A grand, metafictional search of self
All good novels are studies in character. In Inferno, author Alan Cohen faces that idea indirectly, by writing what is in-part a conventional novel, as well as directly, by commenting and playing on the act of writing and narration. The result is an ambitious and thought-provoking piece of metafiction, steeped in literature and science.
Our entirely unremarkable heroine is a woman in her early twenties named Nancey (with an e), who has recently begun working as a nurse in Holyoke, Massachusetts. On the one hand, we read about her learning the mundane things of living alone and being a working adult. On the other, we catch flashes of bad things that happen to her, including sexual assault. These descriptions of contrasting mundanity and misery met with apathy create a disturbing atmosphere of incoherence as the reader wonders where the narrative is headed.
Tired of being a victim of circumstance and subject to the whims of the people around or above her, Nancey is moved by an absurd letter from the outside to an extreme act of self-agency. It is a Truman Show type of thing, but Nancey is not plucked out of the narrative just yet. Instead, she takes up a new, seemingly fulfilling life, where she returns to school while living with a kind partner and surrounded by friends. Simple happy lives, however, are not the stuff novels are made of, and Alan Cohen is aware of that.
The book gradually introduces us to a conscious narrator in separate chapters alongside those narrating Nancey’s life. These chapters initially expound at length about the biology of genes and how people are determined by them, and, later, about how our environment shapes us, until the narrator directly talks about the act of invention and questions it. In the process, the book has taken the reader through a kind of crash course in the psychology which motivated modernist literature.
“Man is barely alive anymore to the first things of this world: its mountains and rivers, trees and tigers, monsoons and eruptions. Shut behind a screen of private thoughts and things, he observes and performs; eats, sleeps, and makes merry. . . And then, with disconcerting suddenness, an event one day detaches itself and, penetrating the boundary between our world and us, makes a dramatic entrance. . . We’re changed, we feel at first, irrevocably; but then we fall back into our own natural rhythms, which increasingly dominate the counterpoint of nature.”
When, at last, the meta aspect of this novel takes over and the process of experimentation becomes overt, the reader feels at home in the lab. Although the book generally doesn’t feel its length, after so many pages the giving up of conventional narrative feels strangely earned. Nancey is emancipated, not in the story but in the book, and we come a tiny step closer to the ultimate goal, that is getting to know her.
Although it could have bore trimming down, Inferno’s length is justified by the peculiar vastness of the world it creates. It is an inner world, one which collapses on itself and explodes, like a star which, in dying, spreads the elements from which sentient beings are made, thus allowing the universe to know itself. Inferno is a fascinating path to take in getting to know ourselves and others a little better. Despite its deliberate formal irrealities, it is remarkably true to life.
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