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In Beloved, Toni Morrison writes of a kind of loneliness that is "wrapped tight like skin." I don't think Morrison's taut simile has been topped, but two new novels attest to the inexhaustibility of language to describe a state we all unwillingly experience.
Peek at the multiple categories that 'Pemi Aguda's debut novel, One Leg on Earth, is shelved under and you'll start to understand how distinctive her writing is. Amazon, for instance, sells the book under: horror, occult and supernatural, city life, and literary fiction. It's all those and more.
Aguda's shy main character is a 23-year-old Nigerian college graduate named Yosoye. A communications major, she feels lucky to have been assigned to an architectural firm in Lagos for her year of national service.
Determined to shuck off what she thinks of as her "inward tilt" Yosoye walks into a "local joint" shortly after moving into her one-room apartment. She "convince[s] herself" to sit down and order a beer, and, when a man approaches, she goes off to a cheap motel with him and has sex. Then, she discovers she's pregnant.
In addition to all the mundane reasons why this pregnancy comes at a less-than-ideal time for Yosoye, there's also something weird happening in Lagos: Pregnant women have begun walking into the ocean, jumping into lagoons and drowning themselves. Some force compels them to be one with water.
Aguda has linked motherhood and the supernatural before in her 2024 short story collection Ghostroots, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Here, it's not only the mass suicides that render Yosoye's Lagos sinister; it's also the locale of the building project where she works, churning out promotional materials.
Omi City will be a preserve of the wealthy built on a peninsula reclaimed from the ocean. Right now, though, it's just miles of empty sand occupied only by the architectural firm's rough headquarters. The self-important employees there barely acknowledge Yosoye's existence. Her lifelong loneliness motivates Yosoye to keep the pregnancy. Here's her thinking:
An outline. That’s what Yosoye had always felt like. A hollow outline of a person moving through space. ... It explained why people looked at her and looked away. ... [A]n outline had no mass, no grounding force. This baby was now a dark little spot inside that outline. Yosoye felt its weight. As it grew, she would be shaded in until she became a real person.
Through uncanny language and images, Aguda enchants her readers into an intimate connection with Yosoye.
Talk about enchantment. Every time Elizabeth Strout brings out a new novel — which is often — I think to myself: She can't pull off another great book again. And then she does.
Strout's signature subjects of loneliness and class humiliation reappear in The Things We Never Say, although Lucy Barton, a mainstay of her recent books, is absent. Instead, we meet someone new: Artie Dam is a 57-year-old high school history teacher —the kind of teacher who genuinely cares about his students and changes some of their lives.
That said, Artie finds himself leading a secret life of sadness. He even contemplates suicide. A puzzling separation from his beloved adult son is one cause, but there's also Artie's low-level feeling of isolation. For instance, arriving home after a cocktail party, Artie says to his wife Evie: "I wonder why people never said anything real."
Evie, a therapist, dismissively tells him not to "be an idiot." We're told that: "Artie, as he walked to the closet with their coats, felt a dismalness return to him."
There's a major secret revealed in the course of this story and Artie's special area of interest — American Civil War history — allows the novel to make some profound commentary about our own contemporary civil wars. But Strout readers know her most overwhelming epiphanies sneak up in throwaway moments, fragmented short paragraphs. I'll leave you with one of those paragraphs, courtesy of Strout's omniscient narrator:
So blind we humans are — so blind. To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone. And maybe we have ... But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own. Thinking all the while that we can see.
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