Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

A novel about a woman writing a novel about a woman who writes — The Rejection of the Progress of Love is a sexy, earthy, bracingly intelligent examination of the vicissitudes of grief, ambition, aging, information overload, compassion fatigue, and a data-centric understanding of self; the relative merits of giving up or giving in; the seductive myth of progress; and the condition of being a thinking and feeling (gendered, raced) inhabitant of an unthinkable, numbing world.

From Brooklyn to Madison to Ethiopia, Eleanor's slow trek toward a kind of autonomy after her laptop (and her data) are stolen, and the narrator's struggle for authority as she wrestles with her novel and a very famous critic's opinion of it, form a series of intersections of experience, exposure, and self-knowledge, occuring on axes of both will and happenstance: not just the backdrop but the material of the work at hand.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Poetry, Adult Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published August 14, 2018

About the author

Anna Moschovakis is a translator and editor, and the author of several books of poetry, including I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (2006) and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (2011), which won the James Laughlin Award. She is the recipient of awards and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and has completed an apexart residency in Ethiopia. Moschovakis lives in Brooklyn and Delaware County, New York.

Reviews

[Kacey]

post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern suprisingly tangible relationships post modern post modern post modern oh, hi Wallace Sean! post modern post modern women think post modern post modern post modern post modern conversations with Wallace Sean post modern post modern post modern oh why did that matter to her to me post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern sky blue post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern art museum post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern did I miss something post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern maybe post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern post modern

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two short passages from Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love:



At this point, Eleanor's thinking became unfamiliar. Had she not been aware of just how familiar her thinking was to her in general, how expected it had become, even in its extremes, in its total enthusiasm and its total skepticism, its most rational gestures and its most impulsive ones? All of it now seemed dull and pathetic, as if thought were a giant mountain and she had spent her life so far considering one side of it only, attempting to scale it, duly scraping her hands and knees, her sights set on the mountains unattainable peak, without it ever once occurring to her - how stupid she'd been! - to relinquish her frontal perspective, to let the mountain become unrecognizable. As if it had never occurred to her to walk to the other side.



(I had experimented, after reading his comments, with removing the lover completely, which entailed among other things losing several scenes in which sex acts were described. But my decision to include these in the first place was made deliberately, in response to a sense – which I didn’t share with the critic now, too embarrassed to bring it up in person while still absorbing his candid marginal responses to my portrayal of said acts – that depictions of sex and sexual dynamics in novels, especially heterodynamics, especially in novels by women, tend to invite a particular kind of reductive critique, or else sensationalism when such dynamics happen to be central to a book. For reasons that remained obscure to me, I had an urge to face this vulnerability – to some extent, at least – rather than defend against it by writing a novel in which nobody fucks.)

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was taken less with the postmodern aspects of this debut novel than I was with Moschavakis’ imagination and, most of all, her writing. There is nothing flashy about it, but she has such perfect control that her long sentences pull you through in a way I found very enjoyable. It’s all about rhythm, both in the long sentences and in the groups of short ones, and about going with apt but fresh phrasing.

I wasn’t surprised to find, when I looked her up, that Moschavakis is not only a poet but, more important, a translator and editor. It shows. I look forward to reading the one translation of hers I have on my shelves, Albert Cossery's The Jokers.

Moschavakis does some wonderful things with the story of a depressive early middle-aged woman, which could have been just awful, especially for an older man like me. A great sense of humor helps.

[Eileen · Rating 5 out of 5]

i would like someone to please read this book so that we can talk about it. i don't think i've felt so satisfied reading something for a long long time. i almost want to flip back to the beginning and start it all over again right now.

i have an impulse to describe this as "hard to explain" but actually that's just a lazy way of describing every book in existence, so i'm gonna try to apply a little more care. there's two narratives – one told in third person about eleanor, a nearly but not quite middle-aged adjunct professor who gets her laptop stolen in a cafe, and one told in first person by the writer who is writing the story of eleanor (eleanor is her fictional character). eleanor's laptop incident (abbreviated as "thing #2") spirals into an obsession with danny k.m., the person who may or may not have stolen her laptop, which is really a stand-in for her anxieties about "thing-prime," the unnamed crisis that everything revolves around. her laptop contained a 20 page document of notes about thing-prime. the writer writer's narrative mostly consists of her befriending this weirdo critic named aidan and having conversations with the critic and puzzling over her relationship with the critic, who's clearly in an unstable place and possibly a pathological liar.

yes moschovakis's book is #postmodern and #metafictional but it's also incredibly lucid and very readable. her writing is so smart & observant that it kind of blows my mind. i felt at times like i was reading a logic sequence, which sounds boring but imagine being in the sort of trance, i don't know, a theoretical mathematician enters when they're working through a really good proof. a lot of it is about making sense of things that cannot be made sense of (the form of a feeling), but it's also about "the relation of beings to time" (as opposed to "being" singular), about power and play, about intimacy and exchange and a million other things. it starts off cynical and ends, i think, sincere. moschovakis is aware of the tension between the two and folds it into the narrative – there's one scene where the critic is in the shower and the writer says to him, "what if i'm not writing an argument? maybe the thing – maybe all the things – can just live in the same space for a while," which she immediately regrets, but the critic doesn't hear her and so she is relieved, and then ashamed at her relief.

anyways this review is messy and you should just read the book! also shoutout to CHP for publishing like half the books that i read.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Anna Moschovakis' post-modern entrance into the world of fiction and autobiography, she tells the story of Eleanor from multiple perspectives as Eleanor tries to piece together her life in the middle of it, after having recognized perhaps it isn't exactly how she had planned.

In an experimental fashion that is reminiscent of her own poetic work, Moschovakis weaves together the story of Eleanor while also telling a semi-autobiographic tale of how she arrived at Eleanor the character through her own engagement with an Eleanor in her life. Though at times this process seems contrived and overdone, Moschovakis' does ultimately do a good job weaving these two together intricately. Admittedly, though, this makes reading the book more of a challenge for the readers - having to constantly be on guard, sometimes paragraph to paragraph, about who the writing is discussing at the time.

Nonetheless, the book itself does a nice job discussing the cynicalism of life and love and does it in a way that is, fortunately, not too on the nose. This leaves the reader with a feeling of having been emotionally moved by an encounter with the book but without any explicable reason as to why. The book itself is far from quotable - and unlike most books on this topic won't have many paragraphs that leave you weeping or self-reflective. But this book does take you to the edge, to the precipice of cynicism and forces you to think about your own self in retro-spect and as such has the power of a book with twice the emotional heft.

[Travis · Rating 1 out of 5]

The obnoxious kind of postmodern metafiction that tries so hard that the only way its heavy-handedness can be justified is by saying that it's precisely the "point" of a novel that is grappling with the everyday banality of living under late capitalism. I tried to like this novel for what I thought it was doing, but aside from some sharp moments of description, particularly of micro-sensations and the seemingly indescribable aspects of inferiority, this indulged in the very worst of "postmodern" or "post-postmodern" in its attempt to be a "theory novel" while trying to disavow that through irony or humor.

[Emily Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is so good

[David Dinaburg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those novels—to be fair, I sought out one such as this—one of those novels so shrouded that takes patience to unravel, focus to follow the thread. Two stories run in parallel, two Eleanors to worry about, two vectors of attack on my prudish brain:

“But my decision to include [several scenes in which sex acts were described] in the first place was made deliberately, in response to a sense that depictions of sex and sexual dynamics in novels, especially heterodynamics, especially in novels by women, tend to invite a particular kind of reductive critique, or else sensationalism when such dynamics happen to be central to a book. For reasons that remained obscure to me, I had an urge to face this vulnerability—to some extent, at least—rather than defend against it by writing a novel in which nobody fucks.)”

The internal Eleanor’s sexual onslaught eventually slows to a trickle, commented on by the framing device itself:

“I keep meaning to ask,” he said, pressing his thumb into my kidney and swerving us away from the picture window, “what happens to Eleanor’s libido?”

Eleanor writes a story about Eleanor; the split between story-Eleanor and author-Eleanor draws attention to the unreality of literature; sexual gratification is frequent in the internal device only as guard against, or response to, anticipated critical response in the world of the framing tale. We read one Eleanor as metaphor—which makes her consequences feel unreal—and the other as protagonist. But author-Eleanor is the construct, the codex to decipher the heart embedded two tales deep. The Eleanor that matters is the one inside the story, not the one writing it.

Which is, I think, the message of the book; literature helps guide us through the world, helps us work through events which don’t have direct bearing on our lives; but reading takes as much as it gives. Some books require experience to understand. Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is my first borrow from the San Francisco Public Library. It is unapologetically New York: Gowanus and Fourth Ave and Nevins cut me with a nostalgia that I didn’t know had time yet to crystallize:

She walked several long blocks up the shallow slope toward the park….[s]he could see up ahead the peaked white tents of the farmers’ market, where on Wednesdays and Saturdays, especially in the summer, the beautiful people turned out with their bikes and strollers, their scooters—the foot-powered kind and the gas-powered kind and sometimes the electric kind—and retro plaid rolling carts, to meet the producers of their organic and humanely raised food.

As my access to tables of NYC-centric small press novels at Greenlight Books or Community Bookstore &tc falls away, will I be able to find tales of modern ennui, the one-alone-among-eight-million genre, that I sometimes crave?

Into Eleanor was sublimation of my longing for Brooklyn. When the setting leaves New York, Eleanor begins to break apart:

She felt in this decision the echo of other decisions, of all the central and marginal decisions that, in their determining powers over the course of a life, form much of the content that replaces empty time; and she knew that the effects of the decision were consequential, even if minor, even if still unknown.

The choice to go is relevant to the overt message: “Any thing may produce any thing.” Reality simply happens, a string of events that don’t hold together under rational scrutiny. That randomness is counter to fiction. It breaks the bounds of a framing device or plot. If the desire to capture the unpredictable, the unanswerable, the unknowable on the page; to push back against the idea that literature pushes a position or advances an argument and thereby let “the thing—maybe all things—just live in the same space for a while,” it leaves a reader with no place to enter the text. Untethered from literature, embracing nothing more than the abstraction of words on a page, Eleanor forces a nonchalance that reads as affectation.

[Jennifer Spera · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, Really think maybe I’m less a fan of the postmodern fiction genre itself than of the writer herself. Dueling narratives that became harder to keep straight, intended? The rambling philosophic theories come across as satire to me, was that also intended?
It started off well, but I felt the more I read the less I “got it” but again maybe that was the intention.
Can something be too meta, or did I just not get it, or both? I was just happy when it was over.

[Ellie Madsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

despite the lack of structured plot and the sally rooney-esque pretentiousness of some dialogue i did enjoy this. it reminded me a lot of the idiot by elif batuman in that both protagonists make sharp observations of their internal and external happenings while going through early/mid-life crises and at no point did i know what was to happen next and both protagonists suddenly go to a different continent toward the end of each book. but eleanor wasn't 200 pages too long like the idiot was.

[Krishan Mistry]

hard! I wanna like it tho!

[Alyson]

Things that happened while reading this book:

I thought about backing up my computer, but did not.

I woke up talking in a stilted inner dialogue that blurred my lines a bit.

Denver legalized psilocybin mushrooms moments after I read the section that ended with a jar of psilocybin being passed around the fire and my naïveté wondered what “psilocybin” was.

All this to say: I’m glad I bought this book under the influence of a perfectly made Old Fashioned. The dangers and wonders of bookstore bars.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alternative Title: "Eleanor, or, The Forgetting to Take Laptop With to the Cafe Restroom"

On the first day he read 26 pages. Time passed.
On the second day he binged GoT and didn't read. He felt guilty. Time passed.
On the third day he did nothing. He doesn't know what he did. Time passed.
On the fourth day ditto... See third day. Time passed.
On the fifth day: he read a lot. He went to a few bars. Parties. Time passed.
On the sixth and seventh and eighth day time passed.
On the ninth day he finished. Time continued to pass.

If Moschovakis had used footnotes instead of chapters & interspersed paragraphs for the first-person author segments this would have been like a David F Wallace fan-fiction piece, straight out of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.

It was still an enjoyable meta-fiction genre read. It was interesting to wonder about how the author's story with "The Critic" was influencing the novel Eleanor's story, and vice-versa.

I thought the ending though got tedious and I started to not care about The Author or The Critic and felt that the story left Eleanor herself fading like a 1970s pop single. Then again so did The Author and The Critic.

[Yonit · Rating 3 out of 5]

An author named Eleanor writes a book about a person named Eleanor. Started out really well and then I got so confused.

[Ana Catarina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too foreign for me. I got lost in all the references. In the end, I was too alienated to care.

[Zoe]

this has cemented anna moschovakis as one of my favorites. i was listening to a podcast with her immediately after i finished the book and she writes about how she loves playing with genre in order to write books that are page-turners although they are also not really novels. this explains my only problem with the experience of reading the book - it was such a page turner in terms of character & wondering at where the experimentation would take us next that i read it too fast and wasn't able to absorb all the genius that was happening. i might have to pull a renee gladman on this one and reread it a few times. i did get chocolate on the back cover tho.

like gladman, this book is about the issue of time passing, and how words can/cannot convey that passage. words as spaces.

"the water stayed cold, then gradually warmed to tepid. there were the missing paragraphs, yes, and the lost site for thinking."

i loved eleanor so much. i loved the other narrator. vulnerability, precision of description of affect. i loved how the two narrators intertangled. i wish i could be more smart about it all but i just loved it.

"'what if i said i'm not writing an argument? maybe the thing - maybe all the things - can just live in the same space for a while.'" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like any of the books I read during shelter in place should come with their own special marking system, or a huge disclaimer of “yo I started this before/during shelter in place and that has a ton to do with my interpretation of this”. You have two stories going on in parallel here - one of Eleanor, a woman who’s finding that her life isn’t what she thought it would be, and the act of her laptop being stolen and what can best be described as the slight unhinging that happens in the wake of that, and the other of the narrator, who may also be the author (was unclear to me), and the critic she’s interacting with as she writes about Eleanor, who has more than a passing resemblance to the life of the critic. Very postmodern in how the two are in conversation with each other and eventually merge in the final part. I don’t know how long this will sit with me, but I enjoyed the read.

[Scott Lennes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had difficulty keeping up with the book at times, given its frequent shifts in perspective, its abundance of literary, film, and art references, and my battle with focus. My understanding would probably benefit greatly from a second read, but I didn't quite relate with the narrator, Eleanor, or the ideas of the book enough to deem a re-read worthwhile.

One quote did stick with me though: "[W]hen Eleanor sleeps, the rearrangement of her mind's furniture happens without her direction, and often without her recall in the morning; [...] the rearrangement has taken place not on the level of things exchanging positions in a room, but on the level of molecules and atoms changing position in the things, so that the things - the furniture, whether object, thought, or emotion - have themselves become unfamiliar."

[Adina]

This book was a real journey, which was, like the book, at turns invigorating, frustrating, enlightening, enraging. I wanted to read this because Moschovakis is so skilled at language -- there are so many beautiful turns of phrase here, and so many challenging (in a good way) ones. I love "She was catching up with herself." But why did Eleanor have to go to Ethiopia? The pieces about the news became self-serving by the end. Reminded me a little of Renata Adler's SPEEDBOAT but I think she lost it at the end. I'm sad because I think it could have been great, but I'm still glad I read it.

[Vincent Perrone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Data loss. What happens when our internality is voided? Part mid-life, part late-capitalism, all crisis. Moschovakis exudes the cool distance of data and observation. A novel committed to revision, reimagining, and reinterpreting itself, reflexive and questioning of its own internal logic. The novel becomes your partner in analysis, shapeshifting to your own interpretations, heading off assumptions. A curious and uncompromising read, equally episodic and meditative, unpredictable and wholly unique.

[Ellie Chin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frustrating, demanding, addicting. Moschovakis takes familiar themes and ideas, ferments them, scrambles them, then plants them into the ground, hoping they will be reborn as a fresh and wholesome production. I think reading this made me a better and more sensitive reader, but it was definitely difficult.

[Emily Butler]

DNF about 50%.

Accomplishing my mission of quitting on more books this year. Life's too short. This probably would have been a 2 star book overall for me. Maybe 3. Anna Moschovakis is my FAVORITE POET. The prose form is not working for me. Hurts me to give her a negative review. Anna if you're reading this I still think you're brilliant :)

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quest for a stolen laptop containing her paragraphs, but really in search of her life. Although this jumped around in time I had no problems understanding, and enjoyed the trip. Eleanor (and the novelist writing about her life) went from teaching in the city to a hostel upstate then to a commune and on to Ethiopia before returning. Enjoyed this.
Coffee House Press

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps Moschovakis's novel got under my skin because her protatonist Eleanor, like me, lives in a dead-end but always open world of false binaries. She is tossed around by her feelings never ending up anywhere.

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts strong, following two narratives (one, the story of an author; the other, the book she's writing), but I found that I lost interest each time I picked it up after about 25 pages. Might just be a me thing, b/c there IS quite a bit to admire here.

[J. Robin Whitley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is brilliant.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the best books I've read in 2018. An existential journey that subverts all the tacky "Eat Pray Love" tropes by exploring identity and reality in the online world.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

slightly painful bc it reminded me of the intellectual bric-a-brac of my own mind

[Leslie Smith]

DNF

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating! I loved it.