Simon Lowe Reviews:

Clara Dupuis-Morency, Trans. Aimee Wall, Sadie X, Book*hug Press, 2023 
Mandy-Suzanne Wong, The Box, House of Anansi, 2023

The term ‘hyperobjects,’ coined by the philosopher Timothy Morton, refers to objects that are ‘massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.’ Hyperobjects can be anything from styrofoam, to planets, to bacteria; they play a pivotal role in our lives, and in the life of the planet. Beginning to value and ascertain the importance of such objects upends the long-held notions that all objects exist outside the sphere of human life. 

This shift away from anthropocentric thinking is at the heart of both Clara Dupuis-Morency’s Sadie X and Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s The Box—two novels that work to successfully repurpose and update literature for the Anthropocene, forcing us to consider our place in the world from a new, non-human perspective. 

In the case of Dupuis-Morency’s Sadie X, the object in question is a giant virus that poses no danger to humans, but exists among us, its behaviour not so different from our own. The titular object in Wong’s The Box threatens to dispense dark powers if opened, in a city suffering under constant snowfall. The giant virus in Sadie X is named the Pandoravirus as it alters our understanding of cellular reality, while Wong’s box also has similarities to Pandora’s, framed as ecological catastrophe. Both authors extract meaning from the centrality of their objects but do so in contrasting styles. 

Sadie X, stringently translated from the French by Aimee Wall, is a cool, elegant study of a woman’s life in thrall to cellular activity. Interspersed throughout are scientific facts explaining the functions and patterns of viruses, which seem to mirror Sadie’s own existence. Dupuis-Morency’s themes of migration, connectivity and family are explored not from the standard literary viewpoint of societal values and human psychology but from the life of a virus.      

As a student in Montreal, Sadie falls under the spell of the brilliant scientist Francois Régnier. His lectures on viruses have a radical effect on her worldview: ‘The concrete that she had once thought inert began to hum with innumerable life forms, millions of viruses, and bacteria, invisible particles. All that life had always been there, under her nose.’ Enthralled, Sadie makes a commitment to leave Canada and follow Régnier to his Marseille laboratory, where ‘every day she is witness to the spectacular life of viruses.’ Travelling the globe together, sampling and testing, they discover a new specimen of giant virus off the coast of Chile. There is no name for such a virus; its unheard- of enormity and structure causes Régnier to liken it to Pandora’s box. Crucially, Pandoravirus is not pathogenic. It poses no danger to the human species but is instead content to live among us.

Life amongst others is, for Sadie, a bodily experience. She sleeps with men and women but is most content when allowing her body to respond to the rhythms of music in the local nightclub. Moving alongside others on the dance floor, a careful mingling of primordial joy, this is a life lived freely, outside of the neuroses and impingement of self-awareness.

The norms and cultural imperatives of Western society are replaced by concepts of symbiosis, nervous systems and proximities. Sadie is a singularity in her own right, reacting and feeling in ways that are unexpected, yet she’s never lonely or aloof, remaining connected. Much like the viruses she studies, she is non-pathogenic, content to live with humans. As Dupuis-Morency writes, ‘The fact that Sadie was not interested in viruses from a perspective in which the human being is the host, but rather studied them as something that would cohabitate with us without being overly concerned with our existence—that bothered people.’ Likewise, a novel that is personal and sensual, wrapped in self-identity and yet rooted in the science of the miniscule, may bother people too. Dupuis-Morency has radically transformed perceptions of human interaction, putting aside anthropocentric traditions to carefully build a beguiling new way of interpreting our existence. Sadie X asks the reader to consider our lives and bodies in relation to the unseen objects around us, living in oceans and puddles, like viruses. 

While Sadie’s life is probed and studied through a microscope, Wong’s The Box features an explosion of voices, lining up the ecological collapse of late consumer capitalism with poly-narrative, tonally fluctuating prose. Shaped, like the box in question, with six identically sized, interwoven chapters, Wong’s novel uses voice, estrangement and the philosophy of object-oriented ontology to describe a city in decline, which is unable to be operated by the usual levers of market forces due to never-ending snow. It is a dark, surreal odyssey and a fascinating entanglement of language and cultural analysis. 

Discovered by a stranger in the snow, the box is small but extraordinarily strong, constructed of paper strips entangled as if haphazardly, shooting out as if dynamically between one another and diving under one another in all directions; but so tight a weave it was that no strip seemed to have an end, delicate as they were the strips held fast to one another with a tension that resulted in an impenetrable rectangle.

This could be a description of the novel itself. In the opening chapter, wildly phrased sentences fill entire pages, stacking on top of one another. After being left on a table in a cafée, the box becomes a piece of modern art in a billionaire-owned art gallery. In this new setting, our narrator is the gallery curator who provides a tour of the objects on display, as the snow continues to fall outside with unexplained permanency. The box, we discover, has a strange allure, instilling a desire in those who encounter it to look inside. After it is stolen from the gallery, the box continues on a journey through a city no longer able to function as it once did. More folds and woven strands of the story are exposed as pillars of the city’s economy—shops, hotels, packing centres, shopping malls and train stations—feel the impact of both the snow and those who desire the box. 

Each chapter, or side, of The Box brings a fresh, extravagantly verbose voice. A couple who own an antiquarian bookshop—and are forced by a new online culture to move premises to the less desirable bend in the river—appear to be from a different age, an older England perhaps, referring to each other as  ‘birdie’ and ‘flower.’ Their shop sits ‘[w]here the mighty river makes a shifty little wiggle like a card shimmying up a sleeve before the sootiest, slinkiest, slimiest, squintiest bridge in the city.’ In a later chapter, the narrator is an employee at the packing centre, cytyBox, a free marketeer whose site has closed due to snow and who believes that the business of boxes, their packing and shipment, is the key to modernity: ‘Civilizsation, even the human condition, is built upon corrugated fiberboard boxes of undented perfection, which contain, secure, convey, even symbolize that which enables the city to exist and the reason for which it exists: in short, the very soul of the city.’ The voices, so distinct, are themselves objects, recognizable yet containing an impenetrable otherness, presenting a city in ecological freefall, which is as much a place of objects as it is people.

Among the many writers and thinkers who Wong claims to have ‘[m]isquoted and misinterpreted’ in writing The Box are Graham Harman and Jane Bennett, two figures at the forefront of object analysis and key influences on Wong’s satisfyingly strange novel. Graham Harman says the philosophy of object-oriented ontology ‘defends the idea that objects—whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human or non-human—are mutually autonomous and enter into relation only in special cases that need to be explained rather than assumed.’ Bennett, in her book Vibrant Matter, describes the vitality of objects as ‘the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.’ Wong herself has published essays on the topic of vital materialism in the past. This interest in non-human forms, shared by Wong and Dupuis-Morency, feels transformative when applied to the literary novel.  

   The Box’s mix of modernist extravagance, philosophical investigation and dystopian setting captivates the reader. Wong’s bravado and scope of ambition are as alluring as the box itself. As a writer from the archipelago of Bermuda, where British and American cultures collide, it is perhaps no surprise that Wong is an ecologically minded, linguistic maverick. 

There is a sense of otherness or estrangement that sits in Sadie X and The Box. They are both, in their own ways, concerned with how the separateness of objects, language and the natural world connects with people in modern Western society. Right at the start of Sadie X, Régnier says:

The virus is not that viral particle, 

that little box we use to describe our idea

of what a virus is. 

A virus is what happens when it leaves the box and 

enters the cell. A virus is a relationship.

By embracing the vitality of non-anthropocentric thinking, a new view of the world emerges, expressing this relationship between people and objects who are living together, outside of any previously imagined box. The result is two novels that present, using opposing techniques, a unified and radical break from the typical casting of literature as an investigation into the workings of humanity. They introduce a world of objects as crucial and fascinating as any homo sapien character. 

—Simon Lowe