Book Review: THE UNMAPPING by Denise S. Robbins
Denise S. Robbins's ambitious debut is hard to review, cuz of it's scope, so we can just talk about the gist.
Thanks for checking out Big Reader Bad Grades! The newsletter just passed 1,000 subscribers and I’m over the moon about that. Today’s post is a review of a Substack novel, The Unmapping; this is a foray into Substack Summer, a reading event where we read and assess the trad-, indie-, self-published novels of Substackers. The name was coined by (who has since established the Samuel Richardson Prize committee for self-published books); the Substack Summer ambassador, basically, is . You can check out my own new/debut book, CUBAFRUIT, and write me a DM asking who the hell am I to be critiquing other folks’ books.
1.
’s novel The Unmapping is sold as literary fiction, capital L, which tends to mean it cares more about style, character, mood, voice, and ideas than it does about story. But Robbins is a cucumber and here's the brine: what she's written is a well-oiled and atmospheric piece of speculative fiction, with deep-n-voicey character riffs, meditations on her various themes, there’s a heavy dose of climate science, the whole thing is very politically literate without being, itself, all that political….
What ensues is a marketing pickle.
It’s hard to sell you on this book without just explaining everything that happens.
But then it’s one of those weird cacti-looking pickles with the double header in that there’s no way to succinctly explain everything that happens (lotsa characters, storylines, themes, events…).
I think you should buy it and look at the pages, though, so here’s what we’ll do:
2.
The premise of The Unmapping is that all the buildings in New York City are suddenly being shuffled around. Swapping places. It’s happening every morning at 4 a.m. No explanation is immediately presented and there’s a slightly Kafkaesque vibe, from the start, where Robbins’s characters are so concerned with how to move forward, how to sustain their life against this crisis, that we can tell it won’t be the author’s priority to explain the “how” or the “why” of it.
But it’s not a copout!
Robbins — whose cast comprises people in leadership-type roles or emergency responders — is more interested in the “what now” question.
Which is very mature. Her characters are in their 30s and so is the author.
This reader is also in his 30s.
Your 30s, I think, are the decade where you stop looking at personal crises and thinking “why” or “how” and instead just look at your resources and the people around you and think, “OK how do I move forward?”
So maybe it’s a bildungsroman. Kinda.
3.
Toward the end of the novel we get a snippet in which the protagonist, Esme (who works on some kind of emergency response planning team for the city, kinda vague), gets word that a building might collapse; they find that buildings are shuffling in a kind of pattern and they notice that, when things “unmap” at 4 a.m., this very-crowded tower will be situated on a river and it’ll collapse.
Here’s a little snippet of how she reacts:
“If we pulled the [fire] alarms, then the fire trucks would come…and [the fire fighters would] want to go inside, and if they did, they’d see there’s no fire, but would want to check it out anyway, and how could we keep them from heading in and doing their jobs? No, yes, we can pull the alarms, but we’ll still need our bosses on board. You know these things take time. The process. But we could…[c]all in a favor. Who would do me a favor? This is not about favors.”
My thumb kept making these sweaty whirls on the Kindle’s bezel cuz I was squeezing a little harder sometimes without knowing.
But notice that riffy quality. Two types of anxiety: the spiraling, tumbling, reflexive, catastrophizing sentence about the first responders—and then the other kind. Staccato. Short sentences. Facts all swarming on her. Occasionally she plucks one out. Latches on. Extrapolates into something longwinded like the thing about saving lives by evacuating the building but simultaneously endangering the people who show up with the best of intentions…..
Something the novel does remarkably well is capture the rhythms of anxious thought. We have an overworked NYC mayor in our cast, a few emergency responders, someone trapped under a building, a woman waiting at home each day while her husband goes looking for their car — everyone in this book is doing two things at once:
the thing they think they’re supposed to be doing,
actively holding their shit together.
They’re stressed-out, anxious people. They’re doing their best to harness that nervous energy into something good/useful.
I think that’s what the novelist is doing with her own imagination here. Harnessing nervous energy into something creative, entertaining, thought-provoking, cathartic.
Something useful.
This, I think, is what’s generally meant when we talk about a novelist having some skin in the game.
4.
But the fact that The Unmapping is a traditionally published debut novel calls for some points of consideration:
It’s got some strong and brainy speculative elements that aren’t indicated anywhere on its cover design, and are also undersold in the jacket copy. This is likely because sci-fi is more niche than literary fiction.
The novel’s full of heavy ideas. If you pick it up because you wanted something intellectually stimulating, that’s what you’ll get.
Robbins is 35 and talks about relationships and work and money in a way that millennials will recognize and celebrate. She could get awards for this. But maybe not if it’s too nerd-coded (i.e., overtly sci-fi or speculative).
Point being: I have no idea what to call this, genre-wise, and I have no idea how you’d sell it.
5.
Robbins concocts in The Unmapping a concept so high it kills birds: what would happen if NYC’s streets stayed the same, but its properties were shuffled, somewhat randomly, every day.
She offers a few persuasive explanations for why this might be happening but she’s mostly got the same concerns as her protagonists: what happens now?
Buildings are moving around — ok, that means there’d be a gas leak, and probably a big explosion — but it’d be early in the morning. Then the city would cinch off everyone’s gas lines. And what’s the first place that’s likely to be up and running on a weekday morning? An indie coffee shop.
An emergency worker, Esme, is walking to work, she's lost, and happens to be standing in front of this cafe when a twentysomething barista comes ragdolling through the storefront window, deaf and baffled, squirting arterial pink on the pavement til Esme gets her belt around it.
It’s a resonant image for where the rest of the novel is going: stanch the bleeding.
6.
One of the bigger issues The Unmapping explores is something a millennial novelist might be uniquely-suited to address, as the first generation of digital natives:
How much of our lives are still actually anchored in our physical space?
To what extent are we still creatures of our environment?
What is “environment,” in the digital age?
Is “home” your apartment, your neighborhood, or your spouse? Or your little brother?
The whole “displacement” motif lends to a number of different interpretive tracks and Robbins is cool about getting out of the reader’s way in that respect, and gives a reader all the thread they might need to argue that it’s a social novel, an environmental novel, something about the digital age…
I think the reason she’s good at cultivating those larger themes, toeing a comfortable space around them for the reader to fill in herself, is because Robbins is focused on something way more personal.
7.
There was a line toward the end of the novel that I didn’t start obsessing about until a few pages later.
But I hadn’t marked it.
I couldn’t remember it verbatim except that it used the word “impossibility.” So I used the Kindle search function. Started typing “impossib—” and then stopped because I saw that the word “impossible” shows up 30ish times in the novel.
Bit of a hint there about what she’s gunning for.
Here’s the quote though:
It seems impossible. And then it hits me. There’s something in the impossibility that’s worth looking at and sitting with. And for a moment I’m like, I found it. Why I am the way I am, why the world is the way it is. We need the impossible. When we don’t have it, we go mad. So.…I don’t know if I’m [spiritual]. At the very least, I’m curious.
8.
Most Substack novels are debuts. Debut novels tend to have similar problems. The most notorious is that there are more characters than the premise can sustain. Characters drop off because the novelist doesn’t know what to do with them.
This happens in The Unmapping. Maybe that’s a hangup from a more “classical” idea of how a novel ought to work.
But imagine a novel as like a grand orchestral performance. The novelist is the conductor.
You start with some windchimes, a little banjo, some cowbell, guitar riff — all these instruments kinda swell, and then subside, trading off to some other instrument; at the end, however, we get the big rewarding cacophony, everything in proper synch.
If our analogy is that the storylines are different instruments, The Unmapping doesn’t bring every instrument back into a gratifying crescendo.
9.
If The Unmapping manifests some of the trademark shortcomings of a debut novel it also has that distinct strength of a debut: energy.
My favorite character in the novel is the mayor of NYC. She’s referred to as “the mayor” and the moniker fits because nobody treats her like a human. Except for the mayor of Atlantic City, with whom she’s having an affair. He sends her dick pics. They had the best sex of her life and she seems bothered to concede that, even to herself. She has a pounding headache. Caffeine helps but the headache comes back.
The mayor becomes my favorite character because hers are the chapters in which Robbins flexes one of her best talents: creating, and then sustaining, a perfectly-modulated air of chaos. Robbins keeps all of the mayor’s juggled problems in sight, never forgetting which falling and which are ascendant. We get a sense for the crushing, volcanic, relentless quotidia of that job: An aid puts a phone to her ear and she doesn’t know who she’s talking to. Turns out it’s someone in the hospital. Gotta say something uplifting. OK hang up. President’s calling. There’s a closet that’s kinda soundproof. Take it in there. “Hello, Mr. President.” He asks stupid questions. OK so she quiets her frustration and steps away from the already-delayed crisis response in order to explain the crisis to someone who isn’t going to be held accountable for its handling, the way she’ll be held accountable…
Something about this is riveting. Robbins runs a tragic thread through her characters, sketching people who’ve learned to live with crushing anxiety, an unwieldy catastrophizing imagination, by throwing a lasso around their brain and focusing its energy on some kind of helpful endeavor.
Where her protagonists falter is that they never take care of themselves. Then they feel unfulfilled by their seemingly selfless efforts to help the people around them because eventually, when they burn out and crash, they realize that what they were doing this whole time was trying to quiet their own minds, and starve their own needs.
10.
The mayor is my personal favorite part of the book and hence the gaping feeling that ensues from her disappearance. Yes her character disappears in the narrative, meaning people don’t know where she went, but she also disappears from the narrative.
There’s a cop-out argument here where the author or her defenders could say, “But this novel is about emotional, professional, and geographical displacement; therefore, the fact that the reader feels displaced is part of its design.”
Sure. That’s a fair argument: the novel doesn’t hold together as a totally cohesive experience because, thematically, it’s about the rupture of such cohesion.
My counterargument would be that the novel is also $18.99 plus tax. And it isn’t just that the storylines don’t all fold back over each other in a neat way, they’re also pretty lopsided in terms of how much time they’re allotted on the page. Esme and her hyper-anxious colleague Arjun (one of the more persuasive depictions of someone on the autism spectrum I’ve ever read!) are clearly the protagonists. But they’re treated as independently as anyone else. The kid under the building, Antony, feels like a figurehead of some kind, but it’s hard to tell what purpose his storyline serves except to be a wrench in the mayor’s storyline and a slight redemption in Arjun’s.
Maybe this is all gibberish if you haven't read it and I don’t want to spend too much time on it because it doesn’t really hamper the book in any way except that, when you reach the end, some readerly antennae starts to preen from your bald spot (you have one too!) looking for where everything ties together — and it kinda doesn’t.
11.
Toni Morrison does this same thing, though, in The Bluest Eye: characters show up, they’re rendered beautifully and their dramas have quick arcs, and then…their narratives drop off a little. Still a mesmerizing read. So do you call it a “first novel problem” or do you say she’s quilted a bunch of scenes together such that, while the individual storylines might drop off, they do create, in the end, some sort of emotional cohesion that’s harder to pin down and explain.
Quentin Tarantino took two movies to figure it out and if you look at the negative reviews for Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction they tend to complain about the “messiness.” Like the storyteller’s not in control. That he makes “good films with great scenes.”
Robert Altman had this problem in the 1970s before just deciding it was your problem.
12.
is the real thing. Sometimes you read a debut novel and you’re not quite sure but in this case it’s hard to refute. I read an interview with Robbins in which she unfortunately proves way less interesting than the interviewer but she does confide that she’s got two novels in the tank after this and she’s looking ahead toward a novel set in space. If The Unmapping was a table it would be a little lopsided, in the legs, but etched all over with intricate designs. Depending where you stand and the quality of the light it’s very upsetting or it’s hopeful or just interesting.
I suspect every reader’ll take away some different narrative/thematic thread from the book and the one thing they’ll have in common is they’re still thinking about it a week later.
Thanks for reading Big Reader Bad Grades! This is a reader-funded endeavor, and if you’re enjoying it, I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription. Everything’s free as it comes out, but falls behind a paywall after five weeks.
Another emphatic shout-out to
, who’s committed to forging a community around everyone’s books on this platform, and whose page you should follow if you want to keep tabs on who’s releasing what. He was kind enough to launch his Substack Summer with a review of my own book, CUBAFRUIT.
Thanks for the shout-out, Alex. I am looking forward to reading The Unmapping toward the end of summer and hopefully get into the Literary Salon's Book Club because this sounds like a great discussion book.
This book sounds wild can't wait to check it out thank you for the review