Opening this novel, Jessi Jezewska Stevens' second, you encounter what look like computer terminal commands on solid black rectangles — and that I didn't even know what to call this probably says more about me than about the book, but still ... be prepared to shrug it off, along with subsequent similar interventions, and get on with the story, assuming that it will all eventually make sense.
It sort of does. The novel, in its way, is about the disintegration of a character (known, logically enough, as C), within the breakdown of society, framed by an eco-hacktivist attack on the national electrical grid. It takes place in the time of Occupy Wall Street, as C, a onetime celebrated textile artist (i.e., a weaver), now the owner of an arts and craft shop, discovers a gnomelike "visitor" haunting her days, which are already haunted by a dissolved marriage, a hysterectomy, oppressive medical debt, a terrible pain that presages yet more medical debt, and news of that hactivist group (GoodNite) wreaking havoc.
Amid all the computer commands, aphorisms and assertions ("Retail is debt," for instance, or, "Why do we go out? To shout at the world, mainly — call it commerce, politics, art."), C is poignantly real, trying to negotiate the cruel financial and medical realities of everyday life while contending with what looks like — but is it? — an incipient romance with her lifelong friend Zo, a rich market analyst. That Zo is typically a lesbian (and, at the moment, contemplating her own romance with a man), and C is typically straight, complicates things further.
