July 8, 2024
This slippery and stimulating novella from Gladman (Calamities), which was originally published in 2008, explores the writing process behind one of her unpublished novels and the relationship between writing and living. The story begins with Gladman as a 20-something poet in an unnamed city in the mid-1990s. Drawing inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Red Desert and a fictional film about two Black women artists who are lovers, she begins writing a novel called After That to express what it feels like to be alive, attempting to develop a plot out of her distaste for cellphones and her unease about gentrification (as the reader learns from a partial summary of After That, a pivotal scene involves a neighbor annoying Gladman’s narrator by showing up in her apartment while talking on a cellphone). Incredibly, Gladman pulls off a story about a failed piece of writing that doesn’t feel self-indulgent. Instead, it’s packed with wonderfully strange ideas (while writing After That, Gladman wondered if she was existing in the realm of fiction), and it builds to a clarifying conclusion about the relief of letting a project go. This is a marvel.
August 1, 2024
Having published a number of Gladman's slippery and strange experimental fiction works (Event Factory, The Ravickians, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, Houses of Ravicka, and the upcoming My Lesbian Novel), the Dorothy Project revives this 2008 account of her failed attempts to write After That, which would have been her first novel. Poet Paul Val�ry famously wrote that "a poem is never finished, only abandoned," a point that Gladman bolsters as she circles and recircles her work's uncertain course of creation, from the rapturous early throes of furious napkin jotting, through years of fresh drafts and abandonments, culminating in "a flat, unalterable end." Amid a searching metanarrative absorbed with linguistic and epistemological quandaries, Gladman provides just enough hints about the plot of her "ghost book" to suggest that it may have been a more inherently interesting failure than this "writing about the writing about the writing of that long ago book" proves to be--which may or may not be the point of the whole exercise. VERDICT Readers new to Gladman might better appreciate this elegy for her stillborn novel after first exploring her more conventionally unconventional fictions set in the surreal world of Ravicka, starting with Event Factory.
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