THE VISITORS, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens
Of all the ways of using the English language, there are two clusters of meaning making that are difficult to understand: the poetic and the financial. (Moreover, if you instinctively understand one, the other is often doubly unclear.) Both try to net over the buzz above us, the swaying and flickering of forces greater than ourselves. Both slosh into the immaterial – future, desires, loss. Both benefit from a firm connection to the practical needs and details of everyday life, but regularly abandon them. Their differences lie in the contexts and communities that hold them close together, and ultimately in the subtle divide between truth and information. Truth complicates; information simplifies.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ new novel, “The Visitors,” sits between the two, attempting to portray the 2008 crash and the market’s patricide, Occupy Wall Street. Stevens’ version of events peels away from the facts as an abandoned wallpaper, as an imagined hacker group, GoodNite, tries to orchestrate a global blackout – wiping out data, debt, operational supply chains, state control. It’s an appealing premise: no computer function is more loaded with human imagination than the restart button. But even as the characters struggle with revolutionary possibilities, the novel’s stylistic choices suggest an author captivated by the language of power. Stevens views the fabricated obscurity of our financial system as profundity, diminishing the emotional truths of her characters by relying on metaphors of market capitalism to explain their inner worlds. The reader is left alienated rather than moved or galvanized.
Twenty pages into “The Visitors,” the main character, C, a former New York City textile artist, endures the unwelcome removal of her “swollen, deformed” uterus on “the weekend Lehman nodded.” Her best friend, Zo, a floor trader, holds her hand and watches numbers turn red. When C woke up from the anesthesia, “everyone was now in debt.” Especially them. There is something fabulous in the deployment of the fertile body as a stand-in for a nation’s wealth, symbolic of error. This tone, poignantly topical yet apologetic, continues with the psychic outcome of the surgery: a few years later, C—divorced, barren, creatively adrift, and beset by loans—begins to hallucinate a talking leprechaun. Before they were garden ornaments, gnomes were the watchmen of the underground, keepers of mines and buried treasure. C’s gnome is working on another system of invisible power: the electrical grid.