O Fallen Angel (Chiasmus) is the first novel by Kate Zambreno, and, if she continues in this vein throughout her career, she’s going to start a lot of fights.

The novel describes a older suburban woman named Mommy, her suicidal daughter Maggie, and a homeless and insane man named Malachi. The characters don’t have conversations, and there is no conventional dialogue at all, but Zambreno uses what amounts to different languages for each of them. Mommy gets the longest, most complex and satisfying sentences, such as “Mommy wept tears and tears for Laci more tears than she has ever wept for her own daughter but Mommy doesn’t want to think about that no Mommy doesn’t even want to talk about that Maggie has dug herself into her own hole and she will have to dig herself out of it it’s called Tough Love! It’s a parenting technique. Like guilt and manipulation.” (7-8) The long, rhythmic and unpunctuated switchbacks of these lines will be compared to Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek—and their frequent, joyous obscenity reminds of Kathy Acker—but the sheer inflammatory shallowness belongs exclusively to Zambreno, as does the comic timing of lines like, “There are angel soaps and little angels on the guest towels (which you are not supposed to use)…” (27) One expects a novel’s major character to be sympathetic, especially one named “Mommy,” but the biggest impression of O Fallen Angel’s Mommy is how utterly loathsome she is. In other words, Zambreno quite deliberately slays one of our era’s most sacred cows.

Maggie’s section is perhaps a bit schematic in comparison, but it better represents the book’s agenda to obliterate received wisdom about everything: character, gender, the so-called traditions of the novel, etc. Instead, for example, of writing scenes with Maggie’s therapist and developing them both over time, she opts for “Maggie is broken because Maggie cannot articulate why she feels sad or why she feels angry and that’s why therapy does not go too well.” (32) This scorn for narrative convention stumbles when Zambreno wanders into cliché—“Because the first cut is the deepest”—or tautology—“Maggie is Ophelia”—but succeeds when it remembers to be ironic, as with the line “Maggie fucks boys and pretends it doesn’t matter because Maggie is empowered!” (34) At such times, O Fallen Angel lays waste to swathes of phony consolation, and feels  genuinely troubling. It doesn’t give us tools to build a better world so much as show us how the tools we do have suck.

The third section reads like a mix of holy rage and paranoia, and seems like an unexpected middle ground of the other two. One’s enjoyment of O Fallen Angel depends on how much provocation a reader can take, but it’s a virtue that Zambreno spends exactly zero time making her book seductive. Her idea is to make a work free of empty solace, and this, as we know, is exceptionally unusual, especially for rookies. The book does not make one feel better, it shows how feeling better is a deception, and it asks, why this need to make one’s self a fool? Not everything we read will act like this—and if this book came up in a workshop, the instructor would spontaneously combust—but those that do perform the essential social task of undermining piety. O Fallen Angel is absolutely fearless, and, in its way, it is devilishly fun.

Adam Novy’s first novel, The Avian Gospel, is forthcoming from Hobart.

Above Image: Lighthouse, Beheaded, by Adam Frelin