Book Review

An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth by Anna Moschovakis holds up a dreamy, haunted mirror to life in the waning days of the pandemic, staging a drama of loneliness and envy against the backdrop of a destabilized world. Moschovakis’s unnamed narrator, an involuntarily retired Method actor, lives in relative isolation in a post-apocalyptic city, where seismic tremors still shake things up at random—or do they? We can’t be sure the narrator really experiences the tiny earthquakes that disrupt her flânerie through the city, and in a way, it doesn’t matter. Earthquake is a contemporary entry into the tradition of the existential novel. At a moment when the ground seems constantly to shift beneath us, when dangers acute and protracted keep us apart and alone, when arcane processes strip us of the resources to which we’re entitled, Moschovakis returns us to those perennial questions: Who are we? What are we? And what is this world? As does Albert Camus’s genre-defining L’Etranger, Moschovakis’s novel unfolds its coded answers around the problem of a murder.

The story is simple enough. The narrator is a failed actor, unable to find work in the years after she gave a spontaneous and unscripted speech on stage and then, overcome by the porousness of certain borders, vomited in front of an outdoor audience. Cancelled, she’s been able to find white-collar work to get by. But in the wake of the mysterious tectonic event that still ripples through her city, the narrator finds herself on furlough in her apartment with nothing to do to pass the time. Meanwhile, Tala, her younger, hotter roommate, goes out to the bar, meets up with friends, dreams about the future. Envious of her youthful beauty, her energy, her happy outlook, the narrator begins to fixate on Tala. She decides that murdering Tala will be her best chance at setting things right again, at returning to herself, or rather—because the unknowability of the self is one of the narrator’s central problems—at establishing a newly “bright coherence.”

Tala is both the narrator’s competition (in the entertainment world, the narrator mourns, women quickly age out of roles scripted for “essential vulnerability”) and her double. By destroying Tala, the narrator will at once defeat a rival against which the patriarchy has pit her and destroy the silliest, naivest version of herself, the one who once believed in something like meritocracy, that supreme xennial fiction. Now, the narrator knows better than to suppose that passion, effort, and desire can fulfill you, sustain you, bring you into whatever ecstatic future you can imagine.

Although Moschovakis borrows from the murder novel only the most elemental aspects, the illicit charge of potential violence carries the book. When Tala disappears from the apartment, and we follow the narrator as she searches the city, the streets, the bars, we’re buoyed along with her, eager to learn if she’ll succeed in her homicidal errand. And we do learn, as the novel moves inexorably toward a conclusion that is by turns hallucinatory and satisfying.

That resolution includes, it’s possible to say without spoiling Tala’s fate, a referendum on that other xennial vogue, call it Theory with a capital-T. As the narrator searches for Tala, she stumbles instead upon a shadowy self-help cult, whose “literature” has—with the help of friends and neighbors—made its way into her backpack, her home, her hands. The cult distributes cards with messages that seem to borrow from giants of philosophy like Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida on the one hand, and from the self-help mandates that propel our social media feeds on the other. “LANGUAGE IS THE HOUSE OF BEING,” some cards proclaim, and “ANXIETY=THE DIZZINESS OF FREEDOM.” Others, by contrast, say things like, “WHO WOULD BE WRONG IF YOUR LIFE BEGAN TO WORK?” and “GET WHAT YOU GOT,” echoing those bootstraps narratives that bolster the class structure by encouraging psychological labor and retail therapy.

The narrator recognizes many of the phrases from her time studying with male mentor figures, most prominent among them the “gentle professor,” who was at his most powerful when gaslighting a student into saying that she no longer had a headache. Returned to this history, the narrator struggles to remember when and how a deep knowledge of Heideggerian anxiety made its way into her body, becoming a part of her. Like the structuralists and poststructuralists, Moschovakis is preoccupied by the materiality of language, by how words break down into “small particles of memory-information” and pass “through the plasma membrane—that which separates interior from environment—of thousands, of millions of . . . cells.”

Once words enter us, the narrator reflects, they are “no longer subjects of study, or of scrutiny.” Language brings the power relations it reifies or telescopes inside our bodies, into the very matter of the self. Once inside, it remakes us beyond our will, beyond our self-knowledge. “Maybe the phrases did not become mine,” the narrator reflects on the words on the cards, on the gentle professor’s teachings. “Maybe I became theirs.” And the consequences, she realizes, have been electric, dangerous. Discourses of this kind have compelled her to ask the wrong questions: “What would it mean to actually kill Tala? or What would it mean to let her live?” Instead, she should ask, “How do you not confuse being wronged with being right?”

In the end, then, Moschovakis’s existential fable is a story about what happens when women direct our damage at other women. The narrator’s journey through this gauntlet is a meditation on cancel culture, on a generation’s enabling fantasies, on the still-toxic world of arts and entertainment after #MeToo. Victims suffering most under misogyny, Moschovakis reminds us, can also perpetuate it.

Those readers who share the narrator’s Theory formation, however, must also grapple with Moschovakis’s critique of our own impure heroes. She aligns Heideggerian anxiety and Derridean deconstruction not only with Instagram’s self-help mantras and with the patriarchy, but also with a sort of Trumpian catharsis. The sketchy cabal papering the city with literature, it turns out, is recruiting the lost and the weary to participate in exercises “designed . . . to scramble people’s ability to think for themselves, while claiming that learning to think for oneself [is] the whole point.” It’s easy to see in this shimmering mirror the right’s anti-establishment manifestos, especially now that democratic governance is fully under attack. This form of psychological warfare belongs to the contemporary right, whose doublespeak has its comers believing that enriching the capitalist class will return the rest of us to a specious greatness. And yet, Moschovakis suggests that Theory’s claims about language, about anxiety, about thrown-being-in-the-world, are also complicit with this oppressive project. Moschovakis is most provocative and compelling when she presses readers to examine how inherited discourses on the left contribute to the present crisis, as they live on unexamined in our bodies, our movements, our language. It goes without saying that Heidegger himself, the last philosopher and Theory’s inescapable progenitor, was literally a Nazi.

If Camus famously stages a senseless murder as a way to confront the arbitrary, empty nature of self and world alike in the waning light of religion, liberalism, and all the other great metaphysical truths, Moschovakis beseeches us to move beyond violence as the ground for identity. Even still, language seems to remain for her, as for the narrator, the house of being. The book offers us a model for tearing down and shaking up the junk metaphors and oppressive constructions that live on inside us, inviting us, as Moschovakis herself tries to, “to cut the cards and liberate the words from each other! What a relief,” we’re urged to exclaim with her, “to rearrange their meaning!”