Kate Zambreno
The plucky unnamed street urchin who narrates Affinity Konar’s vivid and disturbing first novel, The Illustrated Version of Things, is seemingly sprung from a Carson McCullers novel. A high school version of Jodie Foster’s knock-kneed nymph in Taxi Driver, she possesses an almost beatific naïveté that is decidedly Dargeresque, despite being a survivor of the streets and the foster-care system and recently released from a mental hospital. Charlotte Roche’s controversial novel, Wetlands, is an uneven yet adventurous catalogue of filth, a feminist critique of what cultural theorist Lauren Berlant calls “hygienic governmentality.” In the case of Wetlands, this means a politics housed in the anarchic, messy body of German teenager Helen Memel. Narrating from her hospital bed after hemorrhoid surgery, eighteen-year-old Helen sees herself as a sanitary terrorist, rallying against the deceitfully liberational promises of tampon ads and shaving commercials and of a fascist regime of douching and wiping from front to back. Would it be far-fetched to imagine that Christine Montalbetti was musing on the interior monologue of a certain cowboy president while writing her novel Western, a deconstruction of the classic American myth? In this postmodern pastiche—published in France in 2005, now ably translated by Betsy Wing—the narrator, named Christine Montalbetti, writes a novel titled Western, starring a generic cowboy hero, unnamed until the end. Given the associative spirit and self-referential nature of the text, perhaps such speculation is appropriate.