Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

For her first novel, poet and translator Moschovakis (They and We Will Get into Trouble for This) offers a cerebral, sometimes meandering rumination on novel writing that juxtaposes two women writers: Eleanor, who loses the laptop containing notes for the novel she is writing, and Eleanor’s creator/alter ego, who is writing a novel about Eleanor. After her laptop disappears from a coffee shop table, Eleanor receives an email from someone claiming he cannot return the device but might retrieve its contents for her. Eleanor departs Brooklyn for Albany to find the emailer, visits an upstate commune, and then travels to Addis Ababa. When the writer writing about Eleanor shows a draft of her novel to a critic she met 20 years earlier, he asks why Addis Ababa? The question remains unresolved. The writer accompanies the critic as he receives an academic honor. They discuss her novel; their friendship grows. Rich in cultural references but short on plot, Moschovakis’s concentric narratives capture moments of inspiration, distraction, analysis, and mundane activity in prose encompassing quotes, lists, emails, texts, news reports, and two pages of nothing but the words “time passed.” Less a novel than it is performance art in print, Moschovakis’s fiction exercise illuminates a writer’s disconnected choices and personal connections, but, like her characters, bogs down in the creative process. (Aug.)