Fresh starts become false ones in this thoughtful meditation on addiction, illness, and vulnerability in 21st-century America.
In one sense, The Seventh City of Refuge arrives as a remix of author John Whittier Treat’s debut novel, Lambda Prize finalist The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House. Both focus on a mismatched central couple (thirty-something academic Jeff and 20-year-old Starbucks employee Henry in Yellow House, Ivy League music executive Conor and working-class Pete in Seventh City), both feature unsparing depictions of HIV and drug addiction, and both highlight themes of risk, existential loneliness, and the search for a safe harbor. However, where Yellow House unfolds in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, Seventh City is very much a story of and for the 21st century—for an era in which precarity, if still unequally distributed, increasingly permeates American life and culture.
The novel opens in 2018 Los Angeles. Pete, 10 months into a relationship with Conor and struggling with alcohol use, sees a young woman die of an overdose. Haunted by the sense that he has witnessed his own death, Pete persuades Conor, who has been using meth since college, to make a new beginning with him: The pair will relocate 1,000 miles north to Eastern Washington and embrace sobriety. Ellensburg thus becomes their titular city of refuge, a place where, in biblical times, a person responsible for another’s accidental death could seek asylum.
However, the novel is no straightforward tale of rebirth. To begin with, Conor quickly discovers that Ellensburg is a key hub in the local meth trade—hardly the place to shuck an addiction. Simultaneously, Pete, who is HIV positive, goes off the medications that keep him undetectable and untransmissible, though not from any simple death wish. Rather, stopping is first and foremost a way of asserting agency, its very recklessness proof of his freedom. As Conor, a philosophy major, frequently observes, danger and free will go hand in hand, with every choice involving an assessment of risk.
It is this interest in risk that draws Conor and Pete to a local group of survivalists. Upon arriving in Ellensburg, they adopt two dogs from an older married couple, Jim and Angie, who they learn are “preppers” stockpiling resources and honing their survival skills in anticipation of societal collapse. From here, the novel unfolds in episodic, unhurried fashion, its meditations on trust and danger occasionally punctuated by plot developments.
In some ways, Seventh City seems naturally suited to the novella or short story form. Its characterization is at its most robust when tightly focused on the main players—Conor, Pete, and even Jim and Angie. With moments of complexity but an inconsistent narrative presence, characters like Jim and Angie’s son, Ford, and his friend Cookie occupy an awkward space somewhere between secondary and tertiary figures. Conversely, the novel occasionally belabors its points: Conor’s contention that in an increasingly secular world, free will becomes a “wager” based on the odds rather than a matter of moral “fault” is well taken but also reiterated perhaps once or twice more than necessary. One can imagine a pared-down version of the story in which the bleakly ironic implications of the conclusion—that danger rarely takes the form we expect, and that risk is never truly shared—lands with even greater inevitability.
However, to recast the novel as a moral parable would be reductive. The novel adeptly explores how people navigate a dangerous world absent a strongly externalized moral system: “Once, like when [Conor’s] parents were growing up, nothing was just hazardous. It was sin, taboo or sacrilege, and your damnation was immediate as well as eternal. […] But [now] if you did something dodgy, and it backfired, you were a victim of chance.” Conor finds this state of affairs exhilarating, at least initially. Others, the novel suggests, find it terrifying, particularly as the list of potential threats swells (the narrative’s last act unfolds amid the COVID-19 pandemic).
Seventh City reaches no easy answers about which response is preferable. Certainly, given today’s reactionary political and cultural currents, Conor’s contention that the search for safety can be deadly feels timely: “If I want to survive, see, I have to destroy my father, my family, everywhere I came from. I have to destroy myself.” Yet Conor, given to contrarianism, is unsure “where these words of his were coming from, even if they were true.” The qualification is characteristic of the clarity that accompanies the novel’s compassion. Author John Whittier Treat no more romanticizes Conor’s self-destruction than he does Angie and Jim’s prepper lifestyle, even as he shows how both can seem reasonable responses to a world that feels out of control.
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