The Brooklyn Rail

Anne de Marcken’s debut practically sparkles with literary bona-fides. Along with Jonathan Buckley’s Tell, it won the Novel Prize, open to all writers in English and published in this country by New Directions. Then too, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over glitters with high-carat epigraphs. Though a brief, swift-moving text, it has eight overall, including one for each of its seven “Parts,” and these include Fernando Pessoa and Hélène Cixous. Besides that, de Marcken’s first line echoes a classic, Camus’s L’Etranger. The famous, cool opening of the 1942 novel⎯ “Aujourd’hui, maman est mort. Ou peut-être hier…”⎯ whispers behind this one’s: “I lost my left arm today. It came off clean at the shoulder.” And on top of all that, the primary conceptual issue throughout the text is the much-discussed conundrum of the Simulacrum versus the Actual, the stuff of Jean Baudrillard. Long and short, it’s hard to imagine a more erudite zombie story.

This is de Marcken’s central trope⎯ and her triumph. She seizes the gut-smeared cliches of The Walking Dead and recomposes them as a philosophical odyssey. Better yet, despite her fiction’s core seriousness, its quest for the Real, her undead stumble through a Grand Guignol farce. At one point, the story adapts the perspective of a head on a pike.

That would be the zombie narrator’s head, the loss of which winds up stopping her no more than that of her arm. So too, those initial lines may recall L’Etranger, but they lower the emotional register: it’s not Mom, only a limb. Under the circumstances, there’s no blood to spill. Rather, the narrator’s companion, Janice 2 (“Isn’t it strange that I never knew a single living Janice and now I know three?”), carries the thing “back to the hotel,” where perhaps the revenant lodgers can figure out a fix. Granted, the dismemberment isn’t played solely for laughs. Alone with her arm, the narrator dreams of her lost partner, a ghost who hovers over the narrative. “I miss you,” grieves the protagonist, and even “I miss your name.”

Names are part of all that’s been lost. Early on, just once, the narrator allows herself a new one: “Genevieve.” But to her this seems “the kind of name you pick for French class,” whereas everyone else in the hotel views such adopted identities as “little prayers.” A name seems to them like part of a greater task, becoming another order of being. There’s even a zombie preacher, Mitchem, calling everyone to an undead “Revival.” At this event, naming becomes central: “What do we call it,” asks Mitchem, “this new world?” But the narrator doesn’t care, no more than she cares for the man’s suggestion that, regarding her injury, she ought to think differently: “‘Embrace your new existence,’ he says. I picture myself trying to do this with one arm.”

It Lasts Forever…, like its narrator, does without the usual baggage. Any post-apocalypse world-building is reduced to the occasional wry aside. Janice 2 and others share occasional memories, but these are random, nothing that amounts to a backstory. ZombieWorld is a given, and while de Marcken whips up remarkable suspense and vivid climaxes⎯the beheading, case in point⎯these don’t have to do with escape or a cure. Rather, the narrator’s driven by a deep sense of unbelonging, an ache beyond naming. Her own memories include one she can’t shake, snuggling with her lost beloved in seaside dunes, and this becomes a navigational star, drawing her into an odyssey.

Her refusals begin by rejecting what most defines a zombie. In a scene spare yet brutal, its touches of humor pitch-black, she ambushes a pair of young lovers⎯but then abandons the oozing leftovers. “I will eat no more,” declares the narrator. After all, she doesn’t need food any more than she needs a left arm. “Hunger is only a ravenous hope. A mirage. Always receding.” And just as her renunciation is a shock, the response proves surprisingly sympathetic; another zombie, Marguerite, offers a loopy sort of therapy, cuddling and stroking her newly ascetic friend. But the narrator’s disconnect keeps growing, and she runs off before the book’s halfway over.

Not that she has any notion of where to go, an Ithaca⎯ “What,” she asks herself, “is the beginning of something that is not a story?” All she’s got is that recurring dream: “so small together in the lee of the dune … within the sound of the ocean and the warmth of the sun…. This is the very best moment we will ever share.”

This “best,” significantly, remains ungendered. So too, while de Marcken is a queer interdisciplinary artist, her protagonist’s flight from the hotel isn’t merely a coming out. The woman suffers the creeps in a broader, more contemporary sense, as a homelessness of the spirit. She and her lover are “not a story;” they share a fear and loathing that, just now, pervades some of the most intriguing US fiction. The unsettled outsiders of such narratives, I daresay, embody an American Dream tumbling into nightmare.

Thus, despite the Euro-angels fluttering over de Marcken’s novel (though there’s also an epigraph from Beloved), and despite the largely barren landscape (though eventually there’s the interstate and even the Stars and Stripes), I find her terrific debut intrinsically American. It relies so constantly, so creatively, on TV and the movies. One example strikes me as totally the bomb: when the narrator runs afoul of the living, a community that knows how to protect itself, she sees it as “a spaghetti western:” “…a showdown in the empty road. Stranger and townsfolk…. The nervous strum of a Spanish guitar and one lonely trumpet.”

Our Genevieve is a long way from French class⎯in fact, she’s up against the most spectacular violence in a story littered with human parts⎯and her first thought is of the movies. In the same way, Marguerite’s little pep talks have a recurring refrain: first “none of this is real,” and then, as the chill sets in, “some of it is real.” And as for “home,” that’s “Never where you expect it.”

Now, some of this dialog struck me as rather too magic-mushroom. I had the same misgivings about the exchanges with a dead crow. But then again, the crow’s disjointed caws strike a fine balance between Disney’s Song of the South and Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna.” At first the bird is sewn into the narrator’s body, more or less a surrogate arm, but of course the thing won’t stay put. It may even take to the skies again, the Flying Dead, and as a spirit animal for the disintegrating creature below, only another mirage, always receding.