Eleanor or The Rejection of the Progress of Love
by Anna Moschovakis
First Posted Feb 2019
I can’t believe this was my first SFPL book. I mean, I can believe it, and I’m incredibly happy I noted it in the review.
So many small details of of life at the time of reading a book are lost to time when I assume I’ll always remember. It wouldn’t be hard to just check the dates—Feb 2019 was right after we moved here, after all, but kudos to me for getting a library card that quickly.
I still maintain the bookstore recommendation shelves in Brooklyn are more to my taste than the ones here in SF.
This is one of those novels—to be fair, I sought out one such as this—one of those novels so shrouded that it takes patience to unravel and focus to follow the thread. Two stories run in parallel, two Eleanors to worry about, two vectors of attack on my prudish brain:
“But my decision to include [several scenes in which sex acts were described] in the first place was made deliberately, in response to a sense that depictions of sex and sexual dynamics in novels, especially heterodynamics, especially in novels by women, tend to invite a particular kind of reductive critique, or else sensationalism when such dynamics happen to be central to a book. For reasons that remained obscure to me, I had an urge to face this vulnerability—to some extent, at least—rather than defend against it by writing a novel in which nobody fucks.)”
The internal Eleanor’s sexual onslaught eventually slows to a trickle, commented on by the framing device itself:
“I keep meaning to ask,” he said, pressing his thumb into my kidney and swerving us away from the picture window, “what happens to Eleanor’s libido?”
Eleanor writes a story about Eleanor; the split between story-Eleanor and author-Eleanor draws attention to the unreality of literature. Sexual gratification is frequent in the internal device as guard against, or response to, anticipated critical response in the world of the framing tale. We read one Eleanor as metaphor—which makes her consequences feel unreal—and the other as protagonist. But author-Eleanor is the true construct. She is merely a codex to decipher the heart, which is embedded two tales deep. The Eleanor that matters is the one inside the story, not the one writing it.
Which is the message of the book. Literature helps guide us through the world by illuminating potential paths through events which don’t have direct analogues to our lives. Often, reading takes as much as it gives; Some books require experience to understand, feed off of and amplify emotions even as they color and reshape our actual memories. Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is my first borrow from the San Francisco Public Library. It is unapologetically New York: Gowanus and Fourth Ave and Nevins cut me with a nostalgia that I didn’t know had time yet to crystallize:
She walked several long blocks up the shallow slope toward the park….[s]he could see up ahead the peaked white tents of the farmers’ market, where on Wednesdays and Saturdays, especially in the summer, the beautiful people turned out with their bikes and strollers, their scooters—the foot-powered kind and the gas-powered kind and sometimes the electric kind—and retro plaid rolling carts, to meet the producers of their organic and humanely raised food.
As my access to tables of NYC-centric small press novels at Greenlight Books or Community Bookstore &tc falls away, will I be able to find tales of modern ennui, the one-alone-among-eight-million genre, that I sometimes crave?
Out from Eleanor poured forth my longing for Brooklyn, unacknowleged and frightful in its intensity. When the setting leaves New York, Eleanor begins to break apart:
She felt in this decision the echo of other decisions, of all the central and marginal decisions that, in their determining powers over the course of a life, form much of the content that replaces empty time; and she knew that the effects of the decision were consequential, even if minor, even if still unknown.
The choice to go is relevant to the overt message: “Any thing may produce any thing.” Reality simply happens, a string of events that don’t hold together under rational scrutiny. That randomness is counter to fiction. It breaks the bounds of a framing device or plot.
If literature is a desire to capture the unpredictable, the unanswerable, the unknowable on the page—a desire to push back against the idea that literature posits an ethos or advances an argument—then Eleanor is a desire to let “the thing—maybe all things—just live in the same space for a while.” The book leaves the reader with no place to enter the text. Untethered from literature, embracing nothing more than the abstraction of words on a page, Eleanor forces a nonchalance that reads as affectation, but truly cuts to the bone.