PARTICIPATION

Amid environmental and economic uncertainty, two reading groups, Love and Anti-Love, merge syllabuses and members as they redefine what it means to participate—in community, in relationships, in humanity.

E is a member of two reading groups—Love, which has recently begun to meet solely in virtual spaces, and Anti-Love, which variously bills itself as "resistance, revolt, revolution," and which meets at a village cafe 150 miles from the city where E lives and where Love is centered. The syllabus for Love ranges from Aristotle to Badiou, and E is behind in her reading. She attempts to catch up while on a temporary break from one of her three jobs (the mentor who is training her as a mediator has vanished midcase with no explanation), and through her interactions with the group's listserv, she finds herself increasingly fixated on fellow Love member S, whom she has never met in person. Meanwhile, the weather has become unpredictable, a part of the cycle of news reports that “[appear] at the top right of the screen, a stack of small explosions, almost registering, then, compulsively, swiped away.” As E burrows into her reading and through her memories—of Pablo, the gadfly interpreter; Giorgos, a talkative Greek poet; a cherry-lipped bookstore clerk who's “an acquaintance from a time past, when drugs and love intersected in a clear and particular way,” and more—the general sense of apocalypse coalesces in the form of Tropical Storm Ezekiel, much bigger and farther west than meteorologists anticipated, which wreaks havoc in the village where Anti-Love meets. As the diverse characters of E’s life converge on the flooded region, the methodology of Love versus Anti-Love transcends its binary to become something at once more complex and more humanely simple. Theory-driven, opaque, and formally experimental, the book risks abstraction that can be alienating, allowing its characters to exposit their thoughts on their lives, surroundings, memories, and expectations rather than explore these ideas in-scene. However, Moschovakis’ take on what it means to form community in opposition to the expectations of hierarchy, anticipated outcome, or even narrative that have been indoctrinated in readers feels timely, perhaps even prescient, in an era when the only thing that seems constant is the incontrovertible need for change.

Densely intellectual, the novel forces an alert reader to reconsider what it means to participate in the very act of reading.