Dayswork v. Cold People
The 2024 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 8 • OPENING ROUND
Dayswork
v. Cold People
Judged by Anna E. Clark
Anna E. Clark (she/her) is a writer, critic, and academic. Her essays and reviews appear in Alta, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, and Public Books, among other outlets, while her scholarly work has been published in journals such as ELH and Victorian Review. In 2019, she edited an edition of the Wilkie Collins novella The Dead Alive for Broadview Press. She received a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where her work considered character and voice in the 19th-century novel. She lives in San Diego, Calif., where she teaches writing and literary studies. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / annaeclark.com
Here we have two novels about global disasters and—yes—love. Cold People foregrounds the chaos, while Dayswork lets it filter in at the edges, but both are interested in how sustained bonds between people form and grow, and sometimes fall apart, when everything else seems to be falling apart, too.
Have I given you the impression that these novels are similar? Complementary works paired on a syllabus for a class called “The Marriage Plot at the End of the World?” (Someone please teach this.) Well, they are not. Indeed, I can’t conceive of two more different ways of using fiction to tackle their common themes. Forgive me, then, if I think this judgment is a particularly fraught one to render, because it feels less as though I’m weighing two novels against one another than representatives from two entirely different kingdoms within the broad taxonomy of prose.
For its part, Cold People is a novel of plot—so much plot—astounding in the speed with which it sets about explicating its boldly absurd premise: An alien life force has shown up on Earth, taking over technology to announce that humanity has exactly 30 days to relocate to Antarctica. The “or else” is merely implied, but those who can’t or won’t leave are literally vaporized, “their pupils glowing, then their skin and hair, as bright as the embers of a fire until their bodies [lose] cohesion, breaking apart into dense swarms of firefly-size parcels of light.” I was utterly here for all of this—such grandly, unhesitatingly loopy turns of events! Such lyrical description of the horrific! And I was regularly gobsmacked by how good Cold People is at delivering lots of textured detail very quickly and with great authority, especially in richly bonkers little throwaways, like the aliens transporting all the world’s architectural wonders to a corner of the arctic desert, as though “complying with some cumbersome interstellar legal obligation.”
But then, after a few grim vignettes from the mass exodus, what had been riveting explication comes to feel like a worldbuilding info dump, as Cold People tosses us in among the scrappy gang of survivors who, 20 years in the future, are figuring out how to live on the ice, mostly by building quasi-libertarian collectives and—elsewhere—attempting to make a cold-adapted species through some pretty questionable genetic manipulation. At this point, the staggering ratio of information to page starts to make the narrative feel glossed rather than engrossing, an effect amplified by the novel’s choppy chapters, each announced with an official-looking statement of time and place. Yes, it all builds suspense and the pages fly, but so lightly that my attention often wandered to questions like why no one in colonized Antarctica seems all that interested in the aliens, and how it was that, just two decades post-vaporizing, humankind has the wherewithal to build things like “macro-algae farms” and crab canneries.
Imagine Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away, but with nothing between the plane crash and the slow pan of Tom Hanks’s island-hardened physique. I craved the narrative pleasure of civilization-building muddles, but Cold People’s churning juggernaut of plot had little time for them.
Is there a plot? Did pandemic lockdown have a plot, and does a long-term relationship? The act of writing? Kind of, I guess.
This single-minded pursuit of stuff happening feels especially strange because at the same time, Cold People insists it wants us to think about what it means to be human—to consider things like emotion, embodiment, empathy—and even (in a late twist) telepathy. To this end, we get a bunch of couples with complementary two-syllable names—Liza and Atto, Echo and Tetu, Yotam and Eitan—all figuring out what it means to love. Except they’re all exceptional, all physically stunning, all just specific enough—a few quirks, some conflicts, relatable in a way that flatters the person doing the relating. Like so much of Cold People, they read as though part of a novelization of a blockbuster whose release I somehow missed, shorthand gestures toward people awaiting the secondhand charisma of an actor to really vivify.
According to Cold People, fuzzy feelings are what make us human, but they’re also what imperil our survival. As Liza and Atto sum it up, “Weren’t they better people now, better at caring for one another, better at sharing—more affectionate, more compassionate, fairer even… Maybe these virtues couldn’t ultimately save them from extinction, but they would make the last decades of people some of the best.” Sure, why not. But then, wouldn’t it have been nice if the narrative had trusted my patience, allowed me to feel a little of what that first interminable, dark end-times Antarctic winter must have been, made a bit more room for showing me the slow bloom of those virtues among people who were more than just walking lists of appealing traits?
Which brings me to Dayswork, a novel that, in response to my desire to have my patience trusted, might well have said, “Hold my beer.”
Is there a plot? Did pandemic lockdown have a plot, and does a long-term relationship? The act of writing? Kind of, I guess. Open to any page and you see what looks like entries in a notebook, short paragraphs and sentences separated by blank spaces, their content sometimes standing alone, often blurring into one another, a variation on Woolfian stream of consciousness that I found alternatingly alluring and maddening, my eyes sliding off the page with almost the same frequency as they fixated on a passage to read out loud to the person across the sofa from me.
This is a description of reading Dayswork but it’s also an account of how my brain functioned during the very period in which Dayswork is set—those hazy months somewhere in the midpoint of Covid lockdown when urgency and anxiety were in competition with the strange comforts of insular routine. And it’s an account, too, of what the narrator of Dayswork seems to experience as she lives in those same months, her mundane interactions with her husband and daughter interspersed with her research for an unspecified project about Herman Melville and his literary compatriots.
(Bachelder and Habel are, in fact, a married couple, and one might think—as I did—that the reading experience of Dayswork would be inflected with prurient curiosity about the goings-on of their relationship. But, in a testament to just how fully the narrator’s consciousness enveloped me, I largely forgot about the existence of the real-life husband until I closed Dayswork’s cover and got very interested in how Bachelder and Habel collaborated. As someone who has trouble sharing a kitchen with a spouse, let alone a manuscript, this process sounds both dreamy and maddening.)
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If Cold People is a novel of plot that wants to be about feeling, Dayswork is a novel that captures the feeling of being plotless—a suspension made tolerable by the pursuit of occupation (good lord, the sourdough) and sometimes by the vicarious experience of plots not one’s own. There are things that look like chapter breaks in Dayswork, but they read less like demarcations of story or subject than as pauses for rest, turning out the lights before sleep, ending without resolution or anticipation, picking up amid thoughts only ever so slightly different from those of the day before.
As I mulled Bachelder and Habel’s novel, the word that kept coming to mind was associative—the way one idea becomes another, the way a marriage you read about starts to feel like something you’re living, the way it sometimes becomes hard to tell the difference between feelings you’ve borrowed from others and ones rooted in your own life.
Whatever a novel is, I think it should—first—succeed at being the thing it wants to be.
At times, the narrator makes this intermingling explicit, as when she recounts telling her husband about Frank Samuelson and George Harbo, immigrant Norwegian oyster dredgers who sought fame by rowing across the North Atlantic.
I showed my husband a grainy photograph of the two men rowing away from New York—
Together we stared at it like it was a Rorschach test, or like it was one of those drawings in which you can see, alternately, two different things, like a rabbit and a duck.Like a Grand Idea and an Awful Mistake.
Like adventure and quarantine.
Like marriage, and marriage.
Reading this passage felt like standing in the room with the narrator and her husband, peering over their shoulders to behold the same image. But this intimacy was only partial—there are no info dumps here, no gushes of emotion to tell us who is feeling what, except those that the narrator reports from the various authors’ biographies she reads. Instead, I was invited to read in my own assumptions, follow my own trains of thought. Distance and connection, holding apart while staying in proximity, feeling the unknowable difference of the person you’ve shared a bed with for decades. Dayswork makes these fraught, lovely, very human problems palpable. While engrossed (and not) in it, I felt its associations working on my perception, its voice making its way into my own.
And so, my choice is Dayswork. Because whatever a novel is, I think it should—first—succeed at being the thing it wants to be. Cold People very much wants to be a novel of action and emotion and ideas, but it only gets, in my highly unscientific estimate, approximately 63 percent of the way there, diminished in its realization of the final two of those aims by its dogged pursuit of the first. No sooner does it name-drop one of its thematic interests (empathy, love, human vulnerability) then it rushes us onward, giving us more—characters, problems, ice-adapted shenanigans—telling us of its Important Thoughts rather than thinking them. Dayswork, on the other hand, wants only to be a portrait of a highly specific moment, a little bleach-wiped jewel box holding the warped, tender mementos of several very strange months. Yet by keeping its confines close, it manages to make space for the actual business of contemplation—about marriage especially, but also the eternal mystery of other people, and also, in a way, the eternal mystery of our own minds.
Which brings me to the second and final thing a novel should do—the very thing we so often wish our spouses and lovers could do: Work its way into our heads, feel with us, take over our brains a little, if only briefly. On this count, I will give credit to each novel, for they both understand—lucidly, achingly—just how seductive that experience can be.
Advancing:
Dayswork
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin Guilfoile: There is a scene in Cold People, John, in which a former Israeli soldier and an avant-garde French filmmaker appropriate the last film projector on Earth to screen Lawrence of Arabia for a super-intelligent, genetically engineered centaur to see if the centaur is capable of assimilating into what’s left of human society. If that sentence does not make you want to read this novel, trust your instincts.
But if it does, there are, to paraphrase Judge Clark, a shit-ton of ideas crammed in here. On the surface, the premise is sort of “Independence Day, if humankind immediately surrendered to the aliens.” But this is also a dystopian novel, a utopian novel, a Frankenstein novel, a climate change novel. It’s about evolution and genetics, and colonization, and the relationship of humans to one another and other species. It’s about our ability to engineer our way out of the planetary messes we’ve spoiled ourselves into. There’s a cautionary metaphor about artificial intelligence in there. It’s also just bananas.
I like the ambition combined with the utter unpeeled Cavendish-ness of it all, but as Judge Clark points out, this concept requires an astonishing amount of exposition, as well as a lot of yadda-yadda-ing over some pretty obvious logistical questions. That’s not necessarily unusual in this kind of sci-fi, which has to cover a lot of plot taking place over a long timeline across not that many pages. If your tolerance for that is high, there’s much to chew on here. I’m not sure how much of it I agree with or disagree with, but I enjoyed mulling on it.
And now that I think about it, if we launched a probe into space with nothing on it but a print of Lawrence of Arabia, that would probably tell the aliens a lot about us.
John Warner: A Lawrence of Arabia screened for a centaur scenario could make me interested in reading a book if I knew the book was perhaps absurdist or less interested in plot than Judge Clarke’s judgment makes Cold People sound.
That said, if it were the premise for a TV series, I’m totally onboard. I think I just want different things from my fiction.
Strangely enough, that scenario wouldn’t look out of place as a description of a Chris Bachelder novel. His first book Bear v. Shark is set in a near-future quasi-dystopia where a kid wins an essay writing contest that comes with four tickets to a staged fight in Las Vegas between a bear and a shark. (It’s actually Bear v. Shark II.) In another novel, U.S.!, the author and muckraker Upton Sinclair is repeatedly assassinated and resurrected. In The Throwback Special, a bunch of guys get together every year to collectively recreate the shattering of Joe Theisman’s leg on Monday Night Football.
Those weird premises are primarily used in the service of satire, but that satire is also in the service of trying to uncover something sincere about what makes humans tick. Whereas Cold People wants to show us something about ourselves also, but by taking a totally different route.
Maybe I’m more interested in the book than I thought I was.
Kevin: I tried to read Moby-Dick one summer when I was home from college. I had read Melville’s Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas in high school, and didn’t find it spoke to teenage me, but my parents had a copy of M-D lying around and I wanted to give it a go. I’ll confess, I’ve found I enjoy reading about Melville more than reading actual Melville. (Also, we’re only three matches into the Rooster and we’ve already had two Melville-obsessed novels. What’s up, 2024?). I am even more interested in the ways other authors are entranced by him, including writers like Walker Percy and Ken Kesey and Ray Bradbury, who were very influential to me. I’m not interested enough to read an actual biography of Melville, but this kind of stream-of-consciousness novel, filled with Melville facts (and bonus Hawthorne facts! I like Hawthorne!), went down pretty easy with me.
My freshman seminar class was taught by a grad student who told me that he had written his Ph.D. dissertation on 72 interchangeable index cards, and when he presented it, he planned to throw them all in the air and then pick them up one at a time and read them in random order. I have to admit, I thought of him a little while I was reading Dayswork. This book is more carefully constructed than that, but there is something of a cut-and-paste vibe to it. When I got to pages 134 and 135, I knew immediately that I had already read them about a half hour earlier and was certain my book had a misprint. I spent a few minutes shuffling back through the previous pages before realizing that I must have, in a moment of distraction (this book, full of tangents, encourages them), browsed ahead and read these pages out of order. But those two pages could have been inserted earlier in the novel without much disruption.
If you counted all the words in Dayswork that constitute the fictional story—the “novel” part, the relationship between the researcher narrator and her husband—it would probably add up to a week’s worth of old Mike Royko newspaper columns. And if the experiment part of this experimental novel is to determine if you can take a few thousand words of character and incident and distribute them unevenly across 50,000 words of 19th-century literary context and come up with an affecting, book-length fiction, then I think the hypothesis is proven true.
John: Dayswork just feels good to me, if that makes sense. I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for the novel in fragments approach (e.g., Dept. of Speculation) and I don’t need a ton of hard-driving plot to stay interested if the vibes are good (e.g., The Mezzanine), and the way Dayswork feels both improvised and carefully constructed really worked for me.
Kevin: As Judge Clark describes it, reading these books back to back really forces you to ask what kind of reader you are. Knowing me as you do, John, I think it will not surprise you that I lean Team Centaur.
One day that grad student showed up late to class, very hungover. He walked straight to the window, flung it open, and vomited prodigiously onto the sidewalk four stories below. Then he called Victor Frankenstein the c-word (while also insulting him in French) and canceled class with his head on the desk. I sometimes wonder how he turned out.
On Monday, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by Rooster mainstay James McBride meets Henry Hoke’s leonine Los Angeles fantasy Open Throat. See you then!
Today’s mascot
Nominated by Lisa, today’s ToB mascot Mario has a message: “Hello, ToB! I am a domestic short-hair, all black (even my toes) Halloween cat. The lady I live with calls me ‘Mario,’ except when she calls me ‘Get Down!’ or ‘Knock It Off!’ (I only respond to the first.) I’ve lived with her since I was seven weeks old, and I’ll be seven years old on March 20. I'm not much of a reader, but I do enjoy ToB season. This year's favorite cover is What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, obvs. And I love that rooster!
“Have fun, everyone! (Some of you may remember my first ToB appearance in 2019.)”