Book Review: ‘Swallow the Ghost,’ by Eugenie Montague

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Book Review: ‘******** the Ghost,’ by Eugenie Montague

******** THE GHOST, by Eugenie Montague

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For the general public, the worst things about the website we used to call

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include *****, harassment and fascism. But for writers of fiction taking up the site itself as a subject, the worst might be just how tricky it is to dramatize something that is both immaterial, in the literal sense of the word, and far from immaterial, in terms of its effect on so many lives. The novelist who decides to write a novel about a fictional novelist who is writing an imaginary novel on

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has only compounded the problem.

Eugenie Montague’s “******** the Ghost,” a coolly crafty debut, concerns a literary ****** novel fashioned in part from tweets on various fictional accounts. The project is the work of the serious young Jeremy Miller, whose lofty ideas regarding experimental literature haven’t prevented him from shelling out to a P.R. company to help build buzz for his work in progress.

The novel (Montague’s, that is) consists of three sections. The first belongs to Jane Murphy, a diffident and troubled young woman with the P.R. company, who has been tasked with helping Jeremy. Meet-cutes work in mysterious ways, including, in this case, while churning out tweets from fake accounts in the voices of characters from Jeremy’s novel. (Whether these tweets also form part of the novel is unclear, and part of the tweets-en-abyme vertigo of the book.)

Soon, Jane’s in trouble: “Sometimes when he smiles at her, she feels like she’s won a prize.”

At one point, she explains to Jeremy the concept of a “soulbonder,” a term from Y.A. fandom. Such a person feels “an intense bond with a fictional character to the point where they exist in your own head.” Essentially, she’s describing cathexis, the phenomenon of intense emotional investment — something Montague’s stylish, convention-allergic novel resists.

In spite of her love affair with Jeremy, the aloof Jane is more a creature of groundhoggish repetition than romantic passion. Lines describing her daily wake-up recur multiple times, verbatim. While reiteration of the depressively cyclical is an audacious narrative strategy, it also means our girl ******** chimerical; I did not soulbond. As a consequence, the dramatic fate (no spoilers) that strikes her at the start of the book’s second section registers with dampened shock.

Nonetheless, this middle section is the most compelling. For one, the turn toward detective fiction brings with it that genre’s suspense. More significantly, it’s narrated by a character whose life — problems, compromises, vanities, desires — takes on ****** and dimension in ways Jane’s does not. This is Jesse Haber, who has abandoned journalism to work for a corporate law firm seeking to prove Jeremy’s innocence in the scandalous case at the heart of “******** the Ghost.” Jesse’s friends disapprove of his working somewhere that, as a Ph.D. candidate character puts it delicately, “doesn’t seem … to align with your values.” As with the hypebeast promotion of experimental literature in the first section, compromised principles remain a theme.

The book’s final section takes the form of a transcribed conversation between Jeremy and an acquaintance he met “on

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talking about video games.” The exchange is part of a bookstore event for the publication of Jeremy’s new book, some years after his

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novel. The two slightly pompous young men talk before an audience in shades of hostile flattery. The mood does not seem satirical. Jeremy makes pronouncements about distrusting narrative — “even deconstructed narrative, even narrative that draws attention to itself as narrative” — and scoffs at “the invisible hand massaging discrete events toward some coherent meaning.” He decides to “opt out of all that.”

A character’s credo is not to be confused with an author’s, but “******** the Ghost” does indeed frustrate a wish for coherent meaning, not least in its refusal (a spoiler of sorts follows) to solve the book’s governing mystery. Montague’s debut is bold and ingenious but ultimately confounding. When Jeremy is asked to tell a story about Jane, his interlocutor insists: “There have to be people in it, not just ideas. Things have to have smells.” I would have liked more smells.

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******** THE GHOST | By Eugenie Montague | Mulholland Books | 312 pp. | $29

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#Book #Review #******** #Ghost #Eugenie #Montague

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