Nightmare in the dream house

This genre-shifting memoir busts the taboo about violence in queer relationships, discovers Lucy Scholes

TIN THE DREAM HOUSE

here’s a touch of Victor Frankenstein about every memoirist. Theirs is the toil of resurrection and reanimation. “Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue,” acknowledges Carmen Maria Machado. “They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead.” In the Dream House, Machado’s own dazzling addition to the genre, is more spinetinglingly monstrous than most.

It’s an account of an abusive relationship Machado was in with another woman when they were both graduate students. The “Dream House” of the title is both the real home Machado’s girlfriend (who is never named) lived in, and the fantasy of the life Machado thought they’d build together. So far so straightforward, but like Frankenstein’s monster, this book is an exercise in patchwork. Each chapter takes the form of a different narrative trope: Dream House as… myth, sci-fi thriller, choose your own adventure, comedy of errors, soap opera, cautionary tale, ad infinitum.

Break it down, and it sounds gimmicky: the artifice of these kaleidoscopic vignettes; the fact Machado writes in the notoriously tricky second person, addressing (with a mixture of sympathy and admonishment) her younger self, “always anxious and vibrating like a too-small dog”; not to mention the footnotes, highlighting traditional folk-literature motifs that pepper the story.

Indeed, I picked it up with no small degree of trepidation. Not only is formally inventive memoir all the rage, many examples of which suffer from style over substance; but even more damningly, that was precisely my criticism of Machado’s short story debut, Her Body and Other Parties. The centrepiece of the collection recast every episode of the first 12 seasons of the American TV show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in an eerie world of ghosts and doppelgängers; a conceit that was both monotonous and dull.

Here, however, it’s the exact opposite. The further inside the Dream House I ventured – “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture,” Louise Bourgeois reminds us in the first of the book’s three epigraphs – the more convinced I was that there was no better way Machado could have told this story.

After all, what’s more genrebending that a tale of love turned poisonous? That in which the “kick of want between your legs” becomes the “kick of fear between your shoulder blades”. How else to portray the experience of being in a relationship with someone who swings between charismatic and alluring and volatile and dangerous? This is a woman who hurls abuse at Machado while they’re driving home from a bar, who follows her into the house, into the bathroom, into the shower, screaming all the while. Who rips the shower curtain from its rings, leaving Machado sobbing, vulnerable and naked, backed into a corner. Then who comes back only minutes later and, “in a voice so sweet your heart splits open like a peach,” asks her why she’s crying.

As the book skitters and skids between genres, the reader’s sense of instability mimics Machado’s own unsteadiness, both then as the abused and now as its documenter. “At times,” she admits in the afterword, “it didn’t feel like I was writing at all; it felt like I was pinning down fragments of history with wellaimed throws of a knife before they could shift or melt away.”

That Machado is writing into a broader silence about violence in queer relationships only makes her book more powerful. The last thing queer women need, she thinks, reticent to tell anyone what’s happening, is bad PR. Now happily married to another woman – one who has her own history with the unnamed ex: this is “Dream House as Plot Twist”

– if Machado could say anything to her ex, it would be “For f---’s sake, stop making us look bad.”

This isn’t flippancy, it’s desperation born from deficiency. We still don’t really know what to do with same-sex relationships that aren’t models of equality. Perhaps one of the reasons it’s so complicated, Machado suggests, is because, in the same way that abuse in heterosexual relationships is a form of sexism, abuse in queer relationships is a form of homophobia: “I am doing this because I can get away with it; I can get away with it because you exist on some cultural margin, some societal periphery.” Yet to deny queer people their wrongdoings and their villainy is also to deny them their humanity.

In wrestling with this silence, the books morphs, at intervals, into something closer to critical cultural history. Thus, In the Dream House is evidence and archive both – Frankenstein’s monster meets haunted house. Most poignant of all, though, is the realisation that it’s only by telling her story, the only way she knows how, by means of this exceptional document, that Machado realises what happened to her is not unique, and that she is not alone.

Each chapter takes a different trope: soap opera, sci-fi thriller, comedy of errors

Call 0844 871 1514 to order from the Telegraph for £12.99

Nowadays people worry about how automation and so-called “artificial intelligence” are going to put people out of work, but a century ago some thinkers positively welcomed the prospect. In his celebrated 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness”, Bertrand Russell observed: “Modern technic [technology] has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community.” So, he suggested, the workday ought to be cut to four hours for everyone. “Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.”

We have, of course, gone on being foolish since. But the new wave of self-driving cars, warehouse robots and the like, it is feared, might leave us no choice. Computer systems can now accomplish a lot of tasks that it was previously thought required uniquely human intelligence, such as checking legal contracts or identifying cancerous skin lesions. And one of the messages of this fascinating and tightly argued book by the economist Daniel Susskind is that we have no good evidence to suppose that this encroachment on human labour must stop at some particular line. This is not because computers are attaining human levels of cognition, but because computers simply don’t need to do something in the same way humans do it in order to do it better.

The paradigm example of this truth in recent decades is chess. When the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov in their 1997 match, it did so not by emulating human intuition but simply by crunching numbers so fast that it could look further ahead. “Machines can outperform people at a task without having to copy them,” Susskind rightly notes, though the example of chess is actually more nuanced than he allows. For a start, Deep Blue did not give Kasparov “a pounding at the chessboard” – the match was close, and was in fact a rematch after Kasparov had beaten the machine the previous year. And despite advances since then, chess computers have not displaced humans: indeed, the Googleowned chessplaying software named AlphaZero has inspired modern players with its apparently romantic style, and the human chess elite now earn more than ever before.

But what will we do in the coming decades if robots do eventually destroy all the jobs? For a start, one should always rephrase this question to avoid the impersonal overtones of sci-fi dystopia: what will we do if human managers and executives continue to fire huge numbers of their fellow humans and replace them with robots? Secondly, Susskind’s book is mischievously mistitled: as he explains, he is not talking about the prospect of a world with no work at all but that of a world without enough work for everyone, even if some people can still be hairdressers or carpenters or tech CEOs.

One answer one often hears to such worries is that it doesn’t matter because there will still be a lot of jobs programming and designing the robots and doing new tech things no one has yet imagined: the old “everyone must learn to code” solution. But of course, not everyone has the aptitude for computer programming, and – as Susskind points out – although “retraining”

A WORLD WITHOUT WORK

but a deeper objection has long been that free money for the necessities of life will destroy people’s motivation and lead to a general zombified apathy.

Susskind shares this fear, and so instead of a UBI he proposes a conditional basic income or CBI: “conditional” first because it will be means-tested, and second because recipients will still have to earn it by working at whatever

“the community” decides is useful to it: perhaps caring for the elderly, and so on. To some this will sound like a nanny-state hellscape, and Susskind does not shy from calling his proposed solution “The Big State”. He does not, however, go into detail about how exactly “the community” will decide which activities are worthy of payment. Perhaps we will be subject to the tyranny of a slim majority that decides dog-breeding, classical music or literary criticism are valueless activities, in which case no one will ever do them again.

But the moral objection to UBI

We can’t expect every middle-aged taxi driver to retrain as a software engineer

– that it will encourage laziness and anomie – is always at bottom a puritan condescension. If one asked Susskind whether, if he never had to worry about money, he would just spend all day watching reruns of Bake Off and slumping into potato-ish ennui, he would probably deny it.

So why assume it of everyone else? As it turns out, Bertrand Russell anticipated this objection 90 years ago: “It will be said that while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours’ work out of the 24. Insofar as this is true in the modern world it is a condemnation of our civilisation; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency.”

Modern sceptics might still dismiss Russell’s argument as a Fabian pipe-dream, but the “cult of efficiency” is still very much abroad, and it is indeed what is driving the race to automation. Susskind’s careful analysis shows that it will be an increasingly unignorable problem, even if his proposed solution will not convince everyone.

At the last gasp, he even drops in the alarming recommendation that our future politicians should “guide us on what it means to live a flourishing life”, in the face of which prospect one might after all be happier to resign oneself to a robot apocalypse.