Who is ‘You’? Who is ‘I’?

Jared Joseph’s new novel, Soft Lighting, has a stark visual design. No illustrations on the front, no catchy blurbs, just the title and author in faded gray against a dark background. The back of the book is equally austere, the only text a quotation from the novel, giving the impression that this novel is all about the language itself, an assumption that turns out to be completely correct.

In the passage on the back cover, a narrator reflects on the personal impact of finishing a book:

I wonder if I’ve become someone else yet. Once when I was working on a writing project, but I didn’t know how or when it would end, I felt at the mercy of it, and I told Angie this, and Angie said, “I’m done with a project only once I’ve become a different person.” So then writing makes me a different person. Like sloughing a skin or something. Like that writing self is a husk. Like once I’ve written an autobiography, that autobiography is a dead person. That’s why I’ve never written an autobiography. I want to live.

This early meditation sounds like a signal to the reader that the narrator, in producing this text, transforms himself in the process, so that by novel’s end he will no longer be recognizable. The trouble is a) we don’t know anything for certain about the narrator; b) the novel itself consists of disembodied voices, all of whom use “I” as attribution, none of them clearly attached to a person; and c) these voices don’t in any way combine to form a discernible narrative.

Not to worry, reader: Soft Lighting provides other quirky pleasures that compensate for the lack of character, drama, and rising action (that is, most of Aristotle’s Poetics). What you do get, occasionally, is setting — that’s where the title comes in. “I cannot see you move in this establishment, in this place you have established with this soft lighting,” one of the voices says, employing characteristic word play eccentric syntax, “and made of a place that is nothing but soft lighting.”

That passage might also have been used as a pull quote for Joseph’s back cover, capturing the novel’s verbal playfulness and stream-of-consciousness style. Others could have been picked to capture its rapid-fire associations:

If I became an emperor would I have to give up sex? I think in some ways I would. Obama as emperor seemed to have sex, but maybe not; there were no gray hairs on that head at the beginning of those 8 years. I think increasing drone strikes is the opposite of sex.

Or, Joseph might have highlighted a passage that represents the novel’s frequent use of the self-referential/metafictional mode:

But the point is, maybe you [the reader, perhaps] think you can catch me in the trap of solipsism, that it doesn’t matter to me who “you” is, I’ll just talk on and on, and that erases “you,” but it doesn’t. I don’t tell my chair my dreams, either for the future or from last night, I don’t tell my chair my plans for the day, and I don’t ask my chair questions.

A dozen other voices share their dreams, one of the many ways Joseph flouts the “rules” of fiction writing (here: tell a dream, lose a reader) and turns that violation into a thematic feature.

That the dreams he describes sound nothing like actual dreams doesn’t diminish from their entertainment value. In one, a speaker encounters an unlikely dream town: “All the restaurants are pizza places, wedged literally right next to one another, there is an outer space-themed pizza restaurant because pizza is out of this world, there is a Halloween-themed pizza restaurant because pizza is hauntingly good, there is a wild west-themed pizza restaurant because, I don’t know, manifest destiny?”

Another nugget from writing instruction (and English teachers) is that every literary text teaches us how to read it. Soft Lighting teaches us not to worry about coherence or logical development. Instead, let the voices wash over your mind, surrender to the flow of tangential improvisation.

To the question, “What does it mean?” one might ask in return what Jackson Pollock means, or Hieronymus Bosch, or a bowl of fruit. What does it mean to create a well-wrought urn or needlepoint pillow? What is the meaning of John Cage’s “4’33”” or Brian Eno’s ambient music? Rather than meaning, Joseph’s novel provides experience.

Which is not to say that the diatribes in Soft Lighting are completely random. Joseph’s voices (perhaps on a date or at a dinner party, likely living in Los Angeles) circle around recurring themes: the transience of love, the fluidity of identity, the nature of art, the crimes against Palestine. His treatment of these topics, light of touch but with an earnest undercurrent, will appeal variously to his audience’s diverse tastes.

I, for example, was charmed by references to a Sean and a Shawn, neither of which sound like me, though another scene includes a viewpoint I heartily endorse: “In the 90s we had albums, the smallest element of music was not as much the single as it was the album, each song led into another song, an album was meant to be a coherent whole. Now, the album has almost no concept — we had concept albums in the 90s, but now the album is barely a concept.”

Joseph’s novel reminds us that the novel can be serious fun and playfully profound. Read it for the rants and riffs, share it for the insights and aphorisms. The rules of fiction, Soft Lighting implicitly argues, aren’t simply made to be broken; they’re not really rules at all.