WITHSet in upstate New York, Sophie Kemp’s surreal, satirical debut puts us in the uneasy company of a part-time model calling herself Reality, who embarks on a mad quest to become the perfect girl. The main beneficiary of her self-education is a graduate student, a crack-smoking, wannabe musician named Ariel, who openly cheats, infects her, and—in the reader’s eyes—sees her as nothing more than a sex toy capable of fetching snacks. But Reality is besotted, ignoring her own dark conscience—which she calls, with typical idiosyncrasy, a “familiar voice”—as well as her best friend Sung-jin, who thinks Ariel looks like a “school shooter”: “I think what she meant was this: Ariel is a unique bad boy who often wore a leather jacket.”
What follows is like TikTok. Stepford Wives for the era of Pornhub. Taking clues from a magazine, Girlfriend weeklywho magically appears from time to time, bathed in light and accompanied by a cor anglais, Reality leans with a frighteningly joyful mood towards the idea that the ideal girl must be constantly ready to satisfy every whim. “I loved the feeling of getting my ass split open by a nice, thick, but not too big cock,” she tells us, wiping her belly with the sock Ariel gives her after one of the many explicitly described copulations. The reality makes him wonder if she is really his girlfriend now. “What? Oh yeah. Okay, sure.” “My life has become wonderful,” she tells us.
Style is George Saunders meets Ottessa Moshfegh, filtered through—a rough guess—4chan, mumblecore and 18th-century marriage manuals. There are arcing credits (“In which the quest begins with three clues”), naïve babble, drug-addled dialogue, and any number of left turns that make the wild premise even wilder: when Reality enrolls in a clinical trial for a mysterious ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR) pill designed to help potential ideal girlfriends, she finds herself on the run from a machine gun-wielding medic.
It’s safe to say that your experience may vary, not least because the urination can seem ultra-specific (Ariel attends a seminar known in Reality as “James Joyce’s Opinion Class”) and there’s a strong sense that the whole thing is some kind of alternative joke a la Tao Lin (a suspicion reinforced by the cover of the US edition, which features the anime Eve in the Garden of Eden with Kemp’s name in Comic Sans). More Heavenly logic rarely feels relaxed, as it does in fiction of this kind; Kemp knows exactly what he’s doing, and the tone of the novel is a feat, switching skillfully between laughter, shock and heartache, sometimes in the blink of an eye. In one of many startling moments, Ariel forces herself into Reality while she is drunk with a head wound. The narration splits into two parts to show us what she’s thinking – saying “I love you” 100 times – before cutting to Ariel’s mind: “The band is called Computer. We will be playing mid-sized venues across the country and in Europe.”
Gary Shteyngart is quoted on the cover as calling it the funniest book of the year. And this is funny – straight out of an Emily Dickinson epigraph, which finds new resonance in the poet’s use of the word “hoe” – but ultimately it is a comedy about misogyny in the Percival Everett sense. Trees it’s a comedy about lynching. Look at the moment when Soon Jin says Ariel looks like the school shooter: “It was so clear that she was jealous,” Reality thinks, “but I was sad. Soon Jin and I had been through a lot together. Every time I was raped in college, she was always so kind to me after that.” Every few pages, such a punchy line bares the teeth behind the book’s smile, and even calling it a comedy ends up feeling like some kind of weird category mistake that doesn’t come close to the effect of Kemp’s full spectrum. How she will do this is anyone’s guess.