Novel Readings

I pretended everything would be okay because it seemed impossible to always be saying goodbye. To blueberries. To the ocean. To ravens. To pelicans and plovers. To the cormorants. To the sunlight on the living room wall at four o’clock. To the sound of you in the next room.

Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is at once one of the most absurd and one of the most devastating novels I’ve ever read. It is absurd in the way any story about zombies (or vampires) surely has to be: the minute you stop to ponder how this is all supposed to actually work (the head is cut off but the legs are still walking how exactly? vampires have no breath but can still talk?) it falls apart and so if you forget to suspend your disbelief, even for a moment, you might start laughing and not be able to return to it. It is devastating because it is a novel about loss and grief—personal, but also planetary, existential—and the cavernous hunger that comes from wanting and mourning and finding (and expecting) no consolation. “I find I have stopped,” our narrator says at one point on her strange post-apocalyptic road trip;

I am standing in the road. The sky is light in the east. The moon is in the west. It is perfectly round. I am not really thinking anything. I am just looking at the moon. It is silver and flat and serious. A wind comes up to me in the empty morning like someone I’ve met before or seen before but don’t know, and a feeling comes over me. It is sadness. Not a sadness, but sadness. All of it. The whole history of sadness. Everything in me is sad and everything around me is a part of it. The cracked pavement, the moon, the abandoned cars, the gravity that holds them to the road. It is total. I am taken, or taken down. I drop to my knees.

How much can you lose of yourself before you lose yourself? How much can you bear to part with, of yourself, of your world? How long (and why) would you persist in a world without whatever it means to be alive? de Marcken’s novel (novella? at 122 pages it is in a grey area, I think) is clearly using her zombie apocalypse as a device to literalize these questions. “I lost my left arm today,” is its arresting opening line; “It came off clean at the shoulder.” This, and all of it, is metaphorical, allegorical.

It seems fair to wonder: do we need a story like this told in this way? Does the zombie premise help? or is it a distraction? Probably this is the wrong kind of question, a category mistake, as at its heart it is a question about genre. There are other stories about grief and other stories about the end of the world that are not, or not quite, so figurative. As I read It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over I imagined pitching it as “Grief is the Thing With Feathers meets The Road.” (There’s a crow in it, and the narrator is, eventually, walking to the ocean. Has someone already commented on this unlikely pairing as its literary genealogy?) I did sometimes find the zombie aspect off-putting, and slightly comical. “We take my head out of the sack,” the narrator reports,

and prop it upside down at a good angle. I hold it steady and on the count of three the old woman plunges the stake into it with a single unflinching grunt. The point goes true through the soft triangle of my throat and into the firm mud of my brain . . .

I tilt the stake upright and stand with it in my grip. The length is perfect, my head just above shoulder height. I pivot it one way, the other. Realize I can spin it all the way around to see behind me.

And yet. There are scenes in this little book of such unbearable desolation that I sometimes had to put it down and collect myself before I could read on. It also made me think, a lot, especially about whatever it is that we consider the essential thing, or the essence of things, or of people. “When you have arrived at the thing itself,” our narrator reflects, reduced by that point to what is surely the barest minimum of herself,

then all you can do is compare it to something else you don’t understand. A rock. A crow. The only things that remain themselves are the ones you can never reach. The things that are too big or too far away or move too slowly to detect. Smooth. Feathered. Loved. Already lost. They will always be only what they really are, and you will never know what name to call out to them.

Loved. Already lost.