Motion Sickness by Lynne Tillman
Review by Helen King
First published in 1991, Lynne Tillman’s novel Motion Sickness takes the form of a curiously curated, slightly skewed and delirious travelogue, narrated by an unnamed young American woman as she roams the towns and cities of Europe and North Africa in capricious, chaotic fashion for some wildly unmoored months during the late 1980s. Shuttling between countries, hotels, and a series of chance encounters in a feverish attempt to orient the self through perpetual self-displacement, the narrator’s compulsive itinerancy is, over the course of the tale, offered up as a perverse anchoring strategy, a way of fixing oneself in the world: ‘I am drifting, dérive, nearly anonymous… and almost happy for the way I can spy and won’t be seen, can remain unrecognized.’ At home she’s a tourist.
Not so long ago, the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows coined a pleasing neologism which subsequently reverberated unbidden throughout my reading of Motion Sickness. ‘Sonder’ — ‘the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own’ — aptly describes a central obsession of Tillman’s book, whose flickering, deeply unreliable narrator repeatedly describes herself, surreally, as ‘a camera or a tape-recorder’ and at one point is accused of being ‘voyeuristically engaged in other people’s lives’.
As she travels across continents she excavates a motley cast of characters, drinking with some and sleeping with others, but mining them all for their stories as though it were only in those unique refracting mirrors that one’s self might be fully recognised: ‘Are conversations with strangers necessarily uncanny?’ she wonders as she manically writes postcards to those she’s met on her travels, before tearing them up, discarding rather than sending in a repeated, futile ritual. Connections are forged or imagined and then abandoned, with abandon. Fleeting acquaintances (or maybe just ghosts?) are randomly glimpsed in illogical locations — train stations and impossible side streets and breakfast rooms across borders, in ‘coincidence(s) so like fiction it makes one immobile’.
A fixation on the mad contingency of our collisions with others leaves the authorial ‘I’ ‘wondering at the network of feelings, of associations, crisscrossed and complex as a subway map in Manhattan that brought me here… to Arlette’s doorstep.’ Cultural determinism too is at stake, as a catastrophic self-consciousness is brought about by the act of identifying, for once, as a foreigner: ‘I see myself as the ugly, that is, imperialistic American [...] instantly I’m a set of conditions and positions, a reluctant but undeniable conduit…’
An uneasy restlessness pervades both plot and prose. The latter is frequently striking for its unusual figurative equivalencies (‘I wanted to hold my London life in suspension, a bit of fluff caught in a solution’) and sudden unravellings and digressions (‘I’m having common thoughts on my common tongue. A common tongue, the mother tongue, mother means food, I can’t eat tongue…’). The peripatetic bent of the narrative is mirrored by that of its style, which travels unexpected, often disorientating distances in its attempt to render a persuasive rendition of the late-twentieth-century tourist condition. There are echoes here of Kathy Acker (Kathy Goes to Haiti in particular comes to mind); perhaps unsurprisingly given Tillman’s association (like Acker) with the New Narrative movement which emerged out of San Francisco in the 1970s, and strove for the kind of unwaveringly authentic representation of subjective experience that these texts also strive for.
Like some of Acker’s writings — and appropriately enough given its title — there’s a subtle queasiness and instability at the heart of Motion Sickness that is simultaneously a seductive pleasure — the deep intoxicating kick of recognition — and also a frustration, an obstacle, giving rise to an utterly distinctive narrative voice that nonetheless remains slightly off-kilter, slightly unknowable, slightly estranged and estranging. But maybe that’s the point. A robustly intertextual work (stuffed with repeated references to films, books, paintings, records, held up like touchstones), like all the best visitors Motion Sickness speaks awkwardly and eloquently of its particular time and place in the world, its narrator even noting eventually that ‘Virginia Woolf wrote that books continue each other and it seems to me that people continue each other too, spring ungodlike out of the heads and bodies of others, not clones but continuities, with ties that bind, loosely or closely.’ Continuities of these vital kinds, like all important things, are most clearly perceived from a distance, and — as is the case here with Tillman’s odd, tough narrative from more than three decades ago — are likely worth the faint nausea, disorientation and vertigo one might incur in their uncovering.
Motion Sickness is published by Peninsula Press, 5th September 2023