Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp: Building a novel around a protagonist with a ‘low quantitative IQ'
Author
:
Sophie Kemp
ISBN-13
:
978-1398533745
Publisher
:
Scribner UK
Guideline Price
:
£16.99
They say love is blind. Well, I once dated a blind man, and he broke up with me after a month. Maybe it's more accurate to say instead that love is stupid. This at least seems to be the contention of
Paradise Logic
, the debut novel by American writer Sophie Kemp, whose 23-year old heroine, Reality Kahn, has the winsome qualities of a 'low quantitative IQ' and 'one of the most pure and open hearts in the world'.
After her friend and part-time lover Emil suggests she needs a new hobby, Reality sets out on a quest to find a proper boyfriend and become the 'greatest girlfriend of all time'. So ensues a luridly imagined and slapstick narrative that follows Reality around Gowanus, New York, as she valiantly attempts to win the affections of Ariel, a 27-year-old doctoral student with the 'hazel eyes of an introspective family pet', who lives at Paradise (#221), a 'DIY venue with a jazz twist'.
They start going out and Ariel quickly becomes the 'apple of [her] eyeball'. Though his true feelings for her seem vaguer, he agrees to be her boyfriend; she, meanwhile, starts taking an experimental drug called ZZZZvx Ultra (XR) to transform herself into hyper-feminine perfection.
One runs into problems when writing the stupid: gags alone might not sustain a reader's interest across a novel, while true stupidity might come at the expense of developed plots and characters. Our heroine, however, is not simply a dum-dum; it would be too easy to dismiss the idiocy of her cavorting, and the book itself as a mere vessel for a batty phraseology. For one thing that language is genuinely entertaining in its outré imagery and syntactical constructions, often managing to marry the ebullience and abjection of 21st-century girldom.
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But while it's fun to fall into Kemp's 'cracked-up' universe, something else lies beyond the crass first-person narration, a hyperbolic riff on the unreliability of the 'I'. By its end, Kemp isn't skewering misogyny in heterosexual romance as much as showing the lengths a girl will go to in her quest to remain 'delulu' and avoid a hard truth about love. Is it a perfect novel? No. But following an era of self-consciously clever narrators, it's a valiant attempt to try something new.
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