Notes on All This Could Be Different

Part 1

**Went a little long here, but would love to hear your thoughts on the novel in the comments. Looking forward to talking with everyone!**

“This is not a story about work or precarity. I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love, which for many of us is not separate from the other shit.”

Is life breezy? Honestly, is it? Is the tone of life one of ease and humor and drinks on the patio? That’s part of the question Sarah Thankam Mathews novel quietly asks, as Sneha, the narrator, moves to Milwaukee for the summer and tells the story from A1 to Z1, of getting hired for a job that pays her 23/hour with a free living space in an apartment complex. She jokes with her coworker Thom. They banter. She seeks out women to potentially date, although mostly she fucks them. Through online dating, Sneha finds Tig, short for Antigone, and they talk about the world, eating and drinking, bringing up serious topics like capitalism and racism and disability, all in a very light tone. Sometimes Sneha speaks with Amit, a former lover out in San Francisco, who is supporting a friend in active addiction.

On page 6, the narrator the says, “On my phone, I read an article about how, in certain cultures, there are no separate words for the color green and the color blue, and if you showed someone a grass-hued paint swatch next to one the color of summer sky, they would say these were the same. Different shades of one thing.

My phone buzzed. A green (?) bubbling hung from the ceiling.”

This is one of the major motifs of the novel, the idea that to one person one thing could be called something very different. That depending on your vantage point, you may see a young woman seeking love, or you may see a slut corrupted by America. You may see a criminal being arrested for abusing the system or you may see an immigrant who got caught up in a scheme and taken advantage of, you may see a dumb straight asshole never take anything seriously or you may see an idealist attempting to make sense of his place in a capitalist society where even he could be taken advantage of, etc… and so on. You may see a narrator who is always joking publicly with her friends or you may see a woman who is doing whatever she can to hide from the pain she experienced in her childhood. You may see both. They might be both. But you can call it different names.

Back home, Sneha’s family informs her that her uncle dies, and when Sneha doesn’t return home, her mother says, “You are a very cold person…” but the narrator tells us that the uncle bullied her mother and when that couldn’t continue, he began to target her. “After that my uncle decided that I was a more strategic target. He was fond of me, in his way. An affection emulsified with something dark and rancid.” Later in the chapter she says, “There were other things, and I did not wish for a second to dwell on them.”

The tone changes here, dramatically, and we get the sense of some major kind of abuse, probably sexual, was inflicted on the narrator. Whenever the narrator talks about her family, the tone changes. Whether it’s sending money home, or the story of her father getting jailed for working at a company that would later abuse visas, which would send him briefly to jail before self deporting, not even working up the strength to fight the process, beat down by the American system, or the ways that the narrator splits herself, knowing the image her family keeps of her versus who she has become, thinking of herself in terrible cruel language, as if she has been corrupted by her own desires.

But then we return to the main narrative of the first part. Once the narrator helps get Thom, her straight college friend, a job at her company her loneliness lessens a little. She can’t drive, and her often drives her to work.

One night, at Bar Louie, Thom says things like, “I tell you about my sexploits down to the queef. I told you about the time Isabel threw up on my dick, and she literally swore me to secrecy. Here I was thinking you were some Indian chick zealously guarding her virginity. Meanwhile you’re Gertude Steining all over the Ill Mil, apparently. I’m hurt, my dude.”

Is this just brain rot? Is this an idiotic straight man? Is this a good friend perusing his own lexicon to express genuine hurt at Sneha’s hiding her own personal life? Is there a slight bit of racism here? Is Sneha Gertude Steining all over the Ill Mil? Why hide it, from a long time friend, if so? Is the grass blue or green?

While Gertrude Steining, Sneha comes across a woman named Marina online who she obsesses over and reaches out to, only for the woman to disappear. We’re on page 24, at this point, in letter H of the alphabet. Basically, we’re at the point in the draft where we need some mysteries to be solved. Over time, my idea of plot has expanded greatly. It works differently in every novel. But, essentially, a question is often asked and the answer is often withheld, and this is the nature of most plots.

Questions do we have so far in the book: What happened between Sneha and her uncle? Why is her family back home? What will happen between Sneha and her downstairs apartment manager, Amy, who is troublesome? Even though Sneha says this is a story about love and not work, declarations often have a shadow effect, and we wonder what will happen about work? Is Thom a straight asshole or a true homie? Will Sneha find love? Is it Marina?

There are different valences of mystery here. You could rank them on profundity, but part of what makes this novel so successful—so readable, so itself—is that the book conceals the darker questions with lighter questions. The novel has such a conversational tone, partially due to how often we experience conversations between friends (at one point, over oysters with… coffee), and how this act becomes one of the major ways Sneha alleviates her own pain. Her friends who drive pick her up. They pontificate on the great subjects of our time. Tig works multiple jobs while going to school for philosophy. Thom works at a piece of shit company and throws parties like a Kwanza Kegger. The characters complain and joke about their problems, and this fills up the time in the narrator’s life, and this means that her pain is often at bay, or far enough away that she doesn’t have to think about it.

But how long can a person keep this up? I think about this all the time. In my own novel, this was the major conflict between everyone. Dylan, the main character, could no longer hide the effects of childhood sexual abuse because the legal world impinged on his own private life. The world, the larger world, not just the social world, doesn’t let you push out your problems forever. Injustice occurs systematically, which means that it is designed to break into your life. You are just a person who is holding up a painted shield at a very real threat. The painted shield may field good to construct, but it is nothing compared to the very real threats created within society to marginalize and fuck over a person. And the more you interact with other people, especially other marginalized people, the more these intrusions occur and become harder to ignore. Basically, being attached to other people, having social relations, is the method through which your solidarity may start to exist because you are thrust into different forms of injustice. These can be small or large.

For Tig, we learn, to the narrator’s initial dismay, having though Tig was in graduate school, that she has a learning disability which makes it hard for her to read, and so she is slowly going through undergrad while working multiple jobs to afford a place with her family. Tig wants to fuck her too, but the narrator isn’t into her. Despite this, Tig continues their friendship. Because of Tig’s hardships, later in the book, when the heat hasn’t worked in the narrator’s apartment and Sneha doesn’t want to accost Amy, for fear of upsetting her and losing her home, Tig just knocks on the door and tells Amy she legally needs to fix the heat, which she does, and Sneha is able to return home. For most of the section, Sneha is wondering why Amy gives her such a hard time, and Tig simply says that Amy is racist, able to quickly name something that Sneha has troubled to articulate. Through Tig’s struggles, her articulation of suffering aids Sneha in her ability to name what is bothering her. This subtextually journey is a problem that isn’t fully solved in the first section, but we get the sense that it may burst open in the next.

One day with Tig, as they’re eating, Sneha returns to the table as Tig is accosting another couple, and when Tig points out the people leaving, Sneha sees Marina, apparently having been slapped by another woman. There is life, appearing violently, slightly out of reach, always ready to remind us of how little we know.

During the Kwanza Kegger, Thom lets Sneha drive his car, which she immediately drives into a pole. She freaks out, rightfully so, but offers to pay Thom whatever it costs, thinking it might be thousands, even showing him her bank account so that he knows she can pay. Although he says this is fine, and the car gets fixed, a problem between them pushes them away from each other. Sneha waits in the cold for the bust. Eventually, we find out that this is how Thom learns that he is being paid way less than her. She tells him what she makes, and he wants to fight for more pay.

But, then, the work part returns, and we find out that despite her savings, Sneha hasn’t been paid, and the company is in trouble. When she talks to her boss about this, he says that he can’t pay her until the company gets more money, and because of her precarious positions, all she can say is yes, okay, I will work hard still, and then she finds out that Thom has been fired.

Between this, Marina and Sneha start… dating or fucking, depending on who you asked. They have a deep intimate relationship, good sex, but a few things happen which push them away from each other. For one, Sneha lies about her parents being dead, and she doesn’t correct the record. Then, when Marina asks to be something more, Sneha dismisses their closeness, and she blames the fact that Marina hasn’t told her about what happened with her ex, that just a day before they met she had seen the slap happen with Tig, but it’s more complicated than that. The ex stayed longer than welcome, and she basically had to kick her out. Marina tells Sneha that she can’t figure her out, and then they leave each other. Tig picks her up.

Finally, forced into a place of vulnerability, she drunkenly tells Thom everything, years into their friendship, shortly before she needs to go back to her family. He comforts her. Mathews writes: “Two friends in chubby sweaters and boots crusted with salt. Two friends locking into each other, choosing what seemed so rare to me: to trust and forgive.”

This is how the section moves, using the contours of work and love to show the power of friendship, the way that solidarity can exist between people, how a friendship can combat in small ways the tribulations of being alive at this time, how it separates people, how trauma can make one want love and then push it away. How the jokes can end and honesty can exist and create a space for platonic love, which can have just as much power as romantic love.

Sneha’s complexity as a narrator allows much of this to exist. The ways in which is complicit with the system and the ways the system acts injustly against her create pockets for a reader to be let into the world. She isn’t impervious to racism, fatphobia, homophobia, greed, etc… Mathews intelligently allows all this to exist in her narrator, I think, not just for realism, but because in a book that promises all this could be different, we need a narrator who is affected and effected completely by the world. It’s a case against moral perfection in narrators. Moral perfection in narration is its own kind of fascism, making cases that such perfect people exist, which is impossible.

Once the section ends, we still have mysteries to follow. What will happen with Thom? What will happen with Amit, her long time friend who knows about her family? What will happen when Sneha returns to her family? What will happen between Marina and Sneha?

Lastly, random lines I loved:

“His inability to find a job startled me. He was the smartest person I knew. I comprehended at a technical level what a recession was, but not what it meant, truly meant, for people tumbling into its maw. Some half of my generation never recovered.”

“So I’d read the haircut wrong.” (Who among us hasn’t mistaken a middle-aged white woman’s haircut for that of lesbian bravado?)

“This is what I felt: the shock of how your life’s longing can sometimes be smoothly realized, without great strain or cost, easy as buying a clock.”

“The truth is I was so lonely.” (I live for really simple beautiful lines like this in a book. We can often search for the most poetic way to say something, as if the truth isn’t simple and beautiful sometimes. It can be harder to write with this kind of clarity than a more jumbled hyperpoetic register.)

“I touched my laptop’s screen. The display dimpled against the pressure.”

“The sting of it against my little gash, a time machine. Arnica on my cuts, my mother holding me aloft by a single thin brown arm while I wailed.”

“I don’t know. She seems a little on the fat side? But I haven’t met her. What is your type?

I like very soft women. I like the idea of every part of a woman being like a breast.”

“LuLu was beautiful in the way that my favorite American restaurants are beautiful. Tin ceiling. Real wood tables, buzzing with noise. Buttery light.”

“To be generous felt like the best thing you could be.”

“I didn’t know everywhere. I knew the place that spawned me, which based on visits past, already was mutating beyond my recognition.”

“Are you okay driving? I asked, and she said with a laugh, This is Wisconsin, baby.”

“For the first time I felt as though I had stories to tell, once I had her to tell them to.”

“I explained what a bath bomb was to my mother on WhatsApp, how if you dropped it in water it would fizz, turn the tub water bright colors, scent the air, and she just said, Okay.”

“Somewhere in me I sensed that intellectually he believed these things, or was coming to believe these things, but the anger did not arise from what he was describing; it rose from the expectation for a much better life than the one he owned.”

“Something in the way the main character spoke reminded me of my mother, who thinks out loud, but carefully and methodically.” (I love this kind of description, and speaks to a general sense of real life, where other things constantly remind you of other people. I swear my husband spends twenty minutes a day sending memes that literally just remind him of us, that being the text with the meme.)

“Shut up and listen to me for a second. You have to face this about yourself: you’re a judgmental person. You act like everyone’s life is within their control to change, like everyone makes their own success or failure, even though your family shows the opposite—”

“This is what my parents wanted for me, what everybody wanted. To be a dish laid out before a man’s hunger. To be taken, to be quiet. Disappear into hair and parts. Disappear, in time, into marriage and motherhood.”

“Thank u for the apology. We r nice people (+dog) This should not b so difficult. Have a nice day.”

“Perhaps this was the way of the world. Your best friend serving as a placeholder for the real thing: the person who would audition to be your husband or wife.”

“This was just normal, I knew. All decent families lived in that silence. In the past I’d blushed hotly when American teenagers on the TV screen spoke openly, petulantly, brattily to their parents about the birth control pill and intimacy and breakups. Shameless and embarrassing. It did not matter that my aprents were working long hours and so not in the room with me to be scandalized. My shame lived independently from them.”

“That woman is Ray Cyst.”

“Rent is the bane of my existence…”