An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth

Poet and translator Moschovakis’s third novel (after Participation) offers a coolly provocative portrait of an aging actor in a city beset by seismic activity. The unnamed narrator gradually reveals the parameters of her strange world, which has pointed echoes of the Covid-19 lockdown, as she struggles to walk around her apartment during tremors and scrutinizes the guidelines shared by authorities (“They say things will return to normal and you will adjust to the change, as if those are similar promises, and possible”). The reader also learns early on that the narrator wants to kill her housemate, Tala, who’s at least 15 years her junior. Much of the novel revolves around the narrator’s grappling with the reasons for her homicidal desire—a mix of jealousy over Tala’s youth and active social life and a desire to be Tala. After Tala disappears, the narrator sets out to find her, hoping to follow through on her plans. Neither the murder plot nor the speculative elements are sufficiently developed, but the narrator’s preoccupation with poetic language (she’s a staunch critic of “junk metaphors”) lends the novel a deep and lively intelligence. Readers of experimental fiction ought to seek this out. Agent: Akin Akinwumi, Willenfield Literary. (Nov.)