sophie kemp has compared herself to pynchon in a recent interview, and not completely without justification: as the crying of lot 49 looks down upon the great pulsating motherboard of the city and then zooms towards it, becomes it, kemp’s novel starts about as zoomed-out as you can get, at the conception of the universe, before zooming through the history of all womankind, in little more than a page, into the life of reality, whose story, through this potted history, ‘has been foretold’. much has already been made of the novel’s plot, which focuses (with much pre-requisite social cynicism, if not satire), on reality’s quest to find a boyfriend, to be the best girlfriend. if you want to know more or less exactly what this book is about, seek out the broadsheet paper reviews (of which there are many). suffice to say that it’s in new york, there’s lots of young people, doing and saying young people things, which is fine. i’ve never been obsessive about plot, and this one at least doesn’t get in the way of style. paradise logic is in any case an extremely daring and assured debut. kemp’s prose is surprising, ribald, and funny, managing to write about modernity without being unintellectual (as many other zillennial-penned narratives about same are wont to do). the problem is that the overtly postmodernist style of the novel is rather exhausting, if not exhaustive, a la junior vice-metanarrator john barth. it often feels like an unending framed narrative that you want to reach out of, back into the, duh, reality of the narrative, but its borders are an unreachable horizon, moving back and back. this is frustrating, and your patience for this novel then will depend on your penchant for such sustained experimentalism. the fact that kemp can sustain the experiment successfully for the novel’s 250+ pages, however, is itself a worthy achievement. to be recommended, if for its craft alone. ed
death kit 