Zolitude by Paige Cooper

LAUREN KIRSHNER

Zolitude, a finalist for this year’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction, combines dystopian sci-fi and realism to explore the fraught borders between love, sex, and intimacy. The fourteen stories in Paige Cooper’s collection take place in surrealistic and barren environments—apocalyptic wastelands, galactic steppes, and austere ramshackle cities—where survival is far from guaranteed, and where it can be folly to long for intimacy. Yet Cooper’s characters, like most humans, do, and Cooper’s portrayal of their longing is formally innovative, compelling, and deeply human.

In the title story, a woman waits in the fictional city of Zolitude and frets about her long-distance lover; in others, a loner and lover wander a bleak dinosaur park, a sex worker in an unnamed post-war city records her daily routines, and a nomadic librarian who visits remote construction camps takes her chances with intimacy. Rest assured, Cooper’s women characters are not clipping petals off daisies; they are punk rule-breakers whose erotic energy is refreshingly not focused on men but on self-exploration and Sapphic pleasure. In “Zolitude,” two lovers have “coralreef current between them.” With the narrator’s bloodstream “hotsprung” and leg’s “weak,” she sends her lover a selfie in which she wears a playsuit that is “labial pink.” Later, she imagines her lover’s “tights around her knees” as she is “licking her hairless.” Cooper’s writing is sensual and appetitive, and her jewelled sentences ring with moxie and wallop with carnal force.

Zolitude is about women strutting toward intimacy, the intimacies women share, and the risks of emotional nakedness. Its characters are outsiders zigzagged with contradictions: lovers who sleep alone, introverts with molten cravings, and girlfriends whose grand gestures match their fears of rebuff. In a less skilled writer’s hands, these complex, even eccentric, characters could verge on quirky showboating, but Cooper’s characters are layered, believable and, in all of their vulnerability and vigour, absolutely compelling. They are brilliant and emotional women who have been muzzled for too long. One woman’s body holds “emotion like smoke in a barricaded room.” In the collection’s final story, an unnamed narrator aptly notes how “anger is insanity when a woman performs it.” Cooper’s unrestrained, vibrant, and powerful female characters smash these patriarchal assumptions—and express anger, lust, and longing without apology.

From its opening to its closing sentences, Zolitude marks Cooper as a writer in full command of her talents and a storyteller who grabs you by the guts and refuses to let go. Poetic, fierce, and whip-smart, Zolitude is a beautifully-crafted debut that rings with originality and announces Cooper as a voice to be reckoned with.