I have always found the term “stream of consciousness” to be sort of dumb. It has, in my years as a writing teacher, come to haunt me. It’s stream of consciousness, students will say, when something does not cohere, when “voice” is used as an excuse for a piece that goes nowhere, or grammar that’s a mess. Language, I think, and say to students, is not life. Novels are not the same as experience. Language is a flawed and specific container of communication. It’s slippery and elastic and it often fails. To pretend to be accomplishing something inside of language while not respecting its malleability, its need for precision, in service of approximating something close to human thinking, feels to me like laziness.

Interiority and exteriority is something that’s discussed a lot in fiction workshops, also, as if these things are separate, when, actually, each articulation is neither inside nor outside of a person, but in language. Miranda Popkey, in her new novel Topics of Conversation, seems to understand this intuitively. She seems to have the respect, to take the care, to consider what words might hold inside of them that is both in conversation with, and separate from, life--closer to the rhythms we experience, not just when we live, but when we try to make sense of life inside of words.

The first paragraph of Popkey’s extraordinary new novel in full:

From the shore, the sea in three pieces like an abstract painting in gentle motion. Closest to the sand, liquid the pale green of a fertile lake. Then a swath of aquamarine, the color you imagine reading the word: aqua as in water, marine as in sea. Finally, a deep blue, the color of pigment, paint squirting fresh from a tin tube. Sylvia Plath, writing in her journal the month she met Ted Hughes, the day, no, the day before: “What word blue could get that dazzling drench of blue moonlight on the flat luminous field of white snow, with the black trees against the sky, each with its particular configuration of branches?” No matter the snow, the black trees. The sea was that color, the color of what word blue.

The last line of Jean Rhys’s novel Good Morning, Midnight is the word “yes.” I often use it when teaching as an example of a novel that’s done something, taken us somewhere without deploying much in terms of plot. When you land on that yes, I would argue, Rhys has accomplished perhaps the greatest thing a book might accomplish, she’s re-defined a word on Sasha’s, her narrator, terms.

You’ve spent so much time inside language as it’s felt by Sasha. You know so intimately her relationship to agency and selfhood, her relationship with what she’s allowed to have and what she wants, is wholly skewed; you’ve been so fully embedded inside a consciousness that both does not know what she’s willing to take in and what she feels the need to reject, that, when she says, yes, you feel maybe like the word holds something different, separate, from what you always thought it did. You think about the layers of meaning it might hold differently.

All words are like this, surely. When, for instance, I tell my husband that “I’m fine,” I mean something different than when I say those same words to my mother; it means something different too, when I say it to my students or my kids. Words, in other words, and our offering them to one another, hold something in them that is separate from their meaning, or at least fuller, more complicated than we give them credit for. Words hold all the other times we’ve used them; they hold the weight and shape of the context in which they’re offered, the implications of their being stated in specific settings, or with specific stakes.

Conversation, then, takes this on both in terms of a single consciousness that’s in conversation with the reader, teaching us and re-teaching us and forcing us to re-consider the precise ways that this narrator interacts with words; the way she uses and misleads or is misled by them; as well as an accrual of conversations that occur within the book. We are being told a story, the whole time; the narrator is offering an articulation of a set of experiences, but she is always cognizant of how and why she’s doing this in words, within language. We, the readers, are always cognizant of this too, simply by virtue of the way the story’s told.

The paragraph just after the opening one situates the reader beyond the language we’ve been offered and in a body, in a scene. But, it moves us forward too, connecting back to how the language got us there: “I was reading Plath’s journals that summer because I was twenty-one and daffy with sensation, drunk with it.” This is the first mention of the “I” of this book, the Plath makes sense now. The blue sea, we’ll find out soon, is because our narrator is reading at the beach. But the words precede the person. They introduce her. They give shape and structure to the “I,” because that’s how words work, although we often pretend that it’s the other way around. The “I” was there the whole time, of course, speaking, offering us the language, shaping it in only the way this specific consciousness might order ideas into words.

The narrator of Popkey’s book is a failed academic. Plot’s not the point here, but, insofar as it is, I’m about to spoil it for you. She gets married and divorced; gets drunk a lot and then gets sober; she has a kid. We check in with her only briefly and intermittently over a period of twenty years. As the title tells us, we check in with her during conversations that she has with people of various levels of import in her life. Part of why plot’s not the point is because this book knows so fully: what happens matters, but not quite as much as how you shape what matters once it’s over--sometimes while it’s still happening--into words.

Those of us who read and write a lot think we know this. We think we have control of our stories. We think we see more clearly, are perhaps more self-aware, but the way the language overtakes the narrative in Popkey’s book, the way its sharpness and its intentionality so often overrides the narrator’s intentions, reminds us that language is not only communicative of experience, it’s also generative, it also takes us places all its own. In the Popkey, the narrator goes on tangents, sure, but also, seems to accidentally tell us things, she makes a seemingly inexplicable choice to live an hour from her job based on nothing besides a book she’s read (and that was written by a man). 

If Joan Didion posited the idea at the beginning of “The White Album” that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she posits at the end that stories are not working anymore. She says, “Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on “Midnight Confessions” and on Roman Navarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.” In other words, according to Didion, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, but also, sometimes stories fall short, sometimes words don’t add up.

Popkey seems to be suggesting this too. But, in addition, because the narrator tells enough lies to those with whom she has conversations, because she has such an extraordinary ability to manipulate language into newness, she also seems to be suggesting that stories also tell us how to live. That language, with its pervasiveness and power, with the blunt force of how it’s so often thrown around, acts upon us as much as we act on it, that it precedes our assertions of ourselves as often as we use it to make sense after the fact.

Sometimes when I’m running, I whisper to myself the awful things I used to think about myself when I was seventeen, the things that other people used to say to me. I don’t think these things any longer. I love running, and, though many people might disagree with this, my relationship with it feels pretty healthy right now. But still: you fat fuck, I will mutter. You worthless piece of shit, I will say. I do not dislike my body and do not say these words besides when I run. Fucking move, I’ll say, though I’m faster than I’ve ever been. The rhythms of the words are embedded somehow in the rhythms of the running. They’ve imprinted themselves inside of me. The texture of certain words can come somehow to define us, even when we don’t believe them any longer, even after we think we might be free.

I’ve gone on a long time without mentioning that this book is also about sex and violence and the slippery middle spaces that exist between those two and especially between young women and older men. It feels, weirdly, like this is inevitably where a book like this would take us, or at least inevitable for a book this smart. The book starts with a story about this, an older woman tells a younger woman about a time she was young and slept with an older man; but also, concepts of agency are everywhere; maybe more importantly, concepts of not knowing what to want and why and on what terms and if these things are or are not allowed, arise each time another individual within the book tries to hold a whole experience and their relationship to that experience inside of words. Like those words I whisper to myself when I run, people in this book often seem surprised after the fact, to be inhabiting the stories that they tell.

The last chapter of the novel does not include as explicit a conversation as the other chapters. The narrator speaks briefly to her babysitter; she recounts earlier conversations she’s had with her, thinks of calling an old friend. But, to my mind, one of the other conversations that she’s having is with this male writer who told her where to live. He did not tell her, but she read a story he wrote that ended in the town she now lives and this story was the reason she moved here. “Reason” here is slippery. The book has taught us, as Rhys also taught us, that cause and effect is not so clear and continuous a thread as we might like to think.

Fiction, and language more broadly, is not life, but, I think, one of its jobs is to show us something about how we do or do not live, to perhaps suggest better ways of interacting with the words we’re offered as well as those we have, perhaps not always consciously, taken in. There is perhaps no more difficult register then, none more demanding of perspicacity and precision, I might say to students, than attempting to wholly translate into language a single consciousness.

The last chapter, and therefore the whole book, ends on this male author with whom the narrator of the novel seems to be having a sort of half-conversation, though the male author is not there. The book ends on sentences concerning this man and his life, and not her or hers. This seems intentional, obviously. And it could be a little disheartening, that she is absent from this language. And yet, the words are hers.

So many of our lives and stories and choices and books, so much of our sense of our own worth and agency, have been built with and by words made by men. It makes sense, then, that we land here, on a man who makes stories, but then the sentences, the language being used to describe him, is made by Popkey, and spoken to us by the narrator she created.

At the end of the book, the narrator of Topics of Conversation is both sober and raising a young child. The writer, the man, whose story is being told, did not ever get sober, our narrator tells us. He had kids scattered across the country that he didn’t see. The “I” is not present in the last sentence of the novel, as the “I” is not present in the first paragraph. But, maybe, I’ve liked to imagine, each time I’ve re-read it, that the “I” has--Popkey has chosen to allow her--found a way to be more fully and more consciously inside of life instead.