Jake Casella Brookins Reviews OKPsyche by Anya Johanna DeNiro

OKPsyche, Anya Johanna DeNiro (Small Beer 978-1-61873-208-8, $15.00. 160pp, tp) September 2023. Cover by Karl Joseph Aloys Agricola.

I was completely unprepared for how powerful Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche is. Told in second person by a carefully unnamed narrator, the novel blends fantasy, science fic­tion, and absurdism; it’s also a very grounded and personal work. The narrator, a trans woman trying to reconnect with her young son, trying to find friendship and love in a hostile world, is aided by magical figures and contraptions, but it’s her voice that stands out. This is absolutely brilliant writing: raw and unflinching in how it portrays transphobia and self-doubt, sweeping and dynamic in its use of language and imagery.

DeNiro deploys both science-fictional and magical elements alongside intense soul-searching and soul-baring segments. It’s a combination that reflects the difficulty of thinking through the poly­crisis, and had me reaching for books as disparate as DeLuca’s Night Roll and Tobler’s The Necessity of Stars for points of comparison. While the sci­ence-fictional elements – a dystopian police state, anonymous and menacing automated drones, natural disasters ‘‘exported’’ to other states – feel almost extraneous in OKPsyche, minor details alongside the narrator’s personal struggles and the more striking magical plot points, they also serve as an extremely effective writerly shorthand for what it feels like right now, without belaboring the point. I was particularly struck by DeNiro’s use of portmanteaus – a venerable linguistic trick in science fiction – to highlight the strangeness of our current environment, as when she describes empty big-box buildings and the ‘‘labelscars of the retailers who used to be there.’’

By contrast, OKPsyche’s magical elements are more intimately bound up with key developments in the novel, as the narrator receives mystical assistance and advice. But even here, it’s difficult to parse what the narrator is conveying as re­ally happening, how much is imagination, how much is metaphor consciously relayed as a kind of euphemism. Some of these are striking on the imagistic level, bringing to mind writers like Kelly Link or Carmen Maria Machado – a camera ob­scura that reveals distant scenes, mysterious and mystical benefactors, a box containing a deflated ‘‘boyfriend.’’ Even more jolting, though, are the narrative tricks of the novel frequently plays with its own reality, as when it’s revealed that a named character ‘‘doesn’t exist’’: she’s an imaginary friend.

DeNiro is incredibly deft at crafting a narrator who is semitransparently unreliable, a woman interrogating herself and her world, a skeptical fantasist. This balancing, sorting, juggling act – an anxious game of weighing which ideas to believe – colors the entire novel; it’s constantly pulled between sometimes-fanciful aspiration and often-depressing practicalities. The jewel of the book is that the former may be more (or at least as) real or significant: what’s imagined, known, hoped-for is also part of the self and of the world. Even an unspoken thought, to quote Herbert, ‘‘is a real thing and has powers of reality.’’ I’m wary of the terminology, but to the extent that OKPsyche has a plot, it’s one very concerned with manifesting, with actualizing; those are perhaps other ways of saying that this novel is invested in the tensions between being and becoming.

While one pole of OKPsyche is the nar­rator trying to rejoin her son’s life, another is her desire for a relationship, to not be alone, and how that shapes her life and the narrative. ‘‘If this story is a romance, it’s because a person you have not yet met – and, frankly, may never meet – has fallen in love with you.’’ There’s a courageous vulnerability to how the novel centers loneliness and the fear of loneliness, and in how it shows the narrator’s own self-consciousness about that, her struggle to comport her own desires with a world of larger and deadlier struggles. The narrator is a writer herself, and speaks of how her writing practice has changed: ‘‘the hard work of allowing yourself to be maudlin and ridiculous, to sow the hard ground of your past with a viaduct of tears. It was the hard work of being embarrassing.’’

Glimpses of her friends and lovers – sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, sometimes magical – construct a partial chart of possibilities and support. Her relationships with men, though, are fraught. While there is an acerbic humor to many of the narrator’s observations, it’s impossible and indeed irresponsible to overlook the potential violence and transphobia of just going on a date. In one of the novel’s central chapters, Keats’ ‘‘Ode to Psyche’’ is presented in its entirety and with annotations – chopping up a poem of epic love and soul-truthfulness with ‘‘dealbreakers for profiles on Tinder’’ and anecdotes of dates gone dangerously and emotionally devastatingly awry.

At no point while reading OKPsyche did I think to myself: aha, this is an experimental novel. So it’s really striking, going back through it, to see just how nonlinear and daring it is. In the moment, the text of this novel flows so seamlessly, weaving and feinting and dropping astonishingly power­ful lines, that its rejection of traditional structure wasn’t even something that stood out to me. DeNiro’s narrator has an unpretentious wisdom that leaps off the page sometimes – like when she sees that ‘‘fitting in would have been a form of slow unhappiness’’ – and an utterly compelling depth of character. She has an openness to potency, to significance, that can turn the simplest description into something shaking: at her son’s pinewood derby, she notes the ‘‘latches keeping the cars, for a little while, from plummeting.’’ It’s good, it’s potent, it hurts. In a novel, in a world, so rife with violence and bigotry, with uncertainty and doubt, DeNiro has given us something remarkable.

This review and more like it in the November 2023 issue of Locus.

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