Elsewhere nyc11/27/2022 ![]() “Elsewhere”’s speculative conceit works in a similar way. This ritual of collective removal is reminiscent of the supernatural premise of Yoko Ogawa’s deeply affecting novel “ The Memory Police,” in which it is objects and not people that are erased, lending a kind of charm to aspects of our world (matchbooks, dolls, vases) that we take for granted, hardly noticing them at all. Rendering an apt metaphor for the invisibility and loss of identity felt by many new mothers, “Elsewhere” sees them forgotten completely. And this too is by design: The community has developed a ritual of wiping the missing women’s homes of all their personal effects. In both novels, Schaitkin’s pace is firmly controlled, her arcs built line by patient line.īut unlike in “Saint X,” after the women in “Elsewhere” vanish - or do they? - there is no kerfuffle, only silence. “Elsewhere” continues the theme of female disappearance that Schaitkin began in her admirable debut novel, “ Saint X.” Also set in a location both recognizable and all its own, “Saint X” follows the possible murder of a privileged teenager who goes missing on an island vacation and whose absence is used to illuminate the prejudices and ramifications that spiral out in her wake. Staring at older women, Vera and her best friend “saw how they swayed with their babies in their arms, side to side like metronomes holding time for a song only they could hear.” Meanwhile, they fear anyone who comes from “elsewhere,” playing a game called “stranger,” in which they imagine outsiders to be “wretched and cowed.” Vera’s trouble begins when a real stranger comes to town who threatens her and her community’s meticulously calibrated way of living. When the mother of Schaitkin’s 16-year-old narrator, Vera, disappears, she too is subjected to such conjecture: “One clue about my mother everyone kept recounting was that I often turned up at school with my buckle shoes switched,” she says, “which gave my appearance an ‘unnerving’ effect.”Īnd yet, raised to practice the town’s xenophobia and mother-worship, Vera and the other young women consider motherhood their highest possible achievement. No one can predict which mothers will be taken, though that doesn’t stop the villagers from guessing that it affects those who are either “incautious” (like the one who lets her children cross a stream when the water’s too high) or too tightly wound. In a remote mountain town scrubbed of identifying factors, new mothers risk succumbing to an “affliction” that causes some to vanish with no warning or trace. Like Rachel Yoder’s “ Nightbitch,” Helen Phillips’s “ The Need” and Claire Oshetsky’s “ Chouette,” “Elsewhere” literalizes the transformative experience of maternity. It is often revealing, then, to notice which of these archetypes the speculative writer reserves and which they jettison.Īlexis Schaitkin’s second novel, “Elsewhere,” joins the recent roster of impressive novels that have employed speculative elements to examine new motherhood. To upend, poke fun at or hyperbolize the silliest of rituals or darkest of human flaws. One of the many advantages of writing in the speculative realm is the opportunity to clear the decks of societal expectations. ![]()
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