The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball: Review by Jake Casella Brookins

The Repeat Room, Jesse Ball (Catapult 978-1-64622-140-0, 256pp, $27.00, hc) Cover by Sara Wood. September 2024.

We have such a cornucopia of dystopias right now, fictional and otherwise, that they’ve really got to do something different to catch my attention. The Repeat Room, the latest novel from the prolific Jesse Ball, captured it thoroughly: haunting, spare, and inventive, it’s a bleak tale that’s nonetheless rich with sparkling turns of phrase and vivid ideas. While the social and personal cruelties of the novel are its most immediately striking features, Ball has an eye for the human even at our most inhumane, and he crafts a generative ambiguity within its strictures, with much of the story’s potency – and perhaps its clemency – left to the reader to extrapolate.

The novel is sharply divided into two sections. In the first, we’re introduced to the idea of the Re­peat Room – a mysterious element in the judicial system of a rapidly reorganizing (and disturbingly totalitarian) society. Through the eyes of Abel, a sanitation worker selected as a potential juror, we explore the bewildering bureaucracy of the jury selection process. After using the Repeat Room to view, or perhaps relive, the actions of a prisoner, the final juror decides whether the accused lives or dies. In the second half of The Repeat Room, we get a very different story, implied to be the prisoner’s: “the record of the black hill,” the words of a young man from a bizarre and deeply abusive setting. Raised along with his sister in a kind of political-theatrical experiment, he’s never been given a name, only sets of roles to memorize and switch between, and has lived his entire life in isolation from the outside world. Although it’s an unsettling story of torture, incest, and tragedy, this second sequence balances Abel’s narrative in unexpected ways, offering visions of joy and tenderness despite the surrounding walls – and, although you have to work for it a bit, there are tremendously interesting ideological conversa­tions happening between the two sections.

Ball’s writing has sometimes been compared to Kafka, and that feels particularly appropriate here, especially in the first half of the novel. The situ­ations are absurd – I was reminded of Terry Gil­liam’s films while reading this, with their strange characters and machinic, confining architecture – but Ball’s writing is austere, carefully minimal­ist, and allows mundane details and naturalistic dialogue to land with devastating significance. Again, the second half offers an interesting coun­terbalance: a first-person narrative, more verbally free despite the narrator’s horrific world, it’s much more felt, more sensual and emotional. In between the two, there’s a short astonishing passage when Abel is being prepared for the Room: an explosive psychographic moment of dreamlike recollection and metaphysical contemplation. It reads like the conscience and the consciousness of the entire project, and it absolutely floored me.

The Repeat Room’s dystopian bureaucracy is only visible through the narrow window of the few day its spends with Abel. Even so, it’s possible to discern the outlines: a new social order fixated on control and perfection, upgrading and downgrad­ing citizens in some kind of eugenics scheme and “deciding who gets to be human” with a chillingly plausible focus on social-mindedness. The execu­tions that the jurors hand out are not, we’re told, punishments, but simply decisions about who should be allowed to stay in the community. The very different dystopia of the novel’s second half can be read as a perverse refutation of the larger world: a neo-Thatcherite insistence that there is no society, and that individuality itself can be made so mutable and minimal that any attempt at society can find no purchase on it.

Both of these worlds, of course, are terrible, al­beit in different ways. What I find most fascinating about the novel is how Ball is playing them against each other, encouraging the reader to set these two very different stories alongside each other and decide what each is saying to the other, or what they might. After the comparatively dry, abstract, and intellectual setup of Abel’s story – not without flashes of humanity, even absurd humor, but one gets the sense that Abel’s life has instilled in him an almost nihilistic detachment – the record of the black hill is so immediately more visceral, so intensely discomfiting, that it takes over the sense of the book. It takes time and energy to process that second part, time and energy that takes us even further from the unresolved cliffhanger of Abel’s tale – leaving me snapping back, as from an upsetting dream, to wonder what happened, what Abel decided, how exactly the novel’s two halves speak to each other.

Where The Repeat Room shines, I think, is in allowing us the space to sit with that discomfort, in how it displaces so much of its power to im­plied connections. We have to wonder; we have to decide. There are so many dystopias right now, fictional and otherwise, and it is a delight – an unsettling delight, to be sure – to find one so original and thought-provoking.

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This review and more like it in the September 2024 issue of Locus.

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