“Is it possible to imagine something so fully that it takes on a life of its own?” The Visitors, New Yorker Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s second novel, inspects the ways in which reality can be affected by indexes and abstractions: the stock exchange, energy reserve or the dark web. But when C, Stevens’s protagonist, puts this question to herself, she is more concerned about the hallucinatory garden gnome in her flat.
C’s visitor is barefoot, cravatted and beady-eyed. He glides through solid objects. He has a curious range of knowledge: he doesn’t understand the concept of demolition or know what a toaster is for, but he speechifies on complex technological phenomena (rainbow hacking, air gapping). Often, C wishes he would go away. Sometimes she wants to embrace him – but of course, she knows he’s “a projection”.
