankering for "that, but in a different flavor."

As it turns out: this book is not that at all. Nothing here rivals the depth of what Robinson's trying to wrestle with or Robinson's lyricism, sorry.

But! it's still a plenty fun book, with some charm and some interesting things to say.

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( vague nonspecific spoilers for the ending )

The setup for this novel is deliciously fun: Jhanvi, a trans woman working a dead-end job in Sacramento, decides to foist herself upon her college-buddy-slash-sexting-partner Henry, who lives in one of those Burning-Man-y polycule-y group houses in San Francisco. The plan: Jhanvi will show up on their doorstep, invite herself into their lives, manipulate Henry into marrying her, and then use those sweet sweet healthcare benefits he gets from his BigTech employer to pay for all the feminization surgeries she's interested in.

You'd expect this to be a perfect setup for some good satirical skewering of the Burning-Man-y polycule-y group house, and you'd be right (there's a really funny running bit where Katie, the ardent police abolitionist, is determined to figure out who's been calling the cops on the street-harasser guy near their house; Jhanvi knows it's the townie bartender at a place down the road, but sure isn't telling Katie because who needs a self-righteous Burning Man person giving her shit; also, the dynamics of Who Ferries The Drugs Around For Our Outdoor Naked Party Weekend had me in absolute stitches).

But Jhavni's absolutely relentless cynicism does start to wear after a while—an intended effect, I think. Yeah, the group house people are kinda shallow and willfully naive, but Jhanvi is trying to worm her way into their circle, and she thinks and acts in some pretty appalling ways to that end. It helps that she's pretty self-aware about what she's doing—there's a particularly delicious bit where Jhanvi rolls into Katie's room and we get a blow-by-blow account of "here's how I'm going to manipulate this chick in exactly this specific way"—but, still. Doesn't feel right to use people that way so relentlessly, right? and they do have some virtues of their own, right?

(There's a specific mode of thought Jhanvi has, an absolute dogged realism-bordering-on-reductionism, which means she's often the person speaking up to the effect of, "Look, let's be real, this party is not about ~*~liberation and justice~*~, it's about hot rich people having sex"—seeing through layers of bullshit to get to the heart of a matter. I know plenty of people like this IRL, and I'm lucky enough to call some of them my friends—that clarity of thought is an intensely admirable thing, and rare and hard to find! But there's a flipside to it—they can become very determined that their read is the 100% correct one, and become pretty dismissive of nuance or alternate perspectives in cases where they may be warranted. It's not the main thing Jhanvi's going on, but I thought I'd mention it specifically here, since I'm not sure I've seen this specific style-of-thought so vividly portrayed in fiction before, and I'd be really curious to see how other readers responded to it / what they thought about it; I found it really interesting!)

So you've got Jhanvi's gradual turnaround, from grifter-we're-cheering-for to grifter-we're-still-cheering-for-but-girl-can-you-tamp-down-on-the-grifting-just-a-little-bit. The book has a final arc and conclusion in which Jhanvi does have a change of heart, does something sudden and altruistic and selfless that's meant to stand for a larger shift in her character—but the stakes of that decision feel too low, almost abstract, and the payoff feels rushed in a way that didn't quite make me buy that shift.

I suspect if Kanakia had leaned all the way into the overthinking-social-class-dynamics-in-every-single-conversation angle, Death Note/Yukio Mishima/battle-anime-where-some-sidekick-character-is-overthinking-every-punch-aloud style, with even more excruciating detail, I could've bought that shift more readily, because I'd be agonizingly familiar with the contours of Jhanvi's mind. Or, if that final arc had a little bit more buildup/denouement/heft to it, I might've appreciated it a little more. As the book stands, it sort of awkwardly in-between those poles, so it ended up falling a little flat for me as a whole, even though I really enjoyed all the component pieces.

I would definitely read the next book by this author, though. It read very breezily and was a lot of fun and there's some interesting layers I'm still chewing on.

(Oh, shouts to Roshie, the weird, earnest, unsexy, way-too-good-at-her-job nerd who lives upstairs. It's kinda obvious Kanakia loves her too much, and you know what? So do I.)

Ohhh this one was such fun.

The Membranes is a slim, mid-1990s, Taiwanese dystopian sci-fi novel. The premise: the hole over the ozone layer got bad enough that you can't live on the surface of the planet anymore, so humanity moved to the ocean floor to escape the sun's harmful cosmic rays. By the year 2100, the ocean floor has been thoroughly colonized by every nation of the earth powerful enough to project their influence downward (yielding charmingly goofy phrases like "the New San Francisco Accord (signed in the new, underwater San Francisco)").

The story is not particularly interested in the physics of how that works (not least because the answer is "lol it wouldn't;" think about the pressure at that depth and the Titan implosion). Rather, it's more interested in the cultural implications of this move to the sea floor—for instance, even with the ocean floor mostly blocking the sun's rays, skin cancer rates are high & people's skin tends to degrade more rapidly, so "skin technicians" (a sort of hybrid dermatologist/masseuse/skin-artist) are highly trained and highly paid so they can keep people's skin looking young.

I called it a dystopian novel earlier, but that's not quite right. Ta-Wei isn't interested in doing a prolonged, incisive examination of the power structures in this society, and instead pulls a tight focus on a single character: Momo, a highly successful, 30-year-old skin technician who owns her own practice and lives alone in a nice apartment. At the story's opening, she receives a letter from her mom after twenty years of estrangement; the "action" of the novel is a couple skin technician sessions that play out while Momo's trying to decide whether or not to meet with her mom; the end happens when she makes a choice and plays it out. That's all. (And I loved that tight focus, that confidence!)

And I was just so completely fascinated by this Momo chick, and the slow, patient way the story reveals more and more about her. Here's a girl who never goes out, never takes a partner nor has any interest in one, yet has chosen such a tactile, intimate line of work. She's got some technology-aided voyeuristic tendencies—not necessarily in a sexual sense, in an everything sense, in a content-to-experience-other-lives-secondhand way—that, as described, felt simultaneously so so alluring and so so claustrophobic. The slow reveal of the long-term consequences of a horrible set of surgeries she went through at a young age is satisfyingly well done, and also, there's some wonderfully unselfconsciously queer happenings, lots of unexpected eyebrow-raising chemistries between some interstitial characters—I loved it all.

I did find the ending a little... deflating? Without spoiling too much, it has that kind of rug-pull and-then-it-was-all-a-dream feel that I feel like smacks of... idk, a particularly tacky Twilight Zone episode. It's not totally out of nowhere, and I can see the buildup to it a bit in hindsight... but I mostly found myself longing for what the novel would have been, if Ta-Wei had kept to that tight, close focus on Momo, if, instead of zooming the camera out to a "damn wouldn't it be crazy if" kind of scenario, he'd let Momo's choice at the end stand on its own, and shown us what, if anything, changes about Momo afterwards.

But overall, what a romp. I'm glad I read it.

I still have... quite a backlog... of other books to write about... but it turns out, typing up thoughts on memoir/YA is comparatively really fast and easy, so, yeah, these books are skipping to the front of the queue:

( Molly by Blake Butler )

( We Are Totally Normal by Naomi Kanakia )

( Enter Title Here by Naomi Kanakia )