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Set in upstate New York, Sophie Kemp’s surreal satirical debut puts us in the uneasy company of a part-time model who calls herself Reality as she sets out on a crazed quest to become the perfect girlfriend. The chief beneficiary of her self-education is a crack-smoking postgrad and wannabe musician named Ariel, who cheats openly, gives her an infection and – in the reader’s eye – sees her as little more than a sex toy able to fetch snacks. But Reality is besotted, ignoring her own doomsaying conscience – what she refers to with typical idiosyncrasy as “the familiar voice” – as well as her best friend, Soon-jin, who thinks Ariel looks like a “school shooter”: “I think what she was saying was: Ariel is a unique bad boy who often wore a leather jacket.”
What ensues is akin to a TikTok Stepford Wives for the Pornhub era. Taking tips from a magazine, Girlfriend Weekly, which magically appears every so often bathed in light and accompanied by a cor anglais, Reality leans with alarmingly good cheer into the notion that the perfect girlfriend must be permanently ready to service every last whim. “I loved the feeling of being sliced open in the butt by a nice, girthy, yet not too large cock,” she tells us, wiping her belly with a sock Ariel gives her after one of many bluntly described couplings. Reality presses him on whether she’s actually his girlfriend now. “What? Oh yeah. OK, sure.” “My life had become beautiful,” she tells us.
The style is George Saunders meets Ottessa Moshfegh, filtered through – at a rough guess – 4chan, mumblecore and 18th-century marriage manuals. There are arch intertitles (“In which the quest begins with three pieces of evidence”), faux-naif chattiness, narcotised dialogue and any number of left turns making a wild premise wilder still: when Reality participates in a clinical trial of a mysterious pill, ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR), designed to aid would-be perfect girlfriends, she ends up on the run from a machine-gun-wielding medic.
It’s safe to say your mileage may vary, not least because the piss-taking can feel ultra-specific (Ariel attends a seminar known to Reality as his “James Joyce Opinions Class”) and the lingering sense that it’s all a kind of alt-lit prank a la Tao Lin (a suspicion heightened by the cover of the US edition, which displays an anime Eve in the garden of Eden, with Kemp’s name in Comic Sans). Yet Paradise Logic rarely feels slack in the way that kind of fiction can; Kemp knows exactly what she’s doing, and tonally the novel is a feat, expertly switching between laughter, shock and heartache, sometimes in a heartbeat. In one of many startling moments, Ariel forces himself on Reality when she’s drunk with a head wound. The narrative splits in two to show us what she’s thinking – the phrase “I love you” 100 times – before cutting to inside Ariel’s mind: “The band is called Computer. We will perform in midsize venues all over the country and Europe, too.”
Gary Shteyngart is quoted on the cover calling it the funniest book of the year. And it is funny – right from the Emily Dickinson epigraph, which finds new resonance in the poet’s use of “hoe” – but ultimately it’s a comedy about misogyny in the way that Percival Everett’s The Trees is a comedy about lynching. Witness the moment when Soon-jin says Ariel looks like a school shooter: “It was so clear that she was jealous,” Reality thinks, “but I felt sad. Me and Soon-jin had been through a lot together. Each time I got raped in college she was always so nice to me after.” Every few pages, a sucker-punch line like that bares the teeth behind the book’s smile, and to even call it a comedy ends up feeling a kind of weird category error that doesn’t get near Kemp’s full-spectrum effect. How she follows this is anyone’s guess.
