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.
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.
