BURNSIDE

A brainy debut novel about the politics of victimhood.

September is sitting at a bar next to a strange man when she flings her arm into the air, and he scratches her. Though he apologizes and the injury mostly heals within a week, each time September retells the story, the events grow more violent, the man more unhinged. It’s the unnamed narrator, September’s roommate, who observes these changes, and though she’s nonplussed by September’s exaggerations, she’s not immune to the notion that it’s a dangerous world for young women like the two of them. Other tragic things happen in the background of the narrative: An old friend dies of a drug overdose, her body discovered in a polluted river; an unnamed California town burns down, taking the lives of dozens of people; a landlady poisons her elderly tenant. But these events are little more than lurid spectacle or inconvenience. Instead, the narrator and her friends and frenemies hang out at bars and coffee shops, work jobs they don’t like, and have long, digressive conversations. Some of Defoe’s social commentary is brilliant. September waits tables at a Western-themed “breastaurant,” which pays a lot better than the feminist juice bar where she used to work, while the narrator works at a bookstore that stays afloat by hosting parties. The characters are their jobs, vocations, and beliefs—September is “September” because that’s when she’s Girl of the Month in the breastaurant calendar. Their acquaintances include “the antifascist,” the “patio sitters,” and “the man who skimmed garbage from the rivers.” The narrator’s critique of men as desiring women only for their own ego gratification and “tak[ing] what they want, and mov[ing] on,” on the one hand, and women’s delight in casting themselves as victims, on the other, feels unresolved, maybe intentionally. But it makes the novel a bit of a depressing slog.

Trenchant and polemical social critique without much plot.