Could we live otherwise?

Familiar
by J Robert Lennon
(Serpent’s Tail, £11.99)

J Robert Lennon’s new novel, his first book to be published here for almost a decade, is either a sleek piece of science fiction, or a sleek portrait of psychological crack-up, or a sleek reflection on IT, or a sleek case-study appended to a thesis in epistemology, or consciousness studies, or quantum physics. Much of the book’s excitement turns on discovering which of its successive debts to established genres and academic disciplines will prove the most important. It’s a riddle that never quite gets solved, a mature decision on Lennon’s part which leaves the reader feeling light-headed but not underfed.

Tight in focus as well as construction, and written in a clipped and steady present tense, Familiar never leaves the head-space of Elisa Brown, a married woman who notices the crack in her car windscreen disappear and finds herself in a modified version of the life she knew. Lennon’s title provides a clue to the uncanny quality of Elisa’s experiences, familiarity being unnerving rather than comforting when prompted by one’s house or job or partner. This “new life” isn’t “familiar” rather than unknown but familiar rather than known-inside-out-and-backwards.

By showing care over every detail of the initial scenario, Lennon is able to explore themes that Elisa does not ponder but without writing over her head. While the character tries to determine the cause and meaning of her situation, the reader is invited to consider its metaphorical freight, the light it casts on the idea of the self as selves. At the moment when things changed, Elisa was already negotiating a transition between an old existence and a newer one, driving from Wisconsin, where she used to live, to New York, where she has lived for five years. The motorway itself represents a transitional space or limbo, as caught in the word “Interstate”. Elsewhere, too, Lennon alights upon words whose malleability enable little jokes — eg, as an administrator, she is not “real” to the professors she works with.

Just as Elisa’s husband seems more like himself than he had done for years, so her new life as a whole represents a distillation or intensification or scrambled rewriting of her old one, its strangeness no different from ordinary human strangeness. To discover that her son, Silas, whose old-life counterpart died in a car crash, is still alive invokes something very like grief — grief inverted, perhaps, but accompanied by the same dislocation. (After Silas’s death, Elisa “never did find a rhythm” with her husband and older son.) The feeling of having run “out of options”, rather than being unique to this particular option-poor scenario, was also “the signature emotion” of Elisa’s “years as a parent of small children”.

There has traditionally been a sense of fun built into premises of this kind, arising from the exploring of permutations and fixing of parameters. Familiar has fun spoiling the fun, by showing that various components of the body-swap/alternative-reality formula have been destroyed by the internet (for example, within a few clicks, Elisa knows all about her new job). Lennon generally resists the comic and narrative possibilities available to his structure in favour of exploiting its capacity for generating metaphors and analogies —and by refusing to work his way through to a moment of sensible closure, ending instead at a point when things are at their most blurry and brain-teasing, he has constructed an otherworldly narrative that feels fleshed out but not stretched thin.