By Alvin Lu.
Nicholas Rombes, The Rachel Condition (CLASH Books, 2024)
If Nicholas Rombes’s first novel, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing, relies on descriptions of unseeable movies, supposedly by Deren, Lynch, Jodorowsky, etc., for its vertiginous coloring, The Rachel Condition bravely pushes into the things themselves: letters, reports, memoir, a strange genre novel, and annotations. Lacking the connective tissue of narrative cogency, and in their method more like video art than feature films, the texts force the reader into a reflexive state rather than a transportive one. What am I looking at now? What am I responding to?
It is tempting to say that much of this, for a novel, does not hold. Resembling Dhalgren in its sentence-to-sentence slippages between registers of reality, The Rachel Condition seems at times marred by its theoretical commitments, while some sections, such as “The Colonel’s Letter,” are under-realized. But there is also a sense that the novel’s visible sutures will grow less jarring over time, even turning into a source of its magnetism. None of it, at any rate, comes across as accidental, and in several passages Rombes anticipates the book’s reception:
The document presented its problems, not least of which it did not have a through line, per se […] No, it wasn’t the lack of narrative coherence that menaced Michelle (in fact, too much narrative tidiness would suggest that the report, like so many others, was a fraud, an imitation of a real report)
There were other ambiguities, too: the lack of chapter headings, the sudden shifts in time, the genre switches that didn’t seem intentional, the pacing, and of course the implied, subversive politics.
Other destabilizing elements include a tendency to make references to things that are only explained later on. The texts do not flow in sequence, but instead float simultaneously, as they would in an unordered archive.
From the outset we are given a chronology (mainly the late 1990s), a real setting (Detroit), and a series of narrative frames, though all of this somehow only seems to work against the establishment of a seamless world. Ruptures among historical referents (memories of rotary phones, talk of Debord and Baudrillard), late 90s anachronisms such as drones, and outright science-fictional elements (“the protectorate,” a vaguely threatening, possibly overblown illuminati group) suggest flickering possibilities as to tone and genre: is this a deep conspiracy in this reality (“realism”), a reckless speculative fiction, or an alternate-history novel?
Gradually it seems we land in something like a psychotronic punk rock movie, and upon the main character’s descent into the city, Rombes weaves his most seductive passages, in a nostalgic invocation of a still blasted, pre-urban-renaissance Detroit:
The blown apart bus shuttle stops.
The old red street bricks glistening through the thin, pocked asphalt.
The slender, looming repurposed antenna towers rising up like enormous insect feelers.
The trees that inexplicably had been painted white and the piles of dust in the boulevard islands.
The dated, rusted, over-sized, boxy surveillance cameras tenuously attached to splintered telephone poles.
Here a momentary counterpoint is sustained between the novel’s formal moves and urban-surreal flourishes, tinged by a romanticism worn on its sleeve. It appears we might be situated in this reality, after all, only by viewing it from within. For certain readers of a certain age, Rombes’s milieu of insurgents will strike the right notes; the negative reality within the consensus “reality” was exactly what the counterculture felt like.
Such moments recall the early novels of Steve Erickson, others, in the novel’s more degenerative modes, the deeply weird novellas of Robert Pinget, which conflate inchoate menace with illegibility. Roberto Acestes Laing (which Stephen Beachy called “one of my favorite American novels of the past decade,” and I am inclined to agree) drew comparisons to the Roberto Bolaño of Distant Star and 2666 in its ability to evoke a sense of all-encompassing evil; likewise, The Rachel Condition moves, in its own way, toward the no longer unseeable.
The threatened moment arrives, after the aforementioned letter, in the book’s magisterial closing sections, where a nested novel, with accompanying commentary, finally makes its appearance and disintegration initiates at the level of the image and the word. In the stark mystery of this penultimate section and the brutality of the finale, Rombes takes the step, where previously there had only been a kind of void, of showing us what lies beneath, with dread and incoherence intertwined in a monstrous embrace.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alvin Lu is the author of the novels The Hell Screens and Daydreamers, the latter forthcoming from Fiction Collective 2 in 2025. Twitter: @alvinlu
