While there are no schools or ruled paper in the Alexandra Kleeman’s short story collection, Intimations, this feeling is perhaps the closest we’re going to get in any attempt to describe the surreal, anxiety-dream atmosphere stretched across the book. Be they bizarre fables or straighter realist narratives, Kleeman’s stories are imbued with an overarching strangeness. Indeed, many of the characters seem to be facing an exam of one sort or another, though the stakes are raised by their confusion as to what exactly is being measured, by whom, and to what end.

The collection is split into three sections, categorised in the press release as “birth, living, and death.” The first opens with ‘Fairy Tale’, a nightmare in which the narrator’s home is besieged by fiancés and boyfriends, past, present and potential. Her parents look on, as though expecting her to select one, though when she does the piece unravels, chaos disintegrating into a fine, single thread of logic that only she cannot decipher. ‘The Dancing-Master’ is equally unsettling, featuring the titular Dancing Master and his captive-like student trying to perfect his body in motion, while ‘Lobster Dinner’, is an absurd, devious take on the love story, featuring killer lobsters and killing lobsters and lobster-based recipes from summer on the Cape. Strangeness squared, ‘A Brief History of Weather’ closes the section with the most peculiar piece in the collection. Logic obscured as if by a stormy front, the story is either hieroglyphic or pareidolic, as though arriving in neat images and channelled through Kleeman’s pen unedited, arranged according to the direction of the wind or else blind chance.

The majority of the stories in the second section concern a narrator named Karen, though we are left to guess if the Karens are the same person or linked in any way at all. Here Kleeman pivots in a realist direction, the peculiarity left to haunt the spaces between what the characters try to say and what they manage to communicate. ‘Choking Victim’ sees a well-meaning mother grow irrational through neurotic concern, while ‘Jellyfish’ finds a newly-engaged couple at an unnerving holiday resort, seemingly unable to enjoy their milestone. This is made clear by the state of the sea, so chock-full of the Cnidarians of the title that swimming is not possible. “The effect of so many small, identical details multiplied and extended into the far distance was nightmarish,” Kleeman writes. “An optical illusion made suffocatingly real.”

There’s an alienation present in ‘I May Not Be the One You Want, But I Am the One For You’, though cleverly registered as the opposite—Karen, having been isolated from human contact, is the ‘normal’ one, and now suddenly aware of the fundamental oddness of other people, the way they live and breathe and lick their lips, fleshy machines we can never really know. The isolation, it seems, is both the cause and the coping mechanism, the reason the people in her cafe appear so strange and the attempt at escaping into something more digestible. Instead she flees to entertainment in which narrative arcs are followed and people represent simplified ideals of viewers choice.

“She felt thick-brained and inept at the delicate choreography of being nice to people. She had been watching two movies a day, sometimes more. There were almost enough movies around to live your entire life in them. But there was not quite enough.”

The closing section opens with the fancy-dress-faux-pas-turns-murder-mystery of ‘Fake Blood’, where guests at a party debate the relative realism of the killings taking place around them (“But what does real look like?” someone asks). ‘Hylomorphosis’ is Kleeman at her most experimental and abstract, never quite materialising into anything tangible, and ‘Rabbit Starvation’ juxtaposes the fluffiness of white cotton with some hideously dark existential force. Finally, there’s an apocalypse of vanishing objects, ‘You, Disappearing’, which echoes Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things. Here is perhaps where Kleeman’s intent becomes clearest, the tale becoming a melancholic love story as represented by absences, and our inability to see them coming.

“The apocalypse was quiet. It had a way about it, a certain charm. It could be called graceful. It was taking a long time.”

Intimations is out now via Harper Perennial and available in all the usual place. Also, be sure to check out Kleeman’s debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine.

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It’s up for debate whether Alexandra Kleeman’s début novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is dystopian. I mean, it’s too familiar and life-like to be truly dystopian, although that’s exactly what makes it so terrifying. The world seems to be functioning pretty much as normal, as people go about their days with the aimless sense of duty we are all accustomed to, a far cry from the visions of Orwell or Burgess or Dick. But the definition of dystopia is “a community or society that is undesirable or frightening”, so who’s to say “normal” can’t also be dystopic?

Kleeman’s narrator ‘A’ is blank, mostly faceless with few discernible personality traits. Her job feels temporary and is barely mentioned. Many of her scenes involve her doing very little inside her apartment. Instead she is fleshed out through her exposure to-/interaction with her room-mate (‘B’), boyfriend (‘C’) and the vivid stream of entertainment and advertising (or entertaining advertisement) which seems part of the world’s very fabric. Obvious comparisons are Pynchon and Foster Wallace, plus George Saunders in his being-clever mode (as opposed to his sentimental one), although the focus is very much away from the large-scale political/societal systems in favour of personal, A-centric explorations. All background occurrences (the mystery of disappearing dads, an anti-veal activist who ends up marketing it, even B and C) are filtered through A’s experience.

As the story is told in first person this might seem obvious, but (to me at least) it goes much deeper than that. In most postmodern books the main character is subject to/lost amongst a world of disinformation, whereas in You Too… it’s A herself who feels like the disinformation. The question here isn’t “is the world as the media says it is?” but rather “am I who the media says I am? Who I think I am?” Whether this is an emerging trend in post-postmodern millennial literature, a natural reaction to a world in which identity is unsettled and fluctuating, or just a new, gender-based perspective on things traditionally written about by men is unclear. One thing is for certain, Kleeman is a name to watch among the new generation of writers building upon the work of the aforementioned greats.Here’s a collection of songs that I think are relevant or related to the novel. If you like a particular band, just click the artist name in the tracklisting to be whisked away for more information. Enjoy:

Tracklisting:

1. Too Dark – Frankie Cosmos
2. Sucks Hanging Out With You (It Sucks Even More When You Leave) – Free Cake For Every Creature
3. Slumber Party – Mommy Long Legs
4. What’s Another Lipstick Mark – Adult Mom
5. Unholy Faces – Florist
6. Bedroom – Alanna McArdle
7. TV – Oh, Rose & Sawtooth
8. Death Cult Paradise – Trace Mountains
9. I Saw My Twin – Hop Along
10. Nashville Parthenon – Casiotone For The Painfully Alone
11. Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts – Wolf Parade
12. Oranges – Young Jesus
13. 1994 – PWR BTTM
14. Washing Machine – SPORTS
15. Lookalike / I Lost My Mind – Titus Andronicus

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is out now on HarperCollins. Quiet, Constant Friends is still available as a download or on cassette via the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page. You can read the other Lit Links posts here. If you have a book in mind and fancy a go yourself, just get in touch!

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