Roommates. Most of us have had them and usually there’s a story or two. Maybe they didn’t clean up their dishes, follow the chore wheel, or showered a little too rarely. They’re rarely the end of the world. But sometimes…
Set in a fantasy Pittsburgh, June Martin’s new novel Love/Aggression follows two roommates who hate each other: Zoe, a glamourous actress working her way up the ladder, and Lily, an apprentice tattoo artist trying to figure her life out. They started out as friends some time in the past, but when the book starts they’ve drifted apart: Zoe is conceited and catty while Lily has control issues and impulsively jumps into relationships. The two clash at parties, a concert, and finally go their separate ways but keep running into each other and attempt to sabotage their counterpart.
Martin sketches out their lives and personalities with a lot of colour. Zoe’s career is on the upswing after a star turn in a series called Drama Dolls, but she’s quickly become insufferable, assuming that she can call the shots on a movie set and preens in front of every mirror or camera in sight. Hot on heels is her agent/lackey/factortum Nate, a mousey and underhanded man who grovels to her while lashing out at anyone who might slight his boss. More than once he’s called her pet for good reason. A good example of Zoe’s inflated ego and casual cruelity comes when she’s taking public transit to a date and assumes everyone on the train has seen her work:
“…she sat still for twenty minutes and passed the time by wondering how many young people in the compartment had recognized her. A young guy, clearly some variety of gay judging by the denim vest and slender frame, kept stealing glances at her, but whether it was her fame or beauty that lured his gaze, she couldn’t know. The girl on the other side of the aisle was watching Zoe out of her periphery. Maybe she’d tell all her friends later who she saw, spinning up a round of excited squealing that would peak hard and valley harder after the emptiness of their lives became all too clear…”
Or, you know, they’re just looking at the person who’s watching the other riders so intently.
If Zoe is drawn in sharp, bold lines, then Lily is a little more inscrutable. Her relationships with other women are harder to define: there’s Steph, daughter of a cult leader and domme to a handful of submissives, and Elena, a visual artist who works with broken glass and mirrors. What they see in each other isn’t immediately clear, but one gets the impression that Lily’s lacking in confidence and defines herself by how others see her. In her own way, she’s almost as damaged as Zoe.
At times, Martin’s novel is funny: there’s a wild scene at Steph’s house between cultists and her submissives. At others it’s erotic, like when Zoe has a hookup. But throughout Love/Aggression, Martin turns back the dial on reality and makes Pittsburgh into a strange, almost magical city. For example there’s Indisputably Coffee, a shop that materializes out of thin air “at exactly the halfway point between her job and home – and everyone else’s.” Or there’s Lily’s tattoo job where giving someone ink often means their form is changed too: one man is turned into sound, another splits into two halves.
These touches give Martin’s book an air of magical realism which sets it apart from similarly minded authors like Beth Morgan or Leigh Stein. Like them, Martin’s exploring the ways that modern relationships can fraw and grow harmful. But unlike them, Martin’s little dashes of colour feel like they should amount to more than they do: Indisputably Coffee is a novel idea, but it only shows up a couple of times and is ultimately inconsequential to the plot.
Still, Love/Aggression Martin as a writer who not only has a lot of ideas but one who isn’t afraid to try for something different. Her Pittsburgh has more in common with Murakami’s Tokyo than with her peers’ American cities. This is a town where a movie shoot happens in a studio that turns everything into black and white, where gods walk among mortals, and where two frenemies keep running into each other even though they both should know better. In sum, Love/Aggression is a good debut, one with flashes of genuine creativity and talent. I’m already looking forward to her next book.
