Why can’t it last forever?

When we talk about polyamory we tend to talk about unequal dynamics, complex logistics and an inevitable trajectory towards at least one heartbreak, and sometimes several. Then again, monogamous relationships too are often a matter of unequal dynamics, complex logistics and eventual inevitable heartbreak. In personal life “people have absolute power over each other”, the philosopher Gillian Rose wrote in her extraordinary final book, Love’s Work (1995). “Regardless of any covenant, one party may initiate a unilateral and fundamental change in the terms of relating without renegotiating them.”

Misrecognition, Madison Newbound’s debut novel, opens after a bilateral and fundamental change to the terms of a three-person relationship (throuple). The protagonist, Elsa, was drafted in as a third player in the relationship between a successful older artist and his partner (a gallerist) in the hope that it would resuscitate their passion. The arrangement lasted for close to two years, during which time Elsa moved into their New York apartment, sharing their bed (presumably a double king) and working as their quasi-assistant, globetrotting to glamorous art shows. But, while the asymmetry common to the formation of two-person relationships tends to remain latent, with throuples it is made explicit. As the third you arrive new to the country of the couple’s love, meaning you are granted less of a say in the running of things. And so it went for Elsa, who has now been unceremoniously dropped.

Since the break-up she has returned to her parents’ house in an unnamed American town. Her days are empty and her evenings unmarked, except for the films she watches in the family living room. It is an assured choice to begin a novel in the immediate aftermath of a love story whose mechanics could have offered so much dramatic fodder. Instead, our impression of the dynamism and intrigue that characterized Elsa’s recent past can arrive only as background, through painful flashes of recollection that might seize her at any moment – while masturbating, while scrolling through social media, in therapy, any time a couple walks past her.

In the early stages of the novel very little happens. We are in the heat of summer. Elsa walks her parents’ dog. She lands a waitressing job at the only nice restaurant in town. There is a theatre festival going on. She visits the mall to buy skin products advertised by beauty vloggers on YouTube. It does not make for pleasurable reading to be kept inside the egocentric but lobotomized experience of heartbreak, with its keynotes of hollowness and despair.

It thus comes as a relief when Newbound introduces Elsa’s rebound. In a surreal narrative choice there is a famous actor performing at the festival – known only as “the actor-character” – whom we understand, through various clues, to be Timothée Chalamet. Elsa renders him the target for all her desperate unfulfilled desire, only to find that it ricochets instead onto a member of the actor-character’s entourage, Sam, a non-binary film-maker in an open relationship. Elsa’s time in a throuple has reshaped her romantic expectations: though she knows the conclusions can be just as wretched, she feels subconsciously as if there is a shorter distance to fall when you direct your attention to a person who already loves someone else.

But Sam is not like either member of the older couple. The new lovers begin on a more equal footing, closer in age, still figuring out who they want to be. Through Sam we are afforded access to Elsa’s character outside her monotonous internal despair: in conversation she is quick, playful, self-deprecating. She tells Sam she is waiting to be discovered. What for, he asks, and she replies: “I’m hoping when they find me they’ll tell me”. Newbound’s real skill is in dialogue; her descriptive style, as in so much contemporary fiction, is clean and economical.

Through Sam Elsa also realizes that not all forms of unconventional love need to symbolize a dead end. When she admits that her past relationship “couldn’t have gone on forever”, Sam answers simply “Why not?” In Misrecognition, Madison Newbound refuses her protagonist any obvious routes to happiness. What she offers Elsa, at last, has far greater worth: a reminder that what we ought to find in relationships, any kind of relationship, is something like mutual understanding, like recognition.

Lamorna Ash is the author of Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish fishing town, 2020. Her second book, on the contemporary landscape of Christianity in Britain, will be published next year

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post Why can’t it last forever? appeared first on TLS.