There’s nothing ordinary about Susan Steinberg’s first novel and fourth book, Machine. It resists comparison to novels, generally, as its form and intentions don’t resemble the agreed-upon project of the standard literary novel. Its plot comprises a series of memory nodes around which emotions and observations circle endlessly, and its characters, aside from its narrator, prove almost interchangeable. The attention-grabbing textual strategies Steinberg uses — writing chains of uncapitalized, semi-coloned fragments for several pages, breaking paragraphs at jarring intervals — find greater purchase in the reader’s mind than any conventional markers of the novel form, such as characterization or narrative cogency. Steinberg has crafted a cross-genre, digressive work of literature, difficult to explain in brief.
In Machine, a handful of teenagers barrel toward a maturity that involves regimented social systems and profound hypocrisy. A girl drowns, complicating the teens’ summer, and a father has an affair, complicating the narrator’s life. That’s the plot, more or less. But this book is tricky: it succeeds in granting this vague plot a sense of immediacy, partly by stretching and transforming its anecdotes into experiences for the reader.
For example, the chapter “Ghosts” concerns a song that the narrator and her family sing in the car. The song is never named, but it mutates in significance as different family members sing it in different ways. The family’s reactions to the song, in its multiple forms, and the varying ways it appears across years of family life, help to push the reader ever more deeply into the storm of dysfunction brewed by the narrator’s parents. It’s remarkable that a book can be so short on detail and so long on impact. In Machine, abstractions don’t dilute the prose.
Another of Steinberg’s tricks is lengthening an event’s buildup and atmosphere until, when the significance of the event finally clicks into place, it’s as satisfying as popping in the last tongue of cardboard after building a complicated box. During a lengthy anecdote about the narrator’s dalliance with a young man who has hung his own painted portrait above his bed, the narrator stops to clarify her intentions:
this isn’t a story, besides, about my thing with this guy, which was short-lived and is, now, nearly forgotten;
this is a personal history of not knowing where to look;
the choices, my God, we have to make;
That comma-laden “my God” snaps the reader into realizing that having sex with the young man was part of a pattern of choices, and that few of those choices have been good ones. The reader witnesses many of these choices across the arc of the novel, and in this way, the novel’s accumulation and duration stretch far beyond its 150 pages.
Repeatedly, the novel circles around a particular memory node: a moment when the narrator sees her father’s girlfriend — not his wife — reflected in the mirror of a bathroom in which she and the narrator’s father have a tryst during a party. The narrator’s recollection of this moment shifts rapidly from detail to abstraction, a startling jump in register:
I might have said what I saw that night in the washroom; how she looked at me from over my father’s shoulder; and how much she looked like an animal; like the kind you see in the dark; and I might have said how hard she laughed; and don’t you love this detail; and don’t you love this woman; and don’t you love my father; and aren’t you impressed that I, of all the people, am now at the center of your world; so listen up; I want to tell you the end is near; I want to tell you to box your things; I want to tell you it’s going to hurt; I want to tell my mother, my God; but I’m too fucked up to deal with her now;
“My God” again. The book doesn’t repeat many phrases, but when it does, they matter. I counted three appearances of the title word “machine.” Twice, it happens in connection with a bowling alley:
a kid would press a small white button;
a machine would sweep the pins away;
a machine would reset the pins;
and the whole fucking thing would start over;
This action parallels the depiction of the privileged white kids at the center of the book. The pins, these wealthy, furious teenagers, get set up and knocked down and started over, again and again. They form alliances for a summer and split up by fall. They will later marry each other and produce their own little bowling pins to set up and knock down. The society of a wealthy suburb is a machine, perpetuating violent fun. The narrator rages against this entrenched culture.
Added to all this is the expressive clarity with which Steinberg narrates adolescence. It’s a time of anger and pain and arrogance and terror, and nothing is ever like in the movies. But this evocation of angst integrates with the story’s other gestures. In some passages, the turn from one thematic movement to another happens seamlessly:
I still don’t feel right about this;
it wasn’t the way to win a game;
a girl falling through the dark;
the sudden cold and wet;
the pull of something stronger than you can fight;
then the summer ending sadly;
my mother dragging me back to the city;
the public school like a prison;
the walls painted the sickest colors;
the lockers too, and those awful clocks;
and the metal detectors at the doors;
the security guards at the doors;
the cameras pointed at every kid in every room;
it was waking each morning to the darkest thoughts;
thoughts like this place will wreck you;
like the color of the walls will wreck you;
like these kids will fucking kill you …
Adolescence is dangerous here in multiple ways: negligent drowning, the horrible color scheme of public schools, the distinction between a private school crowd in a rich suburb and a place that “will wreck you.” So many gaps to fall through psychologically, and the spectre of real people ready to do you real harm. Precarity is a prominent motif. At any time, Machine posits, life could end due to accident or one’s own misjudgment or another person’s murderous preferences. Precarity heightens the tension of any book, but it’s an ephemeral aura, difficult to evoke in prose. Steinberg sets up precarity with the pivotal drowning death, which may or may not have been deliberate, but she sustains it through the mutual rage between the narrator and her father, and with the terrible decisions the teenagers make concerning drugs and alcohol (and swimming).
Peril, fury, suspicion, rebellion — Steinberg’s craft lies in accumulating these moods and sustaining them. She stacks up detail and mundanity before arriving at a spear’s point: “Then a summer cop was coming. Then the guy from the haunted house was coming. I could see them in the distance. Fucking saviors coming to fix it all.” It’s a bold and challenging way to make a book, to trust the reader to sit still for her own impalement. But the risk pays off. Machine embodies a new kind of novel in verse, a creature that’s part stutter and part song, and its stark, strange melody echoes long after its musicians have packed up and gone home.
[Published August 20, 2019 by Graywolf Press, 160 pages, $15.00 paperback]