ENCLOSURE ARCHITECT

An artist ponders love, art, and sex as the world around her collapses.

“Today’s apocalypse was actually pretty neat,” observes Margaux, the narrator of Milliken’s high-concept third novel. Milliken’s story is more lyrical than direct, but it’s clear that some kind of mass conflagration has forced Margaux and her fellow art students from their safe university for fear of bombs. From a distance, she and her cohort are free to paint, photograph, and hook up in various ways and in variously gendered arrangements. But when one safe haven, owned by a woman known as the Pigeon Queen, burns to the ground, artists and lovers soon disperse. An older man, Otto, pontificates on art and geometry, which prompts Margaux to begin imagining an “enclosure” that would replace the ad hoc squats that she’s forced to bounce around between. But Milliken isn’t interested in plot so much as pondering the ways that institutions stoke or stifle creativity; the so-called apocalypse is far off-screen, emphasized less than the emotional and intellectual storms in Margaux’s head. (There are references to belligerent “Partisans,” but only vague explanations of their politics and motivations for their aggression.) Which is to say that the story is very abstract and a bit pretentious, using sex and dystopian tropes to goose some overworked musings. (“How can we possibly remember the rapidly transpiring NOW when so preoccupied with remembering the perpetuating mudflats of THEN?”) In the book’s sharper moments, Margaux emerges as a wryly comic observer of an “era of festival and squalor,” like a character written by veteran postmodern writer Steve Erickson (who’s referenced) or others. But Margaux’s persistent dissatisfaction and ennui often leave the reader without emotional toeholds or a sense of meaningful stakes.

A brainy but torpid riff on creative tension.