The Gift

Starred review from February 6, 2017
In this charming, erudite, and often devastating metafictional novel, a writer and academic from New York carries on an intense email correspondence with an autistic musician in Germany—who may or may not be who he says he is. Set in the early 2010s and centered loosely around Occupy Wall Street, Browning’s (The Correspondence Artist) novel takes an unabashedly digressive form. The narrator, who calls herself Barbara Andersen, dances from highbrow topics (the gift economy, performance theory) to anecdotes about her family members, lovers, and friends to accounts of her ongoing “conceptual art project” (she makes ukulele covers of various pieces of music and sends them to friends and strangers). Meanwhile, she makes repeated reference to the very novel we’re reading, a move that lends her pontifications about authenticity, fictionality, and representation—stirred by her fraught relationship with the musician, Sami—a sometimes comic, sometimes unsettling edge. All this might seem like so much postmodern hot air, but the narrator has an exceptionally graceful page presence: loony and profound, vulnerable and ingenuous, Barbara acts to unify the book’s central concerns, giving its intellectual flights of fancy a palpable human pulse. Maybe nothing in this book is exactly what it seems. But the sadness, at least, is real.

Starred review from March 1, 2017
In this exquisite meditation on gift-giving, intimacy, the body, and performance, Browning (I'm Trying to Reach You, 2012, etc.) dashes the boundaries between autofiction and novel and offers daring readers something more intimate and muscular than a mere book.Barbara Andersen, a clear stand-in for Browning, teaches performance theory in New York City by day and records ukulele covers by night. Enthralled by Lewis Hyde's The Gift, Barbara sends recordings to strangers she meets by chance on the internet as well as to prominent public thinkers like David Graeber and Lauren Berlant. "The recent implosion of the global financial system made it evident that we needed to try something else," Barbara muses about her impulses. Her fascination with "inappropriate intimacy" ultimately draws her into an erotic long-distance relationship with musical virtuoso Sami, an autistic man who lives in Germany. But when Barbara finally flies overseas to meet Sami in person, he has a breakdown that prevents their meeting and causes Barbara to question everything. Against this development, Barbara traces the work of her friend Tye, a gifted performance artist and trans man, weaving descriptions of his performances into details about her own teaching, activism, and art. At one point, Barbara reveals her struggles with memory, transforming the act of writing--and reading--this novel into a collaborative performance of recovery and creation between writer and reader. "It's not just that I seem to have erased quite a few unpleasant memories," Barbara writes. "Sometimes I think this is what opened up some space on my hard drive for imagining things." Browning takes a book that could easily exist in hypotheticals, layers, and masks and instead grounds it in the chaos of its time, including the disruptive politics of the Occupy movement, the infamous Pussy Riot protests and arrests in Russia, and the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. The effect is indeed intimate but never inappropriate. Browning is working at the edges of her craft, and it's utterly thrilling to watch. A delicious love letter to readers and co-conspirators everywhere.

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April 15, 2017
There's a literary tradition in which authors use alter egos as their main characters. Browning's stand-in is Barbara Andersen. She has just received some spam from a psychiatrist calling himself Dr. Mel, who specializes in treating obesity and who signs his electronic letter Love Mel. Intrigued, Andersen sends him a gift, a ukulele version in English of the song I Wish You Love, which is heard in Francois Truffaut's film Stolen Kisses (1968). This leads to a series of inappropriate encounters, an erotically charged correspondence, and collaboration with a troubled musician in Germany. Browning's novel blurs the boundaries between life and fiction as well as dance, art, and video. She references real-time events and real people, from the Occupy movement to Pussy Riot, from the Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel to performance artist Karen Finley. Like Andersen, Browning also makes dances, writes poetry, and performs ukulele covers. Where does Barbara Browning end and Barbara Andersen begin? What is the difference between fact and fiction? Those are some of the intriguing questions raised by this enigmatic and mysterious tale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)