Novel explores a vast canvass

MEMORY PIECE – A NOVEL Lisa Ko Loot (R484) Riverhead

THIS is a novel that explores, among other things: chosen vs blood family, artistry, work, the internet, capitalism, activism, communal living, class, elitism, exploitation, surveillance, lesbianism, bisexuality, memory, time, and the particular thrills and rigours of being a young person.

The best element of Memory Piece is the three women at the centre of the story. Ko, whose previous novel, The Leavers (2017), traced a young man’s search for his mother, an undocumented immigrant in New York, draws characters with such deftness that they feel wholly alive. Details add up over time to create dazzling dimensionality. We see the characters as they see themselves, and as they see each other, allowing for a panoramic view.

Memory Piece is divided into three sections of roughly equal length – one each from Giselle’s, Jackie’s and Ellen’s point of view – plus a fourth section composed of micro-chapters with shifting perspectives (explaining more would only spoil).

Giselle’s section, the first, is the strongest. It unfurls elegantly with a hypnotic immediacy, starting with her early teen years. Part of the appeal is nostalgia: Women will remember bra shopping with their mothers, as Giselle does with her own mom, Mercy, on the eve of starting Grade 7. “Like Kodak film, she waited to develop, jumping in front of the mirror each morning until finally she spied movement, two minuscule meatballs. In a Kmart dressing room with ossified gum on the walls, Mercy scrutinised the meatballs, snug in two bright white cups with a rose sewn in the middle.”

Her first year-long piece involves living in a secret room in a Paramus Park mall, sans books, television or other modes of entertainment, only leaving the room at night when the mall is closed. (In a sense, this will be her first vanishing act, but not the last.) No one knows until it’s done – except Jackie, who sneaks in food and sneaks out buckets of waste.

Jackie’s segment, the second, drags at the outset. It’s the late ’90s, and she’s working in tech for a Postmates-like company, hating it, and spending most of her spare time working on Lene, a service she lovingly created that helps people publish their web diaries. She rarely sees friends. Her only regular, non-work-related social interaction is with a woman she met online who lives thousands of kilometres away. Jackie’s pages contain many a tech reference – IPOs and VCs; hard drives and web hosting; clever allusions to real-life tech figures – but all her aloneness and computer-y talk could cause some readers to check out. (Techies, though, might be tickled.)

Things pick up when she reconnects with Ellen and meets her motley crew of East Village squatter pals, a resourceful bunch in the process of cleaning out, beautifying and occupying an abandoned building. There may be spotty heating, suspect plumbing and stuff everywhere, but the squat also offers community, companionship – something resembling love.

Ellen rejects convention – 9-to-5s can’t contain her – in favour of a radical reimagining of how to live. And it is she who yanks us into the future. We find her, in the third section, scraping by in a dystopian America. Imagine present-day inequities stretched to hair-raising conclusions. What if the gig economy was the only option left for scores of workers, except the megarich?

(Imagine) the places we used to go were no longer accessible to us, and it was normal to not get paid on time, or ever, to work 60-hour weeks and still not be able to afford electricity or heat or food and water?

Ko doesn’t clearly explain the descent into this militaristic surveillance state, which stretches credulity but doesn’t detract from the sense of doom. Another mystery: The puzzling black-and-white images that crop up between sections. These are explained by the novel’s end, a denouement that’s unexpected, if a bit scattered and overstuffed. The everything of it all diminishes what could’ve been a more pointed conclusion. But there is much to admire in Memory Piece.

The originality. The vastness. The main characters’ depth and breadth. The reflections about who or what gives a life meaning. Also, Ko does something interesting with race. Giselle, Jackie and Ellen are Asian American, but race isn’t the primary aspect of any woman’s identity – it’s a facet, not a centrepiece.