Liz Craft, Little Lips 4, 2015, glazed ceramic, epoxy, 11 × 6 × 2". Then again, the effort feels appropriate to the subject matter: The problem with those narratives for a bright young woman, after all, is how claustrophobic, deforming, and one-dimensional they are. Had not yet realized the folly of governing narratives.” Over the course of the book, that folly is demonstrated over and over, sometimes with a little too much effort. The novel opens with an epigraph from Sylvia Plath’s diaries: “How to recognize a story? There is so much experience but the real outcome tyrannizes over it.” Similarly, Popkey’s narrator tells us at the outset: “I, at twenty-one, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. “If every event which occurred could be given a name,” John Berger wrote, “there would be no need for stories.” Popkey is concerned not only with how hard it is to name the events in our lives but also with how easy it is to misname them. It isn’t a novel of event so much as a novel of reflection, and one feels the presence of predecessors such as Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Rachel Cusk’s Outline. This near disconnect appears to be intentional: With its shifts in time and tone, Topics of Conversation tells a story of misplaced promise and self-abasement. If I hadn’t read the book’s jacket copy I might not have known that this was a single narrator, so different does she sometimes seem from chapter to chapter. The result is less a unified novel in the realist mode than a richly kaleidoscopic meditation on female identity as it evolves over time.
#John popkey series
Topics of Conversation is a series of vignettes-each recounting a single conversation-spanning almost twenty years of the unnamed narrator’s life. The fact that she drinks too much is an element of her persona that feels a bit too stock itself. Wit is never in short supply here the narrator is a perceptive observer of her own habit of falling into, and her ultimate inability to accept, a series of stock roles: bright but naive graduate student professor’s wife suburban mother clever daughter single parent. Stories about ourselves-and how we tell them-are the core of this twisty, prickly, sometimes brilliant debut. Miranda Popkey’s Topics of Conversation is a novel about the things women (largely women of a certain class) talk about, when alone with each other, when with men, when in the world, and privately to themselves.
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