‘Participation’ Review: Great Storytelling Weakened by Unconventional Narration

“Participation,” the second full-length novel by writer Anna Moschovakis, is a bold and innovative read that tells the story of a woman in two book clubs at a time of growing social, political, and climatic unrest. The woman, E, and the book clubs, Love and Anti-Love, combine with Moschovakis’s stylistic and structural choices to craft a novel that attempts to induct the reader into these communities, but instead only manages to offer a glimpse of E’s involvement.

There is no mission statement to be gleaned from the 216 pages of “Participation” — the novel is marred by opacity, with key questions about its characters, plot, and setting intentionally left unanswered. But the title, and the narrator’s explicit address of the reader throughout the novel, suggest that the reader, too, is a “participant” embedded in the fabric of the story and capable of forming independent relationships with the characters that resemble those formed amongst themselves.

This attempt at radical inclusion falls flat. Part of the problem is that Moschovakis’s storytelling is far too excellent. E, who narrates the novel’s first half, skillfully paints pictures of her city’s history, her professional life, her erotic fantasies, and her neglection of book club syllabi with ease, and sometimes all in a single page. Her stream-of-consciousness narration is inviting and thought-provoking, a seemingly endless string of apt observations.

Pausing these vivid, winding narrations in favor of E’s periodic, direct, and uncertain addresses of the reader — forcing them into the fold as a true participant — is initially easy to dismiss. But as the story unfolds and becomes even more gripping, this back-and-forth feels increasingly disruptive as the narrative continues to give way to a self-conscious rupture of the fourth wall, and the reader’s access to E’s mind becomes limited.

E becomes doubtful of her ability to tell the story, stating that the reader must have lots of questions, but then leaving those questions unanswered, usually never to be brought up again. She informs the reader that the events of her life and her book clubs are not proceeding “along linear lines,” but no explanation ever comes about why the book is this way.

These points of the story are E defeating herself. The lack of explanation, the bold and mystifying choice not to answer many of the reader’s reasonable questions, would have been better off left unacknowledged.

E’s awareness of her audience could have been an asset. But the lack of any justification or end goal for these monologues, coupled with an understanding that the reader is intended to be participating in something bigger than E’s story — a story about entire communities in which E is only our liaison — makes them disappointing at best.

When E passes the torch to an unnamed, similarly reader-aware and self-conscious narrator for the book’s second half, she says that she doesn't trust herself to tell the rest of the story properly, and that the reader should not be so quick to trust her, either. If one thing is clear, it is that E is certainly a subjective and unreliable narrator — but she was the narrator nonetheless, and it was her perspective within the book clubs that had been most compelling up until that point. The rest of the characters existed only as supporting acts in the mind-invented story of her life, which the audience is no longer privy to after the change in narration.

Especially since this change in narrator is not accompanied by any major shift in tone or style — Moschovakis writes with the same lovely, short sentences and vivid imagery — it seems as though the main purpose of this change was to include events that E was not present for. This makes sense when considering that a major goal of the novel is to challenge what it means to be a reader and to be a participant in a work of fiction. But with the lack of success on that front throughout much of the novel and the heavy focus on E, this change feels neither warranted nor welcome.

Overall, “Participation” is a wonderful book — the storytelling is truly excellent, and E and her successor have a refreshing approach to their roles as narrator. Unfortunately, this storytelling would have been better served in a more traditionally structured work of fiction; the constant interruptions to address and doubt the reader’s experience damage the novel’s broader goal of daring the reader to participate.

—Staff writer Carmine J. Passarella can be reached at carmine.passarella@thecrimson.com.