Subdivision: An Enigma or a Mess?

 

SUBDIVISION (2021)

By J. Robert Lennon

Gray Wolf Press, 230 pages.

★★★ 

 

It’s not that often that I sputter when someone asks me what a book is about, but Subdivision is such a work. All I can say for certain is that it’s either one of the most creative novels of the year or an absolute mess.

 

An unnamed woman finds herself in the “Subdivision” of “The City,” which looms in the distance but can’t be accessed because of recurrent wind storms and floods. When it is accessible, one goes there via Bus Negative One, which suggests that our main character is either in something akin to a matrix or is recently dead. I might go with the latter, as there are references to the Buddhist concept of bardo, a liminal state between death and rebirth. For me, the novel it most evoked is Kevin Brockmeier’s 2006 The Brief History of the Dead, which toyed with the ideas of sasha (limbo) and zamani (the afterlife) that are aspects of some traditional African religions.

 

I hasten to add, though, that I’m speculating. Others have labeled it a book about trauma-induced amnesia, a Kafkaesque dream, life as a video game, the immediate aftermath of a suicide, damaged memory, or pure science fiction. It might be one, all, or none of those. I could add a slow trip down the River Styx as another possibility. Depending upon your tastes, this will make J. Robert Lennon’s work either an ambiguous pleasure or a journey into WTF frustration.

 

The woman at the novel’s center is also our narrator. She finds herself at guest house hosted by two women, The Judge and Clara, though both women have the first name Clara and both were once judges. The rooms therein are labeled Virtue, Justice, Mercy, Duty, and Glory. In the parlor is a perplexing gadzillion-piece puzzle that the guest is encouraged to assemble. She can’t make heads or tails of it, yet it changes every day and she is commended for her progress. She is also given a hand-drawn map to find her way around the Subdivision and to say that it takes her unusual places doesn’t begin to get it. She meets a woman of indeterminate age who gardens a lot, enters several strange houses, and has encounters with a shapeshifting bakemono, a shapeshifting creature from Japanese folklore whose level of existence is up for grabs but who nonetheless stirs her libido.  

 

And the bakemono isn’t even the oddest character in the book. There is a child that may or may not belong to the narrator; a nearly wordless truck driver who buys bunches of roses for his wife, who never appears; and Forby, a man engaged in quantum tunneling by hurling tennis balls at a wall all day to test the probability that one of them will pass through. The weirdest of all isn’t a living thing, or is it? The narrator purchases Cylvia, a digital assistant whose form also changes. Cylvia offers warnings and advice that’s so weird it might make you want to get rid of your Alexa!

 

Massive wind storms occur from time to time and the narrator secures a job as a “phenomenon analyst,” whatever that might mean. Both Cylvia and her hosts advise her to make sure she works in the Dead Tower rather than the Living Tower, the latter of which is allegedly too dangerous. About all we know for certain about the Subdivision is that its principal products include cheese, bookcases, ice, hymnals, and narratives. A muffin plays a role in the novel, as do unusual sounds, bizarre stories, a blackbird, and reports that that are straight out of 1984.

 

Does any of this make sense? Probably not, but maybe I nailed it. It is true, though, that you are unlikely to read anything else like Subdivision. It’s short. Give it a whirl. If it seems too surreal and confusing, it won’t get any better or worse. In Lennon’s defense I will say that I haven’t stopped thinking about Subdivision since I finished it. It is chocked full of ideas; now all I have to do is figure out what they are!

 

Rob Weir