![]() The narrator here is in some ways a recessive figure we learn about her not from what she says so much as through her acts of listening. At one point the narrator retorts: “And presumably you know that saying the words existing power structures doesn’t mean you’re not part of the problem?” In an early section, when the narrator is still young, she meets a friend at the show of a Swedish video artist who makes work about female humiliation, and the two proceed to perform for each other with baroque cruelty, trying to show who has the most politically astute reading of the art. ![]() She is also particularly good at evoking how women judge, and how they present themselves to be judged. Popkey is sharp on the way young women can alternate between brash self-aggrandizing and deep self-loathing. The conversations in which we learn all this are deftly dramatized, ranging from casual banter to deeply troubling confessions that explore the residue of sexual trauma and dissociative female submissiveness. As the narrator gets older, her ambitions are largely abandoned: She marries a fellow grad student named John and follows him from professorship to professorship, rather than finishing her own Ph.D. Each little wrinkle in time tends to thwart assumptions the reader might have made. When we first meet the narrator, she is “twenty-one and daffy with sensation,” going “straight from a major in English to a graduate program for study of same.” Her story unfolds, like life, in fits and starts, roving back and forth in time with disconcerting precision. Courtesy the artist and Jenny’s, Los Angeles Liz Craft, Little Lips 4, 2015, glazed ceramic, epoxy, 11 × 6 × 2". Then again, the effort feels appropriate to the subject matter: The problem with those narratives for a bright young woman, after all, is how claustrophobic, deforming, and one-dimensional they are. Had not yet realized the folly of governing narratives.” Over the course of the book, that folly is demonstrated over and over, sometimes with a little too much effort. The novel opens with an epigraph from Sylvia Plath’s diaries: “How to recognize a story? There is so much experience but the real outcome tyrannizes over it.” Similarly, Popkey’s narrator tells us at the outset: “I, at twenty-one, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. “If every event which occurred could be given a name,” John Berger wrote, “there would be no need for stories.” Popkey is concerned not only with how hard it is to name the events in our lives but also with how easy it is to misname them. It isn’t a novel of event so much as a novel of reflection, and one feels the presence of predecessors such as Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Rachel Cusk’s Outline. This near disconnect appears to be intentional: With its shifts in time and tone, Topics of Conversation tells a story of misplaced promise and self-abasement. If I hadn’t read the book’s jacket copy I might not have known that this was a single narrator, so different does she sometimes seem from chapter to chapter. The result is less a unified novel in the realist mode than a richly kaleidoscopic meditation on female identity as it evolves over time. Topics of Conversation is a series of vignettes-each recounting a single conversation-spanning almost twenty years of the unnamed narrator’s life. The fact that she drinks too much is an element of her persona that feels a bit too stock itself. Wit is never in short supply here the narrator is a perceptive observer of her own habit of falling into, and her ultimate inability to accept, a series of stock roles: bright but naive graduate student professor’s wife suburban mother clever daughter single parent. Stories about ourselves-and how we tell them-are the core of this twisty, prickly, sometimes brilliant debut. ![]() ![]() Miranda Popkey’s Topics of Conversation is a novel about the things women (largely women of a certain class) talk about, when alone with each other, when with men, when in the world, and privately to themselves.
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