This Week in Fiction: Jess Row

Your story in this week’s issue, “The Empties,” takes place three years from now, after America has lost power. When did you decide to turn out all the lights in the story?

I think I turned to the idea of a total blackout—a failure of the electrical grid and all communications systems—because it seems the most likely and close at hand. I vividly remember the August, 2003, blackout in New York, and even more vividly, of course, the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which happened just after my family had moved into an N.Y.U. faculty apartment building on Bleecker Street. On the wall of my study, I have a large print of Iwan Baan’s iconic photo of lower Manhattan plunged into darkness after Sandy (the same photo that appears on the cover of Ben Lerner’s recent novel “10:04”). That experience of privation and fear, as short-lived as it was, was very much in the back of my mind when I started “The Empties” the following summer.

A disaster scenario is nothing new, of course, in fiction or on the screen. The past few years, in particular, have seen a flurry of dystopian narratives, in which the power is often the first thing to go. It’s something your characters are well aware of. In the opening pages, there’s a discussion of whether they’re living through a dystopia or a post-apocalypse, for example. Were you ever daunted by the sheer number of other narratives out there?

I didn’t actually feel daunted, because I wrote “The Empties” sort of on a lark—it’s the final story in a collection called “Storyknife,” and like all of the pieces in that book it has a metafictional or reflexive component. I started off intending it to be mostly a satire of apocalypse narratives and how seriously we take them, and only as the story progressed, layer upon layer, did I begin to realize that I was taking this particular narrative seriously, too. But I never gave up the emphasis on self-awareness and referentiality, because that’s just endemic to the times we live in. After September 11th, many witnesses described the attacks on the World Trade Center as being “like watching a movie.” That became almost the default way of picturing the event: as something that was prefigured, almost overdetermined, by the fictional destruction of New York buildings in movies like “Independence Day.” We filter almost all real disasters through our own associative library of imagined, fictional disasters. And these days, it’s true, there are so many versions of apocalypse to choose from, including some that closely resemble “The Empties.” For obvious and not so obvious reasons, we’re going through one of those frenzied moments in which we’re all focussed on “fictions of the end,” as Frank Kermode describes them in his classic book “The Sense of an Ending.”

The story’s protagonist, J., a woman in her late thirties who is living in Vermont, decides that someone needs to tell the story of her community, which is one that has proved to be relatively resilient in the face of the “End Times.” Early on, she thinks of herself as “a writer only in the sense that she loved having written.” How did you find the voice for her account of these days?

I wanted J. to sound like someone who majored in English at a place like Oberlin or Bard or Sarah Lawrence, a sophisticated reader who has taken writing workshops and has a sense of how to write a first-person nonfiction narrative, but who at the same time is very skeptical about whether those skills have any use at all in the world she now finds herself in. In an early draft of the story, I included a passage from William Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation”as something she picks up while she’s trying to write her narrative. “Of Plymouth Plantation” is, among other things, a survival narrative, written by someone who saw death firsthand, who saw the entire population of the colony (including my own ancestors, the Allertons and the Cushmans) very nearly wiped out in the first winter after they arrived, and who, of course, credits their deliverance entirely to the grace of God. J., too, is someone who has become “intimate with death,” as she says, but she’s ambivalent about how to express that, and whether it matters. For her there’s no possible narrative of deliverance or redemption or a covenant—whether secular or sacred. She knows how to write a trauma narrative, you could say, but not a survival narrative, a narrative that comes from actually facing what we might call extinction.

Toward the end of the story, when disturbing news arrives from the outside world, J. describes a feeling of dread. It’s something she associates with the Bush Administration. How political do you want the story to be?** **

That feeling of dread was very much my own experience, particularly in the weeks between the 2000 election and its botched, fraudulent outcome. It felt at that time—as it did during the Watergate years, I think—that the façade of American electoral democracy might just collapse at any moment. J. recalls this feeling when she hears the news (which may or may not be true) that the government has reorganized itself and is sending what seems to be a small army, an invading force, to “reclaim” rural Vermont. For her, that dread is a distant memory, because in her present experience what we think of as politics has all but disappeared—the town has no government, no leaders, only the two loosely competing groups, the Vores and the Resurrectionists, and a few traces of the Occupy movement, most notably the use of the human microphone.

There’s a line from a song that occurs to J. at another point in the story—the song is “Running Into Walls,” by the band Into Another, and the line is “We are the last of the loved ones.” What J. experiences, with the disappearance of electricity, and then the collapse of the state, is the loss of so much of her private life, her individuality, even what we might call her personality—all those things vanish or are entirely altered by the absence of her iPhone, her daily cup of coffee, her commute to work in an air-conditioned car, listening to “All Things Considered.” If “The Empties” has a directly political dimension, you could say it has to do with thinking about how our “authentic selves” are largely held together by—among other things—stimulants and antidepressants, cellular technology, climate control, credit cards. If these artifacts of our late-capitalist culture vanished, how would we recognize ourselves? How would we recognize one another?

You recently published your first novel, “Your Face in Mine,” in which a white man becomes an African-American following racial-reassignment surgery. The novel embeds a speculative conceit within a familiar setting (the city of Baltimore, in this case, before the novel moves on to Bangkok). How important was it for you to establish this world before you introduced the surgery itself?

In “Your Face in Mine,” the two main characters—Martin, who undergoes racial-reassignment surgery to “transition” from a white to an African-American identity, and Kelly, the narrator, who discovers his secret—were both white teen-agers in Baltimore in the early nineteen-nineties, and both found the racial and economic segregation of the city to be a source of intense, unresolvable psychic pain. One could say that it marked them for life. Kelly responded (as I did) by moving away; Martin, who didn’t have that option, found himself instead undergoing this very radical, unexpected inner crisis and transformation, erasing his whiteness and embracing (or appropriating, or stealing) blackness instead. So, in this novel, the texture of Baltimore, the atmosphere of the city, in memory and in the present, is all-important. It operates as a metaphor for the racially and economically divided world we all live in, but it also stubbornly resists being reduced to a metaphor.

Did you think about what your life would be like were the lights suddenly to go out? Can you imagine yourself surviving as well as J. has?

I like to think of myself as a relatively resourceful person—I was an Outward Bound instructor briefly in college, studied wilderness first aid, and so on. But I’ve never hunted or fished (successfully), and I’m terrible at getting things to grow. So I’m not sure I would even have as much success as J. has. And I know I would feel devastated at the idea of never having another cup of tea.
