Today is the two-month birthday of The Unmapping! It already sort of feels like it was published in a past life. But it wasn’t! It’s still new in the grand scheme of things and I love hearing from people who read it. Tell me what you think about it in an email or comment or text or letter, and if you haven’t read it yet, well, that’s easy to fix. If you have read it, maybe you have a friend (or enemy) who would like to read it too?
My publisher is putting together a book club guide so if you’re interested in that, let me know. I joined a virtual book club group this past week about The Unmapping and we all had a great time.
Also, read this review from the thoroughly chaotic writer Alexander Sorondo, who has some fascinating and fun things to say about the book, and also says “Denise S. Robbins is the real thing. Sometimes you read a debut novel and you’re not quite sure but in this case it’s hard to refute.”
Happy monthiversary, lil book!
-“The Real Thing”
This week, omens abound. The sky is orange, the air quality index is red, the white flowers disappear or grow in red, my cats cower in fear in the kitchen, tails fluffed to the maximum orange. Yes, the cats are terrified. Earlier this summer, three and a half years into their furry little lives, they discovered the ability to jump onto the kitchen counters. I worried this day would come, I warned Seth our lives would be over, and it has, and they are. Gone are the blissful days of butter on a tray and bread in an open box. No more fancy olive oil jars with their beautiful lickable lids. Cooking food on the stove? Don’t even think about cooling it there. We boarded up our food and put the bread in the microwave and the olive oil under the sink and stopped cooking anything we didn’t eat right off the pan, which we then cleaned immediately and put in the sink. Then they went for the dishes in the kitchen sink, so we cleaned every dish and put it straight onto the rack. Then they dug their paws deep in the food disposal, so we doused that in vinegar. Finally they began licking the newly-cleaned dishes, hoping for a scrap of former food, a memory of cheese. My apple knife, my ice cream spoon. Licked sandpaper raw. That was the last straw. It was time to fight back. Aluminum foil blossomed atop every counter—until they learned to jump over it. Soda cans formed ramparts around the bread and sink—until we ourselves couldn’t stand it. Finally, we bit the bullet and bought the expensive motion-activated air puffers, then scattered them on the counter in random patterns, thinking chaos was our best defense. And they worked. Immediately. Not just against the cats. I myself jump whenever one of them goes off. I crabwalk on the ground with my dirty plate, put it silently in the dishwasher, tiptoe backwards on my fingers, successfully make it to the other side of the room, stand up, then boom. A tiny scream. But the cats have been defeated.
Fear is in the air.
I want to talk more about fear. But first, let me talk about the surprise-red flower. We bought a pack of natives from the local arboretum, and this seedling, they told us, was supposed to be an aster. But out bloomed a bright red cardinal flower. It’s named after the cloaks of Catholic cardinals, which are red, supposedly, to signify the blood they would give for the cause. Pure devotion: Slice me open to prove my faith, it wouldn’t make a difference, fashion-wise. (Or maybe it’s all the spaghetti sauce—it’s Italy, after all.) (Probably it’s the blood.)
Earlier this year I was stranded in Denver with nothing to do so watched a movie filled with real cardinals and lots of red (though not much blood) (nor spaghetti). It was Conclave. You know, the one that won every major writing-related movie award this year. It is described as a “thriller.” What does that mean? There is no hidden monster behind the corner. No secret disease grabbing hold of their entrails. No rivers of blood or serial killers. There are simply plot twists left and right, each more unlikely than the last. A secret baby, a bribery conspiracy, a hidden bedpost drawer, and the ending, with the biggest plot twist of all (no big spoilers here, just tiny spoileritas). The big question is who will become the new pope. Who is the right person to lead the faith of a billion people? And why?
Yes, beneath all the twists and turns, theoretically there are these big questions pulling the story forward. The question of faith and tradition. In a changing world, how to keep traditions? If the traditions change, how to keep faith? Doesn’t faith imply constancy? But in the movie, matters of faith are quickly brushed aside. Twice it is mentioned that our hero, Cardinal Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), is having trouble praying. The movie then gets right back to the plot, as if those moments were an embarrassing burst of gas. The story is about a dramatic papal election, emphasis on “dramatic.” Seth and I kept a running bet on who we thought would win. Cardinal Voldemort? Or the saintly Mexican guy? It had to be one of the two, it certainly couldn’t be one of those evil guys with bad opinions like traditionalism, nor the boringly good guy who the other boring guys wanted too much. But we didn’t know who it would be or how it would get there, and we kept trading guesses. One convenient bomb explosion and speech mic-drop later, we had our answer.
When the movie ended, I felt dissatisfied. You see, I was looking forward to a movie that did something interesting with the “thriller” genre. This has been a year of thrillers for me, and I have a theory about thrillers I’ll get to later, but, I also watched the movie to learn something about religion and faith because I am interested in religion and faith in general and wanted to learn a little more about Catholicism in particular. My knowledge of this sect (do you call it a sect?) is hazy, outside of a friend’s baby’s baptism, where they said a lot of strange things very seriously and I took photos awkwardly. I am less interested in guessing who will become the fake pope in this fake Conclave. Sure it’s fun, in the same way watching worms race can be fun, but from an Oscar-winning screenplay, I’d hoped for more.
So I read the book.
In Conclave the book, there is more. We have a deeper look at a man in a crisis of faith. We have complicated power dynamics and the irony of performative humility and ultimately, a search for capital-T Truth. In the book, our hero Voldemort (in the book his name is Cardinal Jacopo Lomeli but in the movie it’s Cardinal Thomas Lawrence so I’ll just keep calling him Voldemort here) narrates early on: “Some kind of spiritual insomnia, a kind of noisy interference had crept over him during the past year, denying him that communion with the Holy Spirit he had once been able to achieve quite naturally.” A phrase from the Book of Job comes to his mind: “I cry out to You, God, but You do not answer.” He had cancer, we learn, and ever since, it seems, he’s been wondering what it’s all for. Filled with pain, filled with regret for the life he didn’t live. He tried to leave his position but the Pope wouldn’t let him. So now he’s in charge of running this election and doing it in a way that feels correct. Balancing the fact that he wants to be neutral with the fact that he has an opinion about who is the right leader and that he has some power to sway the others.
Cancer is not mentioned in the movie.
Beyond the fact that the movie straight-up removed the spiritual heart of the book, it also botched the power dynamics and nuances of the terrorism sub-plot, and made certain choices that gave the overall feeling of disdain towards religion, if not mockery. I don’t want to spoil any more so I’ll leave it at this: the movie simplified the story to the point where it’s barely a story anymore (but made it very pretty, like lipstick on a skeleton).
The movie does some things well, though. Silence and beauty.1 All the non-verbals. There is stillness. Pauses and quiet moments that are simply unable to be written. Only felt. And perhaps seen. Seen in the red. There is red! There is so much red. There is darkness, and then there is red, and the color is all the more beautiful. It is so beautiful I can imagine traveling to a new world and naming every red creature there a ‘cardinal.’ Birds, flowers, what next? I want my steak cooked cardinal. I’ll have the cardinal slushie, the cardinal M&Ms please. Tacos with cardinal sauce. Pasta cardinal spilling all over my cardinal robes. I will slice myself open so all can be red to prove my devotion to the red.
So. It’s not a good movie, but it is a beautiful movie. As much as I wish this weren’t the case, there are certain forms of beauty that writing can never truly capture. The movement of a song. The stillness between words.
But maybe you can find that same stillness and beauty by going outside and staring at a flower.
Still, I want to believe “thriller” as a genre can do something interesting. My theory is that we should all be writing thrillers to hoodwink the masses into reading good literature.2 Thrillers remain one of the most popular genres, because they’re fun to read. Why not place something interesting on top of that structure? I’ve found myself reading several thrillers this year, feeling hopeful each time.3 I want a story to sweep me away from the first chapter, the first line, and this is what a thriller does best. I’ve largely been disappointed. One exception is Sorondo’s Cubafruit, which I’ve mentioned before, which starts with an assassination underneath a purple couch. The plot MOVES, even if you don’t exactly know where it’s moving or why. It ends with one of the most beautiful scenes I’ve ever read, between a biographer and his subject about the nature of man amidst chaos; all of the book’s heady pandemonium leads up to this scene, this moment, and yes, that’s exactly what I mean. That’s exactly what a “thriller” can do. Destroy my sense of safety, pull the ground out beneath my feet. Thrill me as you feed me something dark and beautiful and full of tiny screams.
Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be writing thrillers anytime soon.4 But I will continue to think about the structure, or lack thereof. In a thriller, you know you’re going to be surprised, even if you don’t know why. The question is will these surprises make sense or will they be even more surprising and implausible. So what is it people like? Do they like the formula, or do they like the surprise? Me, I want the surprise, but I want it to make sense. I also want the energy and the movement and for the story to explode outwards until there’s nowhere else to go. Maybe those two things are opposites.
I have all these thoughts about structure but nowhere to put them. And I have a whole essay written about the failure of the Conclave movie adaptation with nowhere to go. I’ve chopped up the words and put a few thoughts in here, but, is it enough? Is it too much? This has been a strange summer, both structure-full and structure-free. Weeks of busy chaos, where each day is meticulously planned but routines are thrown out the window (travel, guests, doctors). Then weeks of openness, where routine is all I have. I’m thinking about our kitchen and how to set up its ramparts and where to put the dishes. I’m reading the Bible and the Odyssey at the same time. I’m putting up rabbit fences but our asters are getting eaten anyway (unless they are secretly a cardinal flower). I’m playing cello in a quintet once a week although we have no goal. A weekly meeting with no purpose. Structure all the way down. We’re now playing the Dvorak “American” Quintet in E Minor; soon we will stop playing it and switch to something else. One of the violists in my group is a string instrument connoisseur. By that I mean, he took one look at my cello and told me who made it and in what year and he knew the brand of strings on the top versus the bottom. He once picked up a free violin bow at a garage sale that was worth $20,000. He wants us to go to Spillville, Iowa to play the Dvorak quintet, just because Dvorak wrote it there. Population 300. Where is Spillville? Where, in Spillville? “We could play at an Exxon station for all I care.” We play music because there is nothing else to do and because this is all we want to do, to live inside a song. We admire its structure, its many flats and sharps, we may complain about the key signature but we don’t question a thing, except for our own ability to live up to its beauty. On the other six days of the week, this violist remembers that his grandson is going through a brand-new cancer treatment in Philadelphia at the children’s hospital horrifyingly named CHOP, where his tiny T-cells are genetically modified to attack the tiny cancer inside him. But one day a week, there is a song, and nothing in the world is happening outside that song, and each time we play it, we know how it's supposed to go; the only question is who will make mistakes and where, and yet each time we know we can find our way back to each other, and when we get to the end, it’s glorious. The structure of a cell can mean life or death or death that leads to life. It is all we have; it is all we are.
-Denise
Book News:
As mentioned above, my publisher is putting together a book club guide. Along with insightful questions, it includes a how-to guide for lucid dreaming and “prepperdom.” Let me know if you’d like one—and I’d also be happy to drop in on virtual meetings, if that’s not too scary or weird (is it weird? am I scary?)
Also mentioned above, a new review:
If you are a reviewer interested in reading the book, let me know!
Recommendations
If you are able to get to Chicago, go see the Caillebotte exhibit, on view through October 5. I’ll be writing an essay about it for
soon and it’s worth seeing in person. If you’re not in the area, go see an art exhibit, but only one that’s focused on a particular artist. I think that’s the best way to understand what you’re looking at.There are many authors on Substack who inspire me, but lately, I’ve really been grooving to the essays of
of Vita Contemplativa, who connects literature, art, and music in surprising and delightful ways. Highly recomend checking it out.Learn how to collect seeds from native wildflowers in your local park! This is my new obsession. Why spend money on seedlings if rabbits are going to eat half your garden anyway?
What I’m Reading
The second installment of plays by Sophocles. Ajax, Electra, and more. These plays are short and easy to read and yet so very powerful. God. You read them and just shiver in the face of humanity in all its flaws and beauty.
I’m writing a novel that takes place in space so concurrently am reading the non-fiction “Packing for Mars : the curious science of life in the void” by Mary Roach and honestly am loving it. It’s a pop-sci book so not very deep but great fun and surprisingly delves more into the psychology of an astronaut than the technology (at least so far).
Just started
’s “Reason To Be” and it’s delightful so far.
Cat
There might be something to be said for the movie’s over-focus on beauty being very Catholic, compared to the protestant-esque workmanlike prose of the book, which itself is more about belief and tradition, while Catholicism is about tradition over belief, but the fact that the movie implicitly makes fun of tradition undercuts this. But who am I to say, I’m Jewish!
This train of thought is inspired by Naomi Kanaki’s piece on O. Henry stories, which used to be widely read because of how fun they were, not how good they were—but some of them were very good, too. Maybe thrillers can achieve this same goal! Gone Girl, for instance, was a fun read, and I remember it having Important Things to say about gender, although if I would feel the same way if I read it now
Some I read for book clubs like John Marrs’s “The One,” which is completely nonsensical, and some I read for fun like all the sci-fi written by Blake Crouch, which I largely enjoyed, even if he tended to botch the endings
Although, my writing doppelganger, Denise Robbins (no “S”) , made her fame by writing techno-thrillers… mysteriously, she stopped writing them once I started publishing more consistently… hmmm…
Beautiful write up, Denise! I am now even more unmotivated to watch conclave hahaha. And you’re reading my book?? Why would you do that, it scares me.
I’ll take one of those book club guides! The Unmapping is on the shortlist for the next Literary Salon Book Club pick.