Renée Gladman, _Event Factory_

THANK YOU, WILLIAM Harris, for it was your short piece on Gladman in n+1 that inspired me to give this a shot.

Event Factory is the first in a series of fictions about a world or society or place called Ravicka, and I would certainly read the next one. Gladman does not try to conjure up character or plot the way a conventional novelist does—that the epigraph is from Samuel Beckett should be sufficient notice—so the novel’s narrator does not come furnished with the usual demographic tags (e.g., name, gender, ethnicity), nor do they get drawn into a romance or a murder or a revolution. It is not even all that clear whether Ravicka is located on our planet or a different one. 

We do gather, though, that the narrator is a kind of linguist-anthropologist, whose main goal is to see and understand as much of Ravicka and its codes as they can within an allotted amount of time.  It thus has some of the feel of an overtly analytical and intelligent travel book—Tocqueville’s Democracy in America or Chatwin’s Songlines—but also provides the feeling that the character of the narrator is being revealed to us as we see what they notice, how they analyze, what strikes them as important.

Event Factory belongs to a genre that needs a name, in which the main action is the character figuring out what sort of place they are in, how it works, and how they can manage what they need to manage. Gladman gives a shout-out to Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren in the acknowledgements, and that could certainly serve in many respects as a classic example. David Ohle’s Motorman also comes to mind… some of Ursula LeGuin…. But the genre might also include novels in which some mysterious neurological roadblock is getting in the way of the narrator’s re-connecting to a once-familiar setting, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder or Edmund White’s Forgetting Elena. The figuring-out-what-kind-of-a-world-you have-been-dropped-into novel. If only I spoke German….