Eleanor

June 25, 2018
For her first novel, poet and translator Moschovakis (They and We Will Get into Trouble for This) offers a cerebral, sometimes meandering rumination on novel writing that juxtaposes two women writers: Eleanor, who loses the laptop containing notes for the novel she is writing, and Eleanor’s creator/alter ego, who is writing a novel about Eleanor. After her laptop disappears from a coffee shop table, Eleanor receives an email from someone claiming he cannot return the device but might retrieve its contents for her. Eleanor departs Brooklyn for Albany to find the emailer, visits an upstate commune, and then travels to Addis Ababa. When the writer writing about Eleanor shows a draft
of her novel to a critic she met 20 years earlier, he asks why Addis Ababa? The question remains unresolved. The writer accompanies the critic as he receives an academic honor. They discuss her novel; their friendship grows. Rich in cultural references but short on plot, Moschovakis’s concentric narratives capture moments of inspiration, distraction, analysis, and mundane activity in prose encompassing quotes, lists, emails, texts, news reports, and two pages of nothing but the words “time passed.” Less a novel than it is
performance art in print, Moschovakis’s fiction exercise illuminates a writer’s disconnected choices and personal connections, but, like her characters, bogs down in the creative process.

August 1, 2018

With three well-received poetry collections to her credit (e.g., They and We Will Get into Trouble for This), Moschovakis introduces a first novel whose eponymous narrator is herself a novelist. Fragments of Eleanor's story commingle with those of the main character in Eleanor's novel, an unnamed woman. The two confront similar hopes and anxieties. Both are approaching 40, and their respective love lives have reached a crucial crossroads. In the opening scene, Eleanor has lost her laptop. When a specterlike guy named Danny Kamau informs her via email that he has the computer, she sets off to retrieve it, a quest that takes her from New York City to Albany, NY, and Harar, Ethiopia. This physical journey unfolds alongside a critical emotional and mental quest to regain her identity. VERDICT Funny, intelligent, and sensual, although also unsettled, Eleanor is engaging from the onset and a welcoming new female voice, proving Moschovakis has the potential to become an accomplished novelist. Recommended for most fiction readers.--Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2018
A sprawling, fragmented novel that studies the paradoxical alienation and immediacy of the digital age as it follows its twinned narrators: the author and her character, Eleanor.Moschovakis (They and We Will Get into Trouble for This, 2016, etc.) opens her fourth book with a quintessential 21st-century scene: a woman, alone, skimming a report of a senseless act of public violence. This is Eleanor--approaching 40, adrift in her ambition and ambivalent in her love, grappling daily with "the thing that had happened--that she had made happen, or at least not prevented from happening"; literally a character in someone else's tale. Eleanor is at a crossroads in her life, but instead of being faced with a binary decision (left or right?), she is confronted by the thoroughly modern dilemma of multiplicity. A reader, a thinker, a woman aging out of youth but still as unsettled and provisional as she was in her 20s, Eleanor can imagine herself as almost anyone, but her only stable companion is her own unsatisfactory reflection. In simultaneous, spliced sections, the reader is also introduced to Eleanor's unnamed author--a similarly aged, similarly situated woman who is exiting a relationship with her lover, Kat, and entering into a thorny intellectual friendship with a famous male critic who has expressed interest in her manuscript. As the author and the critic's friendship builds, the author's struggle to maintain control over her revision against the heedless authority of male confidence leads the reader through a nuanced and provocative discourse on the power of identity as a tool of both creation and erasure. Meanwhile, compelled by the catalyst of a stolen laptop and the data it contained, Eleanor leaves New York on the trail of the enigmatic Danny Kamau--petty thief or good Samaritan--in a peripatetic quest that takes her from an Albany hostel to a "cutting-edge eco-squat," from Addis Ababa to the Rimbaud museum in Harar. As the novel progresses, the author's and Eleanor's stories intertwine like strands of a double helix--touching only through the laddered bonds of their shared time and place but inextricably connected by the common access of their thought.Philosophically exhaustive yet profoundly human, this book sets itself the task of asking the big questions--What am I? What was I? What will I be?--in a style that evokes Lispector and Camus but with the self-referential and weary globalism of the current milieu. A consummately accomplished novel. A worthy treatise on the now.

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