The sun is permanently setting in The Modern. It might be the only constant in a novel otherwise unmoored by the undulating tides of desire and work, insecurity and millennial ennui. As the narrator of Anna Kate Blair’s debut drifts between lovers – between competing visions of her future – the sky remains crepuscular, casting each slippery proceeding in waning beams and pleated shadows. The light is always “filtered blue” or “pale lavender”, threatened by “the encroaching twilight”. It is a light “that made everything seem distant”.
Dusk is an apt metaphor in a book where everything feels like an ending. The at-first unnamed narrator, an Australian transplant in New York, is in the last year of her 20s, rapidly approaching the final months of her year-long fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art – and with it, the expiration of her US visa. Her relationship with her boyfriend Robert – an echt east coast liberal with a literature degree and a wealthy family – is fraying, their once-animated repartee reduced to a baseline hum of domestic minutiae. By the end of the first chapter, they are engaged: a wine-drunk, impulsive decision that haunts the rest of the novel like a doomy forecast. The next day, Robert departs for a five-month hike through the Appalachian trail.
Left alone in the deadening thrum of her existential angst, the narrator burrows deeper into neurosis. In tumbling first-person narration, she sketches the vague contours of her quandaries: how is she seen by colleagues, strangers, lovers past and present? Is she seen at all?
These questions foreclose any firm grasp on her character. Beyond the most rudimentary of identity categories – she is queer, she is an art historian, she is a former country girl turned big city idealist – she remains an enigma: a funhouse mirror whose true image is distorted through the projections of countless others. Even the most prosaic interactions are rendered opaque – an effect equal parts feverish and frustrating. Her name, which we learn partway through the novel, emerges like a secret. It’s Sophia, she says, introducing herself to a new acquaintance, “unsure of the correct response”.
Sophia’s days are filled with the murmur of work. She pores over the gallery’s archives and conducts regular inspections of a new exhibition. Over a blur of lunches and dinners, she makes small talk with her confreres, mostly circling around the precariousness of their employment. A chance encounter with a bridal shop worker – the younger, savvier Cara, who moonlights as an artist – punctures her routine. Before long, she is smitten; Robert, meanwhile, recedes into a vanishing point out in the wilderness.
Blair is a precise portraitist of love and its delusions; she understands that a crush necessarily entails a degree of self-immolation. Cara wields a singular allure over Sophia, if not necessarily the reader. She “had a self, fixed and identifiable, unknown to me”; she is the proxy through which Sophia imagines a queerer, freer lifestyle. Blair poignantly conveys the melodrama of online life – so steeped in ritual, so rich in subtext. Sophia pores over Cara’s Instagram, mining each photo, every exchanged message for clues into the nature of their relationship. It’s doom scroll as divination.
But listening to someone relay their crush is rarely interesting for sustained periods of time, and what begins as painfully familiar ends up simply painful. As Sophia’s infatuation for Cara consumes her, cleaves her from reality, her narration grows increasingly solipsistic. Cara and Robert become little more than ciphers for what they each represent: hedonism v stability, spontaneity v commitment.
The same fate befalls the carousel of side characters who enter and exit Sophia’s life like stage actors: an old flame from Sydney, a mentor at Moma, an estranged father who receives but a one-line cameo. Sophia understands the people around her only through what they might reveal about her own anxieties. Her primary obsession, as it turns out, is with herself.
Art, too, becomes a casualty of Sophia’s blinkered perception. There are earlier moments where Blair – who, like her protagonist, has worked at Moma – injects the novel with dishy discursions into the commodification of art, the politics of the museum, the vulturous spectators who take photographs in the gallery that feel “taboo, almost pornographic”. These threads, however, eventually unravel in favour of a far less interesting subject: Sophia’s muddied interiority.
“I couldn’t always make sense of my own life through other people’s images,” she admits, and yet she tries again and again, expecting art to provide some kind of absolution. It has a crass, minimising effect: the expressionist painter Grace Hartigan is reduced to a warning against marriage; the seminal photographer Nan Goldin becomes merely a beacon of bisexuality.
Among the Moma staff, debates rage on about the precise definition of the museum’s name. What does it mean to be modern? Sophia returns to one interpretation: “Modernity is the disenchantment of the world, I thought, often, paraphrasing Max Weber.” We might say the same of millennial fiction, that literature of disillusion – the Rooneys, Moshfeghs and Butlers cataloguing the cumulative, corrosive banalities of existence. Blair’s debut pairs nicely with each of these authors, though it lacks their propulsive thrills. Sophia is adrift and remains so. Like a sun slipping behind clouds, her existential spirals can only illuminate so much before they fade into the ambient tedium of life.
The Modern by Anna Kate Blair is published by Scribner ($32.99).
