IT’S COMPLICATED: PETER

Harry’s parents, Harry’s child and her own child, that child never represents futurity. Iggy too becomes a voyager on the Argo, which, over the course of the book, becomes increasingly over-determined as symbol: it stands for improvised family, the arbitrary nature of language, the constant refabrication of the self in relation to the other, and the boat that we’re all in together as “human animals” (in Nelson’s words). The Argo is thus a heterotopia rather than a vehicle oriented toward a destination. A term coined by Michel Foucault, “heterotopia” describes a space that functions as a “counter-site, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites […] that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” For Foucault, “the ship is the heterotopia par excellence,” for it is “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea […] the boat has […] been for our civilization […] the greatest reserve of the imagination.”

As well as the nonlinear structure of her narrative, it’s this space that serves as a symbol of escape from the logic of futurity, for it also serves as a symbol of a time removed from the relentless destructive pace of modernity: of epic time, what Lukács calls “the blissful time-removed quality of the world of gods.” The Argo, then, is at once time as forward momentum: iteration and change — the constant forward movement of “I love you” remaking the relationship it describes each time it is repeated — and time as space: a temporary symbol of the utopian moment where we are held together, or given form, by utterance before we break apart again.

Though very different in spirit and style, The Argonauts and A Little Life might be seen as two sides of the same coin. In juxtaposition, their experiments unravel the dialectic of the novel by testing the limits of its ability to make form and life commensurate: the little life of Jude with its preponderance of ghastly details and the epic journey of The Argonauts; fixed form and fragmentary form; gathering darkness and open-ended journey. Operating at opposite ends of the spectrum of life-writing, these texts, taken together, are responses not only to Lukács’s world abandoned by God, but also the prospect of no world at all.

On the question of “no future,” Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurity and the anticapitalist politics of Anthropocene environmentalists are not identical. Those in the Anthropocene camp, by and large, hope to salvage some form of future by shifting our perspective on it. Edelman refuses futurism altogether, calling on us to embrace the death drive rather than the family. But there is considerable overlap between these stances: both ask us to confront mortality head-on, and to use that confrontation as the occasion for a radical reconsideration of our social structures and their reproductive logic. The Argonauts inhabits this overlap comfortably, emphasizing the precarity of life while celebrating the mutuality that makes it bearable. A Little Life rips the two positions apart by denuding them of their emancipatory politics. Leveraging the homophobia that Edelman opposes but taking up his

nihilism, the novel refuses the hope that drives those contemplating a nonhuman future, opting instead to give shape to the death drive as long-form narrative. The works share an interest, however, in turning the problem of the future into an effect (or affect) of form, making our radical vulnerability as “human animals” (to use Nelson’s term) visceral, and emphasizing the humility that must accompany it. The Anthropocene, in the immensity of planetary history, is but a little life.

IT’S COMPLICATED: PETER MOUNTFORT’S A YOUNG MAN’S GUIDE TO LATE CAPITALISM

CHRIS KRAUS

Set in Bolivia amid the uncertainty of the first weeks of Evo Morales’s presidency in late 2005, Peter Mountford’s compulsively readable first novel is a book about money. A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is a bildungsroman in reverse, tracing the psychic dissolution of the somewhat-likeable protagonist Gabriel de Boya from his first, broke years in New York after graduating from Brown to the cocooned state of permanent transience he achieves as a hedge fund manager. Like Balzac›s Lucien de Rubempre, Gabriel is at once highly nuanced and an allegorical figure. No better or worse than anyone else, he›s just trying to get by in a world that›s systemically compromised.

While Mountford, a former financial analyst, is highly informed and informative about the macroeconomic game theories that order the world and color the most intimate parts of our lives, it is his

novel’s premise that the sweeping lifeforce of capital might animate a personal narrative that is truly radical. As he said in an interview with Vanessa Hua for the Los Angeles Review of Books back in June:

Finance and economics clearly play an important role in contemporary history ... . But if you’re aiming to write “serious” literature there’s a tendency to write about neurotic suburbanites or upper-middle class dilettantes. That stuff doesn’t interest me at all.

Conceived during his exiled Chilean mother’s brief student years in Moscow, Gabriel senses at an early age that the world is “more complex” than his oldschool leftist, Nation- and Mother Jonescontributing mother might have it. Growing up in the oasis of upper-middle class life near Pomona College where his mom is a tenured anthropologist, Gabriel’s mixed parentage makes him adept, from his earliest years, at navigating cultural conundrums. But to where? In the end, Gabriel’s adherence to the twenty-first century truism that “the world is complex” proves just as useless as his mother’s primitive faith in ideology.

When Gabriel accepts a job as regional analyst for the Calloway Group, a hedge fund notorious for its feral ruthlessness, he plans to keep the job just until he has “enough money to be done with the issue of money forever.” Five years after graduation, his former classmates who took Wall Street jobs have entered the world of adulthood while he languishes as an online business reporter. Their opulent lofts and celebrity parties leave him trapped in a low-grade feedback loop of desire, moving between his dumpy Greenpoint apartment and office cubicle. As Mountford writes, “money, in general — the plain and unassailable acts of acquiring it and spending it — had turned out to occupy a more important role in adulthood than he’d expected.” All Gabriel wants is to be free from want, so when an opportunity arises to move to Bolivia for the Calloway Group and, with share options and performance bonuses, hypothetically earn millions, he jumps at it. He aces the interview; when his future boss Priya asks him why he wants to work for the Group, he replies: “I want to make a shitload of money for awhile.”

Gabriel arrives in La Paz on the eve of Marxist President Evo Morales’s election. Bilingual and bicultural, he is at home, even comfortable, with Bolivia’s dereliction. It is a country where — as Mountford writes in one of dozens of stinging descriptions — the sight of rebars protruding from concrete blocks is a sign of hope: should things improve, construction might one day be finished. Gabriel finds the shag carpets and tawny-glass chandeliers of the city’s five-star hotels sincere and refreshing: “He believed that the management knew perfectly well how outmoded their décor was. It wasn’t any funnier than the fact that their roads were falling apart. It just made an easier target.” Traveling to Bolivia in his late teens he’d found its intractable third-world poverty personally liberating. Temporarily released from the compulsion to “succeed,” he enjoyed the giddy epiphany that his American life occurred within the Matrix: “The United States was actually a very bizarre place. Elsewhere in the world, the unattainability of great fame and fortune was more readily accepted, so life was less driven by grandiose fantasies.”