Review | Booker-Prize winner Anna Moschovokis’ new book ‘Participation’: When Love and Anti-Love get together revolution is possible

In “Participation,” a woman known only as E drifts between two reading groups, called Love and Anti-Love, in an attempt to find her purpose amidst environmental catastrophes and societal decline.

Two of her three jobs leave her feeling empty; her mentor at the third has stopped answering her calls. Increasingly isolated, she succumbs to fantasies about a colleague she refers to as “the capitalist” and a member of Love, S, who she has only met online.

The two reading groups offer E a possible guide for making sense of these unprecedented times — but the readings leave her with more questions than answers. An uncanny mirror for our current moment, “Participation” takes us into uncharted waters to explore how we understand them, if we can, and if it’s worth it to try.

The sophomore novel from Booker Prize-winning translator and poet Anna Moschovakis “begins without the beginning,” mid-thought, looking back in time. Though the setting is familiar, characterized by mentions of all-night bodegas, cafés, playgrounds, and California, the exact geography is withheld — and there is not what we might call a true “scene” in “Participation” for thirty pages or so. The reader must situate themself with little support from the author.

E warns us that cohesion in a narrative can be useful but false — this is a a story that is wary of story. At the same time, “Participation” is full of “translators, interpreters, mediators, therapists, negotiators” — pathfinders, in other words. The reader is in good company. We’re all just trying to figure it out.

Halfway through the novel, a cataclysmic storm ruptures the tenuous status quo, cutting E off from the new-normal, demanding a new-new-normal. Moschovakis’ prose changes from prose to poetic forms and from different narrative perspectives, across news reports, social media, and postcards, for example.

As social and societal structures crumble, Love and Anti-Love decide to meet in person, not only as readers but as comrades, too. This is another mirror of Moschovakis’: as the text becomes more fluid and open to interpretation, the reader must take a leap of faith in favour of something inventive, collaborative, imperfect and new. When E and S finally meet, a fragile and extraordinary unity alchemizes between them.

Up to this point, we have heard about the impossibility of knowing another fully, the multiple meanings of a single image, even a single word — now we arrive at the volta, the change within the poem: we might not be able to know each other, but we must try. The reading groups of Love and Anti-Love gather to look at life’s problems through different lenses, toward the same aim.

Desire, conviction, commitment, connection — or simply need — can be a bridge politically, semantically, narratively and interpersonally. Dialogue shows each of us making an imperfect effort to understand one another. This is Moschovakis’ magic trick: by withholding cohesion, the reader must work to meet her in the middle (must, in other words, participate.) This is, of course, how poetry is made — and maybe, eventually, revolution.

Experimental, brilliant, and deeply moving, “Participation” offers an anti-guide for the current moment: not teaching us how to live, but inviting us to try.

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