A review by fiendfull
Misrecognition by Madison Newbound

2.0

Misrecognition is a novel about a lost young woman who becomes obsessed with an actor in town for a play and the actor's androgynous friend. Elsa is back living in her childhood bedroom after breaking up with an older artist couple, and a film she watches with her parents leads to an obsession with a hot young actor who just happens to be in town for the summer. From her job at a fancy restaurant, she can spy on the actor and his friends, including Sam, who Elsa is immediately drawn to. 

 

It's hard not to immediately summarise this book with 'the literary fiction book about a woman becoming obsessed with Timothée Chalamet'—the actor-character constantly referred to in the book is clearly Chalamet, if you can recognise that the film is clearly Call Me By Your Name—even though that is really only part of the narrative. The novel has third person narration centred around Elsa, and many characters are given epithets rather than names: the aforementioned "actor-character", the man and the woman who Elsa split up with, and Sam, who is referred to as "the person called Sam" for a good chunk of the novel. The slipperiness of the pop culture references and characters' names feels like it is meant to be a thing, but it can also be hard to know what the point is of making them obvious, but also having them mysterious. 

 

Elsa herself is a fairly blank protagonist, depressed and occasionally trapped in online spirals, sometimes exploring her sexuality amidst other characters who are more sure of theirs, but mostly just being obsessed. Similarly to many other novels of this type—depressing young woman back in hometown falls down some kind of specific rabbit hole—there's not much character development for her, and she seems mostly to be a "relatable" stand-in, with the slight meta angle that she's doing the same thing with other people, like the "actor-character" or influencers she watches. By the end of the book, you know more about her failed relationship with the artist couple, but a side plot around her supposed best friend never goes anywhere, and narrative-wise there's not much in terms of character or plot. 

 

Being non-binary, I wanted to like the character of Sam, who is given not much more than a girlfriend, a "the person called" epithet (which feels very "look, I'm good, I know they might be non-binary"), and 'they/them' pronouns (the ARC I read slipped up on this once I think, which I hope is fixed before publication as it didn't seem to be intentional in any way), but they just seem to work as someone for Elsa to position her sexuality around, with gender nonconformity being an opportunity for someone to consider life outside of a cis straight world. Disappointingly, the narrative didn't really explore gender at all—not Elsa's ambivalence to Sam's gender (which is never actually discussed by the characters), not how Elsa's own gender relates to the online influencers she watches—even though it feels like it wants to. Essentially, it feels like this book expects readers to be Elsa, not Sam, and Sam is just another ambiguously-gendered character in a novel without any character traits for a protagonist to have their own journey in relation to (but without any meta-commentary on this that might make it interesting). 

 

I liked some of the quirks of Misrecogition and I wanted it to go deeper, to actually explore the internet culture and gender and sexuality and polyamory that features within its narrative, rather than just to be like 'Elsa is depressed and obsessed and the internet is bad'. The ending didn't really show any progression or changes, and almost felt like there should've been a few more chapters or at least the ones that were there explored what any of this meant for Elsa. I wanted to like this book, but it just fell flat for me.