The Brooklyn Rail

At a coffee shop in Kadıköy, Istanbul, a balcony looks out over a circular square, framed by two plane trees, surrounded by cobblestones on what was, some decades ago, dirt ground. Diagrammed, the square is made of three concentric circles: an inner circle demarcated by concrete poles, where men on benches drink tea and buy lottery tickets, a secondary circle of cobblestones where people carry gossip or packages or instruments, and a third, outer circle of shops—a perfumery, a cellphone store, a clothing shop called “SuperStep”. The view from here reminds me of reading Renee Gladman’s latest work, My Lesbian Novel, where her plot opens outward from concentric narrative frames, each of which nests fantasy into genre, which is in turn nested by living.

My Lesbian Novel takes the form of an interview between two voices called R and I. This is Gladman’s secondary book, her walking people, if it were the Kadıköy square. R talks to her interviewer about the writing of the innermost book, a romance novel that plays out in italics, following two characters named June and Thena. On the very outside, a third book accounts for what Gladman does when she feels stuck in the second—she goes outside, takes a walk with her wife, climbs a mountain, feels the air—continuing her decades-long exploration of what it means to build a writing life. Considering what writing provides, R quotes the sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud: “For me sculpture was never a hobby. Sculpture was something integral to life. Sculpture was a life, as a matter of fact.” Gladman takes seriously how life influences narrative, where characters are shaped by what happens to their author in the time between encounters with the page.

This structure comes from Gladman herself, who describes a third book that “grants the fiction of the second,” implying that the interview risked becoming non-fiction without the protection of the third. Twice in TOAF, a meta-narrative about writing a failed novella, first published in 2008 and reissued by Dorothy in September, Gladman maintains, “There is fiction and then again there is life.” Gladman tries to bring fiction and life closer together through style, writing a narrative that “move[s] and go[es] nowhere,” a problem she solves by going on walks in the city she’s writing about. My Lesbian Novel solves it by turning outward, towards conversation or time spent outdoors. Here, line between fiction and non-fiction doubles as the line between life and the act of writing.

My Lesbian Novel considers what it takes to design a vessel—June is an architect of fixtures, of adornments, of the edges of roofs; R is at work designing a book; Gladman occasionally takes a break from writing to create new conditions that will allow her to return—and, through this question of the vessel, what makes writing possible. R first describes writing as the process of creating “an index to sit within,” a dimensionless container. Then she scratches that idea in favor of a bright and empty room, which gives her the occasion to write out the scene in the gallery where June and Thena re-meet and the romance plot ignites. Thus, we go from an index—a flatness, something without edges or surface, a style of prose Gladman championed in TOAF—into a “bright, empty room.” R writes the novel from here.

After reading hundreds of romance novels, R claims that these books are built from both ordinary life and the stuff of fantasy. Comparing literary and romantic fiction, she argues that the former is full of good sentences that cannot contend with love, while the latter contains beautiful love stories in too-sharp containers:

The genre does not regard language as a living force, as an inhabitable space, a space for encounter. Rather, each sentence tends to be treated as if it were a sharp-edged container with one function. Like: point. Or: explain. Or: dramatize… In a way, these are the sentences we live with. Maybe we don’t say them, but this is what we’re acting out all day, and someone had the brilliant idea, yes, let’s use these sentences for writing.

On the other hand, R explains how “romance is for fantasy: everybody being their wettest, hardest, prone to multiple orgasms, no triggers, all that good stuff.” My Lesbian Novel makes up its own math, rewires a plot from scratch, offers everything one might want from a romance novel, rooted in both quotidian and fantastical matters—hot sex scenes, chance encounters in the best of public spaces, parks and museums, and the best offering of all: instructions on how to write your own. At one point, as June watches a woman draw a line across a wall from a distant window, she muses, “I hope it’s not an outline for a painting or mural. I want the lines to be the site, even if I can’t see them from here.” Gladman’s novel, operating as both the site and the barely-visible lines, allows us to see the contours of genre more fully.