Emma Cline makes fiction look mostly easy
At the height of the pandemic, whatever that even means anymore, I rented The Assistant. In this quasi-indie, we spend a dreary workday with Jane: a junior assistant at a film production company. She lives in a modest apartment. She microwaves her meals to prepare them. She withstands an insidious and at times aggressive lad culture at the office, facilitated by a boss who likes to mix pleasure with business. Tired of organizing his trysts, essentially, she breaks the movie’s careful and also deliberate monotone by filing a sexual harassment complaint with Human Resources. This is on behalf of a younger woman that’s okay playing the system. HR reprimands Jane by reminding her how the world works, and that she should be grateful for the opportunity to file papers and send emails for a very important man. She returns to those emails, and a choppy ocean resumes its unstable peace.
Visually, The Assistant is the shape of Jane’s computer, her desk, all the humdrum squares of her office, the office kitchen, the microwave, and HR. It’s shot at surface level, it feels like, so that when Jane defies its ‘propriety’ you can sense the futile rebellion coming on your skin — on the very tip of your nose. Emma Cline’s collection of short stories, Daddy, feels this way. Nearly all its stories are about the aftershock of people, and especially men, that exploited whoever was nearest and dearest; or they’re full of people having to deal with the miasma of unresolved feelings.
Cline’s scintillating debut, The Girls, was a mesmerising diary of a young girl who finds herself drawn into the Manson Family commune in 70s Los Angeles. This was such a difficult book to recommend. It captured perfectly the innocence of youth and also how an empty heart is the perfect sponge for radicalisation. You might not read a more lyrical dissection of human evil by a living author for several years. Whereas that book was inherently tinged with finality (eventually there is a gruesome murder; eventually the fantasy of youth gives way to the true brutality of having to actually exist), each of Daddy’s stories begin with their protagonists shuffling through debris: unsure who to be, how to live with themselves, and whether to even try.
It’s extremely reductive to consider all or most of Daddy’s dazed and confused animals previously powerful men who have found themselves Me Too’d. I think this coincidence, when it occurs, is more about the author trying to reflect the moment in which both the male and female conditions find themselves. ‘Los Angeles’, the story that reminds me most of The Assistant, quietly considers that just because a woman exercises sexual agency doesn’t make emotional (or physical) aggression by men a natural reaction. But Cline isn’t a brilliant writer for her socio-commentary alone. It’s the way she patterns the motions of a department store during business hours, or hangs the sun over days that bear deceitful similarities to one another, before perforating it all with consequence: that umpteenth horseman of the apocalypse. Unreturned calls and unread messages; stern reminders of legal ramifications; all the invisible force-fields of rehab; belligerent teenagers wreaking weird cosmic vengeance on sighing, apologetic fathers. This algebra doesn’t occur linearly — memories fade into dreams fade into reality, and by the time it’s all over Cline’s creatures usually wake up alone.
Sometimes she forgets to turn on the machine, or perhaps turn it off. ‘Son of Friedman’, in which a man attends the screening of his son’s mediocre film production, (produced with his dwindling money), lacks the complexity to suggest it smacks of anything more than middle-aged ill-feeling and regret. The barebones prose of ‘What to Do With A General’, originally published in The New Yorker, never really escapes the domestic confines of a fraught family reunion; and ’Mack the Knife’ doesn’t really observe the present enough to help an implied history shimmer. But personally I could spend all day riding round the hipster haven of ‘Arcadia’, in which a bunch of late millennials manage and subsist within (well) a farming community, and I can sense the savagery of childhood again in ‘Marion’, in so many idle days capsizing in one callous betrayal. In ‘A/S/L’, set within a rehab centre, Cline does a stellar job of teasing monsters you never actually see — fiddling again with how consequence begets consequence, rippling endlessly but also meaninglessly into unlived time.
A literary friend, I should mention, takes issue with Cline’s inability to write beyond her immediate surroundings; California, the trappings of celebrity, etcetera. I would counter that her lack of sentimentality, Cline’s ability to care or not really, is the perfect blade with which to skin both America’s and humanity’s excess.
