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A review by mattdube
The Visitors by Jessi Jezewska Stevens
4.0
This book really tickled me for it's openness to being all kinds of books at once. I really didn't know what to expect from scene to scene, but that didn't make me feel like the novelist was out of control, just that this book was more organic than that.
Our protag is a fiber artist around 2008-9, recently divorced from a man and a gnome has taken up residence in her small NYC apartment. Though we sort of know from early on the gnome is a projection of some sort. The artist is at loose ends, running a crafts store into the ground and generally on a slow decline, with Occupy mostly far in the background, though she does go to Zucotti park for some teach-ins. The novel is smart about economics, as it is about cyber (there's a made-up hacker collective, GoodNite, and a Ukranian super computer, and other semi-specialized knowledge delivered here in tight little packets of exposition), but it doesn't really intersect the ideas of the book, which are, it seems, about the challenge of discovering yourself as an artist in the city. Or something like that.... It's a lot of fun, even with its sort of gruesome ending.
It did occasionally feel dated; it reads like a novel that took a long time to finish/ get published, but what do I know. It also deploys a lot of learning without a real obvious purpose. But I was into it.
Our protag is a fiber artist around 2008-9, recently divorced from a man and a gnome has taken up residence in her small NYC apartment. Though we sort of know from early on the gnome is a projection of some sort. The artist is at loose ends, running a crafts store into the ground and generally on a slow decline, with Occupy mostly far in the background, though she does go to Zucotti park for some teach-ins. The novel is smart about economics, as it is about cyber (there's a made-up hacker collective, GoodNite, and a Ukranian super computer, and other semi-specialized knowledge delivered here in tight little packets of exposition), but it doesn't really intersect the ideas of the book, which are, it seems, about the challenge of discovering yourself as an artist in the city. Or something like that.... It's a lot of fun, even with its sort of gruesome ending.
It did occasionally feel dated; it reads like a novel that took a long time to finish/ get published, but what do I know. It also deploys a lot of learning without a real obvious purpose. But I was into it.