Book Review

Vanessa Saunders’ The Flat Woman, an experimental novel and winner of the 2025 FC2 Ronald F. Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, can be loosely summed up as a novel documenting the fragmentation and dysmorphia of postmodern life. However, this novel warrants a far closer look as an innovative example of overturning the commonplace of form defining substance in favor of substance defining form. Form here defines content because the leakiness of character and plot are replicated by the leakiness of the novel’s form.

By “leakiness” of form, I refer to the conceit of the protagonist’s body routinely and apparently casually transmogrifying into bird and animal forms. The very first chapter instantiates this:

On the morning of her ninth birthday, the girl woke up with a rash of bird feathers.

A plate of black-and-white seagull feathers, thick as a coat of armor, covered her back, from her neck to the base of her spine. It was painful to sit up, painful to lie down, painful to stand on her legs, the feather shafts poking out of her skin.

Before proceeding much further, the etiology of this mutation will be revealed in a vignette reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s surreal eco-hostility drama The Birds (1963), the war between birds and humans depicted thus:

Suddenly a flock of gulls descended on them, a blaze of white feathers, dark claws, and throaty squawks. . . .  The sound of the gulls’ wings flapping filled her ears as they followed her down, cutting her knuckle flesh, drawing blood. The girl believed she was going to die, based on . . . her aunt’s screaming, and the talons scraping the back of her neck. They both ran to the car, not wishing to see any more creatures.

Within a few pages, though, one learns that the presumed species warfare is orchestrated. It is a government conspiracy to pin the destruction of the ecosystem on “terrorism,” with which the girl’s mother is charged and incarcerated. The gull deaths are actually being staged by the government: “A terrorist attack occurred this morning in the city of Pinecoast . . . .  We won’t let the terrorists get away with this.” But in a society where morning classes begin with students singing “I believe the government/Is sparkling and true,” plot can only leak continuously—as does the girl—into terrains of the surreal and formless, making formlessness itself the plot. Soon, then, the police arrest the girl’s “Momma” on “charges of seagull terrorism.”  The girl tells her aunt, “At school they say she . . .  murdered a bunch of seagulls to get back at the government,” and the entirely undependable aunt says, “Her lawyers say . . . .  she’s not really a terrorist. That they [the government] made it all up because they needed someone to blame.”

Previously, while the girl expressed longing for a father so that she could “sit on his lap and spill out all my feelings. Then I . . . wouldn’t have any issues,” her mother responded, “Therapy would toughen your boundaries.” The girl refused therapy, however, and continues to leak through her “boundaries,” while her aunt lackadaisically “takes care” of her symptoms: “You’re . . . leaking . . .” Formlessness is the story, and the diegetic world attacks the girl with all its malicious forays on form. The story itself fizzles out—chapter after chapter—without any decisive denouement, development, or progression, either of character or story.

A mother-daughter trope could have felt tired except that it’s cross-woven with Anthropocene ennui—all liberal discourses like climate activism and psychotherapy are eviscerated and empty. The experimental “flat” style salvages the predictability of the mother-daughter trope and elevates it, aslant, onto a posthuman and post-political observation plane where motherlessness as trope is subtended by formlessness as style.

In a narrative relentlessly undulating between victor and victim, prey and predator, the switching of many roles—some enacted by the protagonist herself—some by others, a world in ecological catastrophe mode is presented wrapped in candy, ice-cream, Cola (ominously named “Pop’s Cola”), Elvis impersonators, dying cows, and bloody vultures. These entities take turns on the Anthropocene stage of story in a postmodern jangle of uncontainable signifiers and even more uncontainable signified. The uncontainable signifiers include, prominently, the motherless protagonist’s leaky and weakly boundarized body itself, but also San Francisco skyscrapers collapsing from annihilating heat, ecoterrorists, shapeshifting hotel buildings and interiors, and the police who turns into baby snakes being hunted by murderous black birds.

But the novel itself is uncontainable and uncontained signified and signifier. It ends with the following description, at first seemingly reassuring and soothing: “Closing her eyes, she [the girl] pictures the sea lions lounging, serenely, on the zoo rock. She can hear them barking like dogs. She feels the hot dog wrapper in her hand, the smooth unraveling of waves, her aunt’s soft palm inside her own, which, out of nowhere, suddenly let go.” The semantic and syntactic wobble of The Flat Woman’s final syntagma signals the themes of structural and substantial breakdown of objects (recognizable, in place) into things (unclassifiable, uncontainable) that the novel hypostasizes.

According to Heideggerian Thing Theory as developed by Bill Brown, things are what objects become when they lose their known and clear sense of place, value, and use for the user or subject. “Thingification” entails a reconfiguration of the relationship of subject and object leading to a moment of judgment, and the loss of the subject’s quintessential meaning. Things manifest themselves as what, out of turn, uncodifiable, make contact with bodies, malfunction, mutate, and elude access via cognitive, affective, and associative systems of meaning.

So, what “suddenly let go” in the final sentence? The hot dog wrappers, or the waves, or her aunt’s soft palm? Or something else? Or does it even matter? Perhaps not, because things constantly mutate and alchemize, colonize bodies parasitically, penetrate what they leak out of, without notice or apology or explanation, becoming that which they are not.