The Future Future

May 1, 2023

In 1775 France, innocent 18-year-old Celine is subject to scandalous allegations that, however false, the public wholeheartedly believes. She and her friends then band together and (it seems) march through history to crusade for truth and against a male-dominated world's tendency toward genocide, colonial expansion, and violence against women. Twisty history from Thirlwell, twice selected as a Granta Best of Young British Novelists. Prepub Alert.

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September 4, 2023
Thirlwell (Lurid & Cute) delivers an enigmatic novel of ideas set largely in revolutionary France with excursions into the future. After Celine, 19, is maligned in a series of pornographic pamphlets, she reinvents herself by founding a literary salon. The pages that follow trace Celine’s travels through the decades, across the Atlantic to the nascent United States, and even, for one particularly disorienting interlude, to the moon in the year 2251. This is only the most obvious form of time travel Thirlwell’s narrative employs, however; throughout, the use of anachronistic language (Celine’s husband is a “fascist” and her clothing is “punk”; the narrator compares education to taking over a “disused gas station”) creates the sensation of being unmoored from time. The narrative voice is reserved and analytical, at odds with the whimsy of the linguistic choices. The almost sterile tone, combined with the characters’ repeated musings about what, exactly, the point is, may have readers echoing such sentiments. Thirlwell offers moments of insight, particularly when touching on the persistence of misogyny throughout history and the intersections of gender and language, but these are obscured by a narrative that feels both aimless and almost deliberately opaque. This strange outing provokes and frustrates in equal measure. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency.

September 1, 2023
Her privileged existence shaken up by pornographic pamphlets about her, a woman looks for meaning in a time of radical change. Coyly partial names (Antoinette, Beaumarchais, Louverture) and the general course of events indicate that Celine struggles to face down her slanderers in the years leading up to the French Revolution, falls afoul of the new government during the Reign of Terror, then wanders off to the Americas, where George Washington oppresses Native Americans, and French revolutionaries fail to live up to their ideals when faced with a slave revolt in Hispaniola. At the same time, Celine and her friends message each other and use anachronistic words like fascist. "Centuries and centuries go by, but everything happens in the present moment," is apparently Thirlwell's point, insofar as his all-over-the-map narrative can be said to have a point. An interlude among the Mohawks and a bizarre trip to the moon ("the calendar on the wall in the kitchen was saying that the year was now 2251") suggest that Celine's quest involves a desire to live in greater harmony with the natural world, and she muses about women's lack of power and agency throughout. The uses and nature of language is another thematic undercurrent; Thirlwell definitely isn't short on ideas. But his tone is so abstract that it's difficult to engage with those ideas or the people voicing them. A comment by Celine's daughter, Saratoga, on writers' limited notions about the future is characteristically opaque: "The true future wasn't what was about to happen in a month or even a year but the future future, said Saratoga: alien and incommunicable." Celine's relationships with the numerous secondary characters milling around her are equally hard to parse. The enigmatic ending is likely to frustrate anyone who hasn't already been frustrated by a text that seems to go out of its way to be disorienting and alienating. Some interesting ideas in search of a coherent fictional framework.

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