Failure to Comply

language: English
country: USA
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 1.1.26-6.1.26

I have two divergent assessments of Cavar’s Failure to Comply. given the content of the novel, I think it’s apt to be of two (or more) minds about it, though there is some heavy irony in that one of my opinions about it is my attempt at an “objective” assessment — judging the novel based on how well it accomplishes its apparent goals rather than judging it based on my personal enjoyment of it.

“objectively”, I think Failure to Comply is a very good book, an incisive critique both narrowly of psychiatry and broadly of the kind of society that grants psychiatry the power that it has over the bodyminds of those who live in/under it, that allows psychiatry as such to exist. the novel follows an unnamed protagonist, a young person who has/had escaped the Community governed by the organization known only as RSCH — not an acronym but a tetragrammaton of the biopolitical regulation of bodyminds and citizen-subjects. they flee the Community for the woods beyond it, inhabited by (other) Uncitizens, who either cannot or will not comply with RSCH’s planned lives, bodies, minds. particularly important for the protagonist is Reya, an experimental subject who has escaped from RSCH and lives/tries to live in defiance of it but whose life even in the woods is marked/marred by the violence RSCH subjected them to. the narrative moves nonlinearly between moments in the protagonist’s life, structured by RSCH’s attempt(?) to “reintegrate” them into the Community as a Citizen following their capture in the woods, as RSCH attempts to force the protagonist to forget and the protagonist struggles to remember and — in some later time — to record their memories, however fragmentary and shaped by the power they were subject to.

the novel’s form is experimental, both at the linguistic level — moving between and across timeframes and tenses, with breaks/disjunctures in conjugation, grammar, and syntax — and in the layout of text on the page. there’s a lot of whitespace, sometimes breaking up individual words into their component syllables or individual letters, and RSCH (or RSCH-approved) words are printed in a different typeface. some of the novel is functionally poetry; I’ll come back to this later.

I will say, in terms of my “objective” assessment, the one thing that I’m not sure quite works is the separation between Community and woods/wilderness — it felt at times less like the protagonist and Reya were meaningfully living on the run from the forces that sought to discipline or, failing that, destroy their deviance and more like they were playing out in the woods behind their school at recess, just out of the teachers’ sight. to some extent this is clearly intentional: Reya observes that the Community and the wilderness are coconstitutive, such that RSCH does not (cannot) actually want to destroy the wilderness/deviance outright, because to do so would be to destroy itself. nonetheless, I found there was a bit of a vibe disconnect. (notwithstanding the fact that school — even school recess — is, of course, also a preeminent site of the biopolitical regulation of bodyminds and citizen-subjects, as indeed the novel points out!)

apart from that, though, I think the novel is well-constructed, and its formal experimentation serves both its characterization of the protagonist as a mad/maddened subject of state/psychiatric violence and its critique of RSCH’s — and by extension any society that allows psychiatry to exist’s — regime of sanity-wellness-Health-gender-Purity (and the double-standards created by, for example, the insistence that fatness is “deviant” and must be (violently) punished vs. the violence that’s brought to bear on subjects who respond to this insistence through self-starvation, at least past the point of plausible deniability).

good stuff! this kind of redefinition/reglossing is a recurring move throughout the work and it’s really effective, particularly when the reglossings bring unexpected angles to words/phrases. the above is a pretty straightforward chain of associations, I think; less so — and standing out more, in a good way, as a result — is “artifacts (artificial, that is, untrue, facts)”, as if it were a(n English) portmanteau rather than a (Latin) univerbation.

my personal assessment of the novel, however, is, unfortunately, that I found it kind of a slog. I think mainly this comes down to the fact that Failure to Comply is a novel by a poet, and past experience (A Minor Chorus, Code Noir,[*] On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous) has shown that these just tend not to be my vibe.

this isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy some of the language play and the thrust of the book’s theoretical argument, because I did! it helps, too, that it’s sci-fi, and that it is so successful in terms of its own project. but I found it subjectively slow going — although in fact I would say it’s a fast-paced book — in a way that signals to me that I’m not enjoying it (contrast something like Delany’s Dhalgren, which was also labor-intensive reading but which I was definitely conscious that I was enjoying as I read it).

but: if you’re interested in experimental science fiction about (dis)ability, medical violence, and T/truth with a strong poetic sensibility, hopefully you will enjoy this more than I (subjectively) did!

[*] not strictly a novel but grouped here because I had the same kind of reaction to it as to A Minor Chorus and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Failure to Comply, Cavar