I like crazy. I like the monomaniacal Captain Ahab, the deranged Humbert Humbert, the murderous Raskolnikov, the obsessed Heathcliff, the serial killers Patrick Bateman and Tom Ripley, the psychopath Judge Holden. I like Ginsberg madly howling for Carl who is locked up in a psychiatric hospital in Rockland, New York, and yes, I like Eileen.
I also like Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees. Cosimo—the Baron—is a member of an ancient noble family, but he rebels against his father and takes up residence in the trees surrounding the family estate, and then in the trees throughout the countryside where he lives out his life. He can hold a rational discussion, he is smart, he is perceptive, he falls in love, yet he lives in the trees and never comes down to the ground, and upon his demise he floats away into the sky…and that’s crazy. Nevertheless, despite the absurdity of the premise, the tale never seems farfetched, and just like any other realist work of fiction, the story of the Baron envelopes you in the madness.
As does Sophie Madeline Dess's What You make of Me (Penguin Press, February, 2025).
We've long needed some kind of crazy to shatter the glass ceiling of autofiction, trauma fiction, dating fiction, disguised personal essay fiction…we've needed something fresh, something wild, something you have to work for. And What You make of Me is it.
What You make of Me is a family story that focuses on the Stern siblings, Ava and Demetri, who have their art and each other and not much else. Their mother has suicided. (She was "very good at two things: chess and indigestion. Often, they happened at the same time…") After her death, their grieving father moves to California and takes up residence in a hillside bungalow where he tends to his garden. Their father realized early on that his children shared a "secret little alliance: "So cute! God, you two are the cutest. The way you just stick together." The dark side of this enchainment, he noted, is that "Neither of you is free…" When they become teenagers, it stuns Ava when she realizes that Demetri might want someone else and not include her in his desire, "Because different desires would make us what we were not—namely, two separate people."
From a young age the sibling's behavior attracts attention and reprimands from adults for ignoring the generally accepted codes of society. They are thrown out of one school because Ava is labeled as "oversexed" after flaunting her genitalia in class and letting her classmates examine it, visually and digitally. At their new school, the principal suggests she can get Demetri into an elite academy for gifted students. At dinner with the siblings and their parents, the principal presents this idea hoping to win the parent’s consent. Out of the blue, their mother (still alive at this point) wonders how Demetri is so good at French, a language she has never heard him speak, and which she presumes he doesn't know. His father asks Demetri if he is filled with joie de vivre, and since Demetri has no idea what the phrase means, Ava tells him their father wants to know whether he is "filled with a fart." Demetri says yes, and farts, and Ava rolls off her chair onto the floor laughing. Both children shriek uncontrollably. They understand each other, nobody understands them—and so it goes throughout the novel.
Built upon one intense situation after another What You make of Me pulls you into its orbit as the narrative hurtles forward with no backward looks. As wacky and absurd as some of the set pieces are you keep saying to yourself (as you do while reading The Baron in the Trees) this is all reasonable, this is what I have always believed artists are like and what they are born to do. I understand what is going on here. These kids live and die by their ability to create and they have an acute understanding of reality—a gift, really—that allows them to experience the phenomena of everyday life in ways that we civilians don't, and they take the sensations deep into their consciousness, so deep that it wounds them internally and the wounds bleed out into works of art.
Suffering comes with the territory.
Narrated in omniscient first person by Ava, the prose in What You make of Me is direct, stark, rugged, tough, not to be fucked with. The language is parthogenic. There is no "consecution," Gordon Lish's idea that a sentence is (or should be) always a response to the sentence before. Throughout the telling of this tale there often is no before, there is only the ineluctable forward momentum of the language that emerges from a "neurological storm" as noted in a review in RealClear Books & Culture. This storminess, bordering on violence, reverberates throughout: Dess states in a recent interview: “I am sometimes surprised when, opening my novel to a random page, I come across some paragraph of Ava or Demetri’s and encounter the aggressive nature of their obsessions, the way their lives charge forward with a kind of tragic force.”
Just as there is no consecution, stylistically, Dess also resists similes because rhetorically similes are failed metaphors and, more often than not, cliches, commonplaces, or redundancies that add little in terms of insight or descriptive power and slow down the progress of the prose. For example, while in Home Depot Ava and Demetri encounter a mother and child. In describing the little fellow Dess eschews the facile comparative "tall as a…" and describes him by simply saying he was "tombstone height." In her description of the female nude in Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass, she writes: "Her skin was a thick fabric—she wore five layers of naked for every cloth layer on the men." When she does allow a simile—and there are very, very few (these may be the only two)—they create their own imagery: "He wears his smile like a wet hole in the head." And: "her wet black eyes—each lash separated, coming at you like a fragile claw." Her use of verbs as adjectives and the ability to extract a surprising implication is second to none among contemporary writers. Here she describes a portrait she is painting of Willow, one of Demetri's love interests: "…I worked my way down the ridges of upper rib and didn't lift my brush until I reached the middle of her breast, which ended at a nippled point—an embossed square, so precise—on which her whole body might rock if you were to suddenly push her over."
While visiting her father, unable to locate the garbage to dispose of the damaged plum she is holding, Ava says, "I hold the plum in my hand, drill my finger into its bruise, breaking the weaker fibers and hitting the pit." The image—fingering a bruised fruit—is both gross and erotic at the same time. Ava thinks outrageous thoughts, says outrageous things. Just as she can't keep her finger away from the rot spot on the plum she always "sniffed for weakness" in a person. She is direct and sassy and does not suffer fools gladly. Her psychological acuity can be both cutting and illuminating. She understands that in a portrait of a person representation is the opposite of what you might think: "people want to be depicted not because they want to be captured as they really are, or as more than they really are, but because they want to be shown what others think they really are, which is most important to them."
Even though the novel is set in New York City—the epicenter of the creative world—and Ava is a rising “art star," none of the buzz and hype associated with that world finds its way into the story. In fact, none of the memes of social media, or TV, or snarky references to the hipster New York scene makes an appearance in this tale. Ava and Demetri are not out to cultivate their image among scenesters or to cultivate a "brand" of themselves. No one in this novel is on their cell phone. No one is texting. Ava and Demetri have their art and their lives to attend to. However, as Dess notes in an interview: “It wouldn’t matter what world they occupied, neither of them would ever be able to fully enter it because of their fierce internality, their self-alienation and isolation.” In their universe they orbit around each other and their art. Their parabolas only shift when the Italian gallerist Nati enters their life and becomes the love interest of both them, and this reconfiguration of the sibling's universe entails complications that unwind as the story rushes to its conclusion—foreordained in any case.
While What You Make of Me is a book about artists and art, it is not strictly speaking a Künstlerroman. There is no struggle between the siblings and society, no tortuous search for self-realization or artistic identity. Ava in particular comes at us fully formed and ready for battle like Athena who sprang from the forehead of Zeus.
There is a long history of siblings in literature, from Cain and Able to Orestes and Electra, the brothers Karamazov, Hansel and Gretel, to Flora and Miles, to Franny and Zooey. Each defend or betray each other, or conspire against others to establish their place in the world, and many come to a tragic end.
What You Make of Me, as its author notes, is "quite bleak… despite the moments of genuine lightness and humor within it." We don't know what Demetri would ultimately have made of himself due to his premature death. We don't know what will happen to Ava without him. At the end of the tale, she is faced with a future without her brother. In mourning, her spirits are somewhat lifted by the child left behind for her to watch over, born of Demetri’s love affair with Nati who has returned to Italy to deal with her mother's death. Ava is smitten with the baby and, ever the artist looking at raw material, promises herself: "I will make him into something."
