Review by Vincent James Perrone
Long Day Press / April 2022 / 202 pp
Early in Rebecca van Laer’s debut novella, our protagonist, Charlotte, states, “I have been wondering for a long time what to do about my poetry.” The clear insistence of about overtakes the expected with. Like a misbehaving dog or a creeping mold, something must be done; action must be taken. Poetry has shifted from identity-defining to self-voiding. That is, the lyrical, life-defining work that Charlotte has dedicated herself to for nearly a decade has undone her. Upon introduction, she is no longer a poet at all. She’s theorizing through the works of Gillian White, Ben Lerner, and Michel Foucault. She’s attending yoga retreats. She’s getting married. How to Adjust to the Dark begins, then, as a quest for context. Charlotte is an excavator, a personal anthropologist panning through her past poems for golden clues to the larger narrative. Not only to determine the value of the artistic labor, but also to work out what it meant to write the poems at all.
Van Laer’s ambitions lie in building new connective tissue from personal history. The past pummels the present, and the novel is a bold, hyper-textual volley, following plot with poem and then with sticky pseudo-objective analysis. Charlotte is both subject and object, both sign and signified. She crafts narrative in real time, peeling away the layers of reflection and contextualization, leaving something raw and pulsing with meaning. As Charlotte remarks, “to make this identity permanent would require that I keep insisting on it.”
After the present-tense frame, the story brings us back to the genesis of Charlotte’s artistic development. Her early poems, like those of many burgeoning writers, were wound-based and in step with a now-antiquated cultural moment. “My poems took the place of my LiveJournal, and my present experiences became fodder for writing.” In the beginning, there’s little knowledge of craft or artistry, only the concrete ache of experience.
Outside her unhappy family—an unstable mother in Georgia, a distant father on the east coast—Charlotte flounders in a series of bad relationships. The poems are about these relationships, and symbiotically (or parasitically), the relationships are about the poems. Her first fledgling romance dissolves into a competition of creative ambitions. Instead of winning back her boyfriend, she earns the admiration of her professor. Charlotte escapes to Craigslist, the venue of the moment for ennui and isolation. Van Laer skillfully summarizes the beauty and horror of the site:
The promise of craigslist was a special one: to pick up a missed connection; to forge a new one; to reach out through an anonymous post across the white and purple space of a webpage and find a like soul reaching toward you—a soul who wouldn’t kidnap you.
Life at the millennium always mitigates the raw need for connection, whether through digital platforms, personae, or poetry.
In her sophomore year, Charlotte begins an on-again, off-again relationship with a boy pulled apart by his religious adherence. A virginal Christian with a superiority complex, he appeals to her only because of his resolute otherness. Charlotte composes work after St. Catherine of Siena, tying religiosity and devotion to her own desire for her young Christian lover. What results is a college-aged Confessions of St. Augustine. Charlotte remarks, “She is his ecstatic, starving sub,” but the dogmatic allusions aren’t enough to buoy the relationship.
Following a first break-up at a Ruby Tuesday’s, Charlotte composes poems situated around fairy tales, returning to another kind of myth to anchor herself. After reunions and subsequent decoupling, Charlotte finds herself single at 21, drinking and watching True Blood. Wounded in a new way, she begins writing a novel in verse and applying to graduate school—which likely sounds familiar to writers who may be reading.
It might be easy to pathologize the lyric-poet identity exposed here, to regard this book’s novelistic conventions of self-knowledge, acceptance, and understanding as a more artful layer of narcissism. Of course, that’s a plausible criticism of any autofiction. How To Adjust to the Dark wryly recognizes these boundaries, and de-generalizes them by never escaping the protagonist’s singular skin. Van Laer embraces the limited interiority of one consciousness in one body, and fixates on tiny mechanisms of control—diet, hair color, drug intake. “I started to run on the elliptical. I bought dresses. I wore blush.” Then, the wobbly choice of whom one sleeps with in one’s twenties, which so often becomes a push/pull of diffuse and external forces rather than a careful choice. What can be done about poetry when the self constructing the poetry has so little agency? Keep running, keep having bad sex, keep writing, but so often it feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Charlotte builds a flimsy perimeter around the continent of her self—a self she’s desperate to preserve, even if she barely knows its geography.
As Charlotte muses, “Poetry was perhaps a good anchor for creating a sense of self, the belief that I was someone with power and purpose.” What happens to a real self when the [auto]fictional self imposes on it? If Charlotte’s impetus for writing overlaps with van Laer’s, what kind of self is being invented? What identity does Dark insist upon? The meta-commentary is inescapable, and the layers of reflection are almost innumerable—analysis within poem within poet within protagonist within author. If poetry can create a channel toward power, then fiction might be the means of codifying the power, systematizing a self and buoying identity.
The novella leans toward a third pillar of identity, an aspect that cannot be fully rendered in poetry or prose: requisite faith. “Faith that a box of words can reflect you, and also the faith that you are definitely interesting and possibly important.” Throughout the novel, faith is conjecture. There are too many variables to faith, whether the self-determining type that Charlotte embraces or the dogmatic faith by which Charlotte’s ex-boyfriend is so enraptured. Isn’t the first-person pronoun a kind of faith? Van Laer turns “I” into mantra or rosary countlessly repeated. The declaration of an identity so unified and whole that it can be represented by a single character, a tiny metonymic symbol.
How to Adjust to the Dark recognizes the inescapable identity of the poet. There’s no unwieldy gesturing toward the separation of art and artist. In fact, the two subjects couldn’t be more fused, nor colored more deeply by the implications of autofiction. It’s also playful, staking out ground for academics grappling with undignified life choices. This book references Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse on one page and follows it up on the next with the line, “I no longer took my top off at parties or did whippets.” The inventive juxtapositions create a kind of multifocal effect—part memoir, part thesis, part warped hagiography.
On the final pages, Charlotte asks, “what else is possible?” and this question rings out like a prayer. There is a self beyond the novella and, beyond that, there is an other. An unknown unknown, made real by the faith that everyone else exists as complicatedly as our selves do. The question is a manifesto for the reality that makes art meaningful—the inextricability of the self and the world outside the self. We must travel all the way inward to wind up on the other side.
Vincent James Perrone is the author of the poetry collection, Starving Romantic (11:11 Press, 2018), the microchap, Travelogue For The Dispossessed (Ghost City Press, 2021), and a contributor to the novel, Collected Voices in the Expanded Field (11:11 Press, 2020). His recent work can be found in Storm Cellar, The Indianapolis Review, Heavy Feather Review, and Olney Magazine. He is the poetry editor of The Woodward Review and lives in Detroit.