“When I was little,” Agnes Maurer muses near the end of the film. Agnes is alive!“We’ve been taught to negotiate with our status.” She remembers that as a child, when patronizing upscale cafes, it didn’t matter if the bakery next door wasn’t technically affiliated with the restaurant if you really wanted to go. You have to politely but firmly ask the waitress to take it for you. She obliges.
Agnes, the plucky narrator of Harry Elizabeth Newton’s disorienting debut novel, bends the world to her desired reality, even though she’s catty, disreputable, and never quite gets her way. She is a narcissistic and volatile person whose self-worth is based on getting more than 11 likes on Instagram and what her boyfriend thinks of her. Once, Leonard Cohen told her that she was beautiful. The novel is an uninterrupted stream of consciousness, punctuated only by her speech. She hasn’t heard from anyone else, reflecting her exaggerated actions of phasing out those she considers inferior to her. Agnes is alive! is an ambitious and dangerous work—her voice lies somewhere between Valerie Cherish’s unabashed desire to be in the spotlight and Marnie Michaels’ relentless desperation—and yet it’s one of the year’s most uproariously entertaining novels.
“Baby, are you talking about the movie? I’m going to run errands all day, but I’m waiting for your message. I love you. I love you. It’s your big day. I love you. Will you answer me? Go to sleep.”
One morning in September 2014, as she sweated it out at 6:30 a.m. in a SoulCycle class, she realized she would do anything to get someone to kill her. This kind of idea seems a little childish at first, but her first question to the barista has a rhythm of self-deprecating humor that’s steeped in Tumblr, which we’re about to move on to, until you realize she’s deadly serious and trying too hard to get the job done. She is promptly fired after snatching a knife from her (“self-inflicted, boneheaded”) boss’s desk, buys a gun from a girl in a Carly Rae Jepsen shirt, and wanders the hallways of a shady building to buy cocaine, overhearing “a conversation in Chinese that I imagine involves a multigenerational family meeting about a problem child who doesn’t do his homework.” As the days stretch into night, her ways become bolder and freer.
The book makes it very clear why Agnes wants to die by the shocking nature of her thoughts. Thankfully, this isn’t a one-off joke. Her mind moves quickly from topic to topic, and while it can sometimes feel subtly eccentric, it usually works in her favor, portraying women with problems or simply facing the world as it is. Agnes’ darkest thoughts are revealed in a disturbing and brash way. She criticizes President Obama’s failure to acknowledge Black Lives Matter and the fact that this is the Year of the Crystal, but what bothers her most is the casual tan suit he wore during the ISIS press conference. “What on earth was he thinking?” she asks. She carries the burdens of life, and her inner monologue is shaped by the pace and frenzy of someone with nothing to lose. I think of Meg Stalter. busy I asked a confused Stephen Colbert about his experience in London. “When you’re eating breakfast, you’ll say, ‘Get me out of here!'” Agnes’ screams were barely concealed.
she is a model whorl magazine (the magazine has reserved her a spot on its “Cultural Council”), and the girlfriend of indie filmmaker Nathan Gray, a depressed, indifferent man who couldn’t care less about her. She gets tickets to movies in at least five different time slots at times that are most convenient for him, but despite her urging, he never contacts her in time for any of the show times. “He likes me to wear a turtleneck and white underwear and serve him takeout on a tray in bed.” That’s skateboarding. She recalled the time he told her she was “taking control of his life” by bringing him coffee, cleaning his apartment naked for him, and installing a medicine cabinet in his bathroom. Nevertheless, she remained loyal to “my intelligent man,” delivering danishes to his bedside, “his hair wrapped in swirls of intelligence, his lips pursed like Cupid’s witty bow.” When she leaves for work, she adds barrage. “Baby, and a movie? I’m going to run errands all day, but the text is waiting. I love you. I love you. Big day. I love you. Can you say it back to me? Go to sleep.”
Agnes is alive! is often hilarious, but the narration switches from jokes to touching moments with overwhelming deftness. She tells two separate men that as a perk for killing her, they can do whatever they want with her after she dies, and that her body is their grateful gift. And it’s clear that she gets more out of Nathan than he does – “I’m going to meet my partner Nathan Gray at the cinema” – but her desire to be her own type of artist is never made clear. “I wanted to create things with people, with men,” she reflects. “Movies starring men are like our own babies.”
With its reliance on shocking content and gore at times (Agnes succumbs to the misery of what New York City has done to her in the final third), this novel could have really gone sideways. An overambitious dilemma, an impossible narrator, an unwieldy structure, it’s a miracle. Agnes is alive! Newton’s talent is well reflected in the repeated flashes of light. Consider an unseen conversation with a gun dealer who owns a dog with social anxiety. “He needs to get used to strangers. We’re in New York. I personally like strangers. I’m busy too. Good luck to you too.” Many of the chats with clerks, editors, and long-time ex-lovers rely on the same subtle cleverness, ironic verbal tricks with an irresistible sense of humor. Agnes is alive! It’s more than meets the eye, it’s both a serrated knife and a child’s play blade.
Agnes is alive! is out now.
Source: Our Culture – ourculturemag.com
