The sun is permanently setting in The Modern. It might be the only constant in a novel otherwise unmoored by the undulating tides of desire and work, insecurity and millennial ennui. As the narrator of Anna Kate Blair’s debut drifts between lovers – between competing visions of her future – the sky remains crepuscular, casting each slippery proceeding in waning beams and pleated shadows. The light is always “filtered blue” or “pale lavender”, threatened by “the encroaching twilight”. It is a light “that made everything seem distant”.
Dusk is an apt metaphor in a book where everything feels like an ending. The at-first unnamed narrator, an Australian transplant in New York, is in the last year of her 20s, rapidly approaching the final months of her year-long fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art – and with it, the expiration of her US visa. Her relationship with her boyfriend Robert – an echt east coast liberal with a literature degree and a wealthy family – is fraying, their once-animated repartee reduced to a baseline hum of domestic minutiae. By the end of the first chapter, they are engaged: a wine-drunk, impulsive decision that haunts the rest of the novel like a doomy forecast. The next day, Robert departs for a five-month hike through the Appalachian trail.
