Death by Landscape

Starred review from May 30, 2022
Novelist Wilk (Oval) brings together memoir and her literary criticism and reportage in this superb collection. The essays “have been decomposed again and again, recycled and used as soil for new seeds, new ideas,” she writes, and her fiery intellect touches on ecology, dystopia, the female experience, virtual reality, and fiction writing. The title piece uses Margaret Atwood’s short story of the same name to explore a genre of “ecosystems fiction” that aims to remove the distinction between “human and nonhuman,” while in “Funhole,” Wilk juxtaposes two novels—As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem and The Cipher by Kathe Koja, both of which have plots about a “woman fall in love with a black hole”— with Anne Carson’s telling of the story of Joan of Arc and the writings of Susan Sontag to investigate the limits of interpretation and what’s knowable. In “Ask Before You Bite,” Wilk does some gonzo journalism in the vampire larp scene, and things complicate as she goes “from larping a larper to larping” and finding “an experience of being yourself and not-yourself, in which you and your character coexist but remain distinct from each other.” Taken together, the essays are elegant and powerful. This one packs a punch. Agent: Cynthia Cannell, Cynthia Cannell Literary.

May 15, 2022
An eclectic collection about topics related to our current position in the Anthropocene. In a wide-ranging series of essays, Wilk, author of the acclaimed novel Oval, examines a variety of genre-bending creative works. She derives her title from a Margaret Atwood story about how a missing girl in a liminal person-plant transition becomes part of the landscape. Wilk begins with "what it means to be a person in an age of drastic ecosystem decline--of planetary extinction." A sense of urgency pervaded what she calls the early systems novels of DeLillo, Coover, Pynchon, and Gaddis, which manipulated or upended genre conventions. Drawing on works by H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Powers, among others, Wilk explores what constitutes weirdness, eeriness, and ecosystems in fiction. She seeks to understand death as a "kind of life through landscape," including the effects of a toxic environment on people and art as employed in Jenny Hval's novel Paradise Rot and Karen Russell's short story "The Bad Graft," which follows "an unwanted, unexpected, erotic interspecies incursion." The "impossible terrain" of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Wilk notes, is a good example of "narratives reflecting the transformations of the drastically changing planet." Pandemic and apocalyptic stories "offer a lot for comprehending our current situation," while dystopian landscapes "rendered in familiar fashions" can still be titillating or terrifying. Science fiction, Wilk contends, has found its own utopian landscapes in steampunk, solarpunk, cyberpunk, and films like Neill Blomkamp's Elysium. In the latter part of the book, the author verges off into some robust issues about empathy and virtual reality as a "trauma machine" as well as her own intriguing participation in the improvisational theater of a vampire larp (live action role-playing). Wilk concludes with autobiographical reflections on Oval, a larp based on it, and her writing methods. The author makes us look at the world and speculative creations in a new, defamiliarized way.

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