If you haven’t heard of the new PC game Subdivision, that’s because it’s a novel. The experience of reading J. Robert Lennon’s latest title is as akin to playing certain mystery video games as it is to reading a typical book. As in many games, the protagonist simply arrives in the novel, into a world that’s a poor facsimile of our own. She arrives at “the guesthouse” as a nearly blank template, a space for the reader to fill, a character for the reader to play. She doesn’t know how she got there, but she doesn’t seek to find out. She’s detached from her memories, but doesn’t seem terribly concerned. We’ll come to know her as a woman who faces each situation as it comes to her. She goes along, not feeling the need the reader does to make sense of the off-kilter world in which Lennon has situated her. That’s not to say that her world is a video game, but that’s one of many hypotheses a reader may consider as the environment of that world.
The moment we meet the narrator, she’s staring at an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the guesthouse table, a puzzle whose pieces “were extremely small, and very few of them appeared to bear any distinctive pattern or color, instead betraying only the faintest gradations between bluish-white and whitish-gray.” She’s unable to tell what the puzzle will depict, and with the box missing, there will be only one way to find out. Odder than the puzzle are the guesthouse’s proprietors, Clara and the Judge, who fail to introduce themselves, leaving the narrator unsure of which is which and why they are fixated on the puzzle: “It was clear, however, that the puzzle meant a great deal to my hosts, and that their invitation to help solve it should be received solemnly, as though it were an honor.”
The book’s mysteries emerge slowly, perhaps even preciously. Inscrutable puzzles, mixed up names, strange titles for the guesthouse rooms she must choose from: Virtue, Mercy, Justice, Duty, and Glory. In the background of these rooms is a curious, emptied-out feeling to the world. You won’t hear the clang of a garbage truck or pass crowds on the street. You won’t catch stray scents on the air or hear florid descriptions of a sunset. The town’s stores have generic names: Used Parts, Financial Endeavors, Fortuitous Items, Services. It’s not just that the language is neutral. The Subdivision is a place where nothing superfluous seems to exist. That’s one generator of the novel’s video game aura. Old mystery games for PCs and many newer mobile games generate that sense of having programmed in only what’s necessary for play — an object is included only if the player can interact with it. Others elements contributing to that feeling are Cylvia, a fortuitous digital assistant who helps guide the narrator’s quest like a game tutorial; impassable borders confine the narrator to The Subdivision like limits on a game’s playable area; and a portentous crow flickers in and out of existence like a glitch.
Lennon isn’t failing to realize a detailed world; he’s realizing a non-detailed world. The narration is precise but toneless, displaying the same detachment whether describing neighborhood aesthetics — “The Subdivision was quiet and clean with wide streets, tall trees, and neat lawns. It had no apparent dominant architectural style; the oldest houses seemed to date from a century past, while others might have been little more than a decade old” — or bizarre paintings:
“The painting at first appeared to be a rendering of one of the cards in a tarot deck; it had the same flattened cartoon style, and depicted a character resembling a queen, seated on a golden throne and dressed in a white gown. But closer examination revealed a few key differences. This queen was pregnant — about seven months, judging from the shape beneath her gown. In addition, the gown was parted, exposing a single full breast, and she held an animal in her lap — some kind of gerbil or weasel, it seemed — which she was attempting to nurse. But the animal had bitten the breast, which bled bright red from the wound, and instead of drinking the milk, the creature was licking, with a curved, almost prehensile tongue, at the oozing blood.”
This restrained voice and this space defined by its absences and genericisms aren’t just a feature of video games. If you make the guesthouse a tavern, the courthouse tower where she finds work a castle, and the digital assistant who guides her quest a fairy godmother, you have yourself a fairy tale. Change “The Subdivision” to “the village” and make the barrier that prevents departures an increasingly dense forest. What’s changed is just the filter superimposed upon it.
But this old form is connected to a newer one that’s taken hold in the age of the internet. The virtual simulation of The Matrix has its “agent” villains, white guys in black suits, defined by their bland elementalism, practically copies of each other. It has its Oracle and its Prophecy. NBC’s recent sitcom “The Good Place” about an engineered afterlife is much different in tone, but also presents a world with a generic facade (highlighted by a multitude of frozen yogurt shops) that’s just one level of reality. Like Subdivision, the show features a virtual assistant, unusual liminal spaces — a shopping mall called the Oracle in The Subdivision; a lost “Medium Place” in the sitcom — and unusual weather patterns tied to the characters’ emotional states.
The advantage for the writer is the ability to tweak reality and introduce elements as they see fit, no verisimilitude check needed. The pleasure for the reader, when the former is done well, lies in the tension between the world as it is and the subdivision in which the reader or viewer is contained — in how the real world, which the artificial one conceals, sneaks through the membrane. After a quaint start, Lennon proves himself masterful at this. The momentum starts to build when she encounters a shape-shifting demon called the bakemono with a preternatural ability to seduce her: “rather handsome — seasoned, but not worn or weary. His long face had a chiseled look, but his large hands were soft, and his broad shoulders implied strength … I followed, trying to avert my eyes from his muscular, jeans-clad behind. He really was good-looking. Perhaps he would need to come back to The Subdivision from time to time, for business. He might want to stay in the house — on the sofa, or even in the bed, if he wanted.”
The introduction of this poisoned apple propels the novel into a stranger place, replete with probability wells, experiments in quantum tunneling, and deadly windstorms. Some are random, while some, like the ruined church of “Our Lady of Perpetual Forbearance,” whose stained-glass stations she tours, are revealing: “Our Lady shunned any adulation for her good deeds. Her followers really took it to heart. They were so devoted to ignoring her achievements that they completely forgot she existed.” While it’s not always clear which oddities have outside meaning and which are simply dreamlike logic, the mystery unfolds at a steady drip, and gives the reader some intriguing detours on the ride to the big reveal.
The more the novel goes on, the more its world resembles those in Murakami novels (though we’re spared any sexualized descriptions of women’s earlobes), with their interplay between the strange and the meaningful, the conscious and the subconscious. Lennon makes familiar things just strange enough to be unsettling, as with this carousel in an abandoned mall the narrator journeys through: “As large as the Carousel had looked from above, it seemed even larger now … There were horses as far as I could see, deep into the darkness … The horses were lovingly rendered in action poses: trotting, cantering, and galloping … One could imagine them marching in a colorful, jubilant parade, or in some stately and dignified government ceremony. But their faces, equally detailed, seemed to imply a different story. Their lips were pulled back, their teeth were bared; wide eyes gazed in terror over flaring nostrils. Seen from the front, the horses gave the impression of panicked flight, as though they were running away from an enemy or natural disaster.”
Although the hallmarks of the setting are its artifice and illusion, it’s clear that the narrator faces dangers. The Subdivision is ultimately a place to escape from. You may call this a weird thriller, and also a mystery — not a whodunit? but a whoisit? and a wherearewe? and a whathappened? If a bookseller told me the pleasures of a book were like the pleasures of completing a jigsaw puzzle, I’d walk out of the store empty handed, but strangely enough, that pleasure is compelling here. Since we don’t have the picture on the box, seeing the picture revealed as Lennon fits more and more pieces into place makes for an effective mystery format. Clara and the Judge’s mysterious, slowly revealed puzzle in the guesthouse dining room is itself just one piece of the puzzle the novel comprises — a kind of synecdoche for the book itself.
But the most interesting thing about the form Lennon has chosen is the way it turns a book about a faceless, nameless character with no memories and few opinions into a portrait. The reader isn’t the only one discovering who this woman is. The narrator is on a journey to see herself, and the life The Subdivision conceals, properly for the first time. The narrator arrives as an empty outline. The journey to fill in that outline is a wild one, but one given meaning by the person we come to see inside it.
[Published by Graywolf Press on April 6, 2021, 240 pages, $19.00 paperback]