At its most cursory level, the story is an account of predation and dubious consent, played out largely over text. As such, it was hailed as some kind of dispatch from the zeitgeist. The underlying notion, that literature is in service to the zeitgeist, or even that a story’s value resides in how loudly and righteously it speaks to the prevailing political wind, is a troubling fallacy. The power of that story, as with its forebears—by which I mean precise depictions of imprecise heterosexual relations—was in its fine-tuned ambivalence. This sort of ambivalence is the opposite of a cop-out: it’s generative, rather than reductive, and it comes from time, on the writer’s part, spent dwelling in uncertainty. Though many apparently received the story as an extended version of a #MeToo social media post, unable to grasp it as fiction, it did what the blunt tool of a hashtag cannot: specifically, provoke empathy for both parties.It’s a subtle oscillation of sympathies that Roupenian enacts: we feel for Margo, a 24-year-old student, who may or may not be attracted to Robert, her slightly overweight, 34-year-old date, and we also feel for him, at least until our sympathy is savagely revoked by the last word of the story. “Cat Person” then, is not about how guys are pigs and younger women are victims, but rather about the curious mechanics and currencies of desire, its necessary deceptions, both mutual and individual.
Margo wills herself into arousal by imagining Robert’s own desire for her. When she mentally tests out the idea of having sex with him—imagination is a prerequisite of action—she thinks: “Probably it would be like that bad kiss, clumsy and excessive, but imagining how excited he would be, how hungry and eager to impress her, she felt a twinge of desire pluck at her belly, as distinct and painful as the snap of an elastic band against her skin.” Does this mean the desire is less hers? Is wanting to be wanted as valid as wanting for oneself? (...)
The state of not-knowing is intrinsic to love and sex and it’s also intrinsic in good fiction. Faking it, of course, can operate in the inverse too, not as an attempt to suppress real desire, as Frances does, but as an inability to prevent real desire arising out of something feigned. In Catherine Lacey’s terrifyingly incisive novel The Answers, Mary is a physically unwell young woman, desperate for money to afford a specialist treatment called PAKing. She answers a curious ad promising generous remuneration and finds herself employed by a famous movie actor and his team. Kurt has the sort of untrammeled wealth and solipsism that allows him to orchestrate something called The Girlfriend Experiment, in which all his needs will be met by an array of women paid to perform certain roles. Mary is assigned the role of Emotional Girlfriend. Obedient, if dispassionate, she meets her cues, recites her lines and follows all protocols. Soon, however, “it was unclear to her if she was just impersonating affection, or if this impersonation had changed her from within, synthesized a kind of love in her.” However clearly defined human schema are, their participants are subjective beings, subject, specifically, to uncertainty. Is a synthesized love any less valid, perturbing and painful than a “natural” love?
Synthesis takes other, less legible forms. When, in “Cat Person” Margo kisses Robert, she finds herself, “carried away by a fantasy of such pure ego that she could hardly admit even to herself that she was having it. Look at this beautiful girl, she imagined him thinking. She’s so perfect, her body is perfect, everything about her is perfect, she’s only twenty years old, her skin is flawless, I want her so badly, I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anyone else, I want her so bad I might die.” Ego, too, clouds the narrator of Emma Cline’s bewitching The Girls. Russell, the simultaneously charismatic and pathetic Charles Manson-like figure at the center of the novel, coerces teenage Evie into giving him a blowjob moments after she’s been introduced to him. Perhaps a more accurate term is “offered up to him.” Afterwards, she experiences the rest of the night, “as fated, me as the center of a singular drama.” The tepid, flat coke he hands her after coming in her 14-year-old mouth is, “as intoxicating as champagne.” A thing can be both disgusting and delicious, its value not intrinsic, but rather dependent on the person experiencing it. Because then there’s this, the sentence which ends the chapter and the preceding description of Russell’s calculated ways of “breaking down boundaries”: “But maybe the strangest part—I liked it, too.” As Margo notes in “Cat Person”: “humiliation […] was a kind of perverse cousin to arousal.”
by Hermione Hoby, LitHub | Read more:
Image: "Yawning cat", uncredited
