About midway through Christine Murphy’s debut novel, “Notes on Surviving the Fire,” her protagonist, Sarah Common, tells a guy she’s dating that rape-revenge movies don’t work. “Action movies are man movies,” she says. “Rape isn’t something men understand.” When the guy asks her to explain more, she gives a little speech that deserves to be as oft-cited as the “Cool Girl” monologue from “Gone Girl”:
“I think men think that rape is unwanted sex. And sex is great. So how bad can unwanted sex be?” She elaborates: “You think it’s like being force-fed a cookie. You didn’t want the cookie, maybe it’s not your favorite type or you’re not in the mood, but it’s just a cookie. And you eat cookies all the time. So — what’s the big deal? There may be too many cookies, or cookies you don’t like, but the world’s worst cookie has still got to be pretty good, right? People love cookies. And you think, even if it’s the worst f— cookie in the world, big deal. It’s just a cookie.”
“Notes on Surviving the Fire” — out Feb. 25 — is about rape: actual and specific acts of sexual violence, the reality of rape culture on college campuses, and even rape as a metaphor for how those with money and power get to screw over those without it, consequence-free. But it is also about violence more broadly, who we expect to see wielding it and how we react when we discover that those we love most are capable of it.
The book opens with Sarah and her best friend, Nathan, smoking weed in her truck. They’re both in the final stretch of their religious studies doctoral program at the University of California Santa Teresa, both in the thick of applying for professorships, both preferring to hang out together and smoke, snort or swallow whatever drugs they have on hand in order to push away their bleak prospects. Bleak because the California coast is on fire (Sarah often comments on the ash in her mouth, the students pulling their T-shirts up over their mouths), because of the ever-shrinking academic job market, because of the debt accrued from their studies and the pathetic stipends they earn for teaching, because of the impossible cost of living, because their students don’t seem to care about anything.
It is, indeed, a dire time for many in higher education and has been for a while. Murphy portrays these struggles perfectly, down to the way Sarah encourages participation in her class by tossing mini candy bars to students. Those like me, a graduate of a doctoral program — “the overeducated and underqualified,” as Sarah puts it — will surely gravitate to this aspect of the book.
And then, of course, there’s the reality of rape on college campuses. Sarah, who was raped by a fellow grad student three years prior to the start of the novel, spends Fridays at 4 p.m. in group therapy with other sexual assault survivors. Not that it seems to be particularly helpful — the women are all exhausted by the Title IX procedures, and the therapists leading the group are frustratingly neutral. It’s Nathan, the only one in the department who believed Sarah (others thought the Rapist, as she refers to him, was simply too great a guy to have done something like that), who has really been her rock over the years since the assault.
She’s devastated when, early in the novel, she finds Nathan dead of a heroin overdose. Having known him for years, she’s convinced there’s foul play afoot because he’d never used heroin — although his sister attends rehab semiregularly for her own substance use disorder — and, moreover, he’s left-handed, yet the injection site was in his left arm. There are plenty of plausible explanations but Sarah doesn’t believe them. She begins to wonder whether there’s a connection between Nathan’s death and the others — mostly undergraduates — on campus.
“Notes” follows Sarah as she attempts to investigate the death, but really, it’s a journey of grief, and the novel isn’t interested in a tidy detective narrative. It’s a far messier book than that, but largely, I believe, by design. Sarah tells Nathan that she’s so angry that she “can’t remember what not-angry feels like,” and this is evident on every page. Sarah has plenty of reasons to be angry: her rapist is getting job interviews, her only friend is dead and her advisor ignores her repeated requests for feedback on her dissertation — and that’s not even the half of it. Her trajectory through the novel is not a hero’s journey so much as it is an attempt to regain some control over her fate.
While the novel’s climax and ending feel a bit silly in comparison to what came before — which, while bitingly funny at times, is deeply felt and quite serious — Murphy has certainly written a furious, fast-paced, emotionally resonant and memorable novel. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while yet.
Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming novel “Beings.”
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