THE VISITORS

C is lonely, ill, in debt, in danger, and on the verge of the most radical reinvention of all—total erasure.

In 2008, C was an up-and-coming fabric artist in Manhattan, married and hoping for a child. Then, “on the day the market crashed,” she underwent an emergency hysterectomy and awakened to what her lifelong friend Zo, a trader on Wall Street, described as an almost literal new world, one where “everyone [is] now in debt.” Three years later, C is still struggling to adjust to the normalcies of a life in constant crisis. Her medical debt is stubbornly eating away at the resources she needs to keep her arts and crafts store afloat, her marriage has ended, she has a nagging pain in her side and experiences unpredictable fainting spells, and she’s begun to be visited by the specter of a gnomelike little man in a navy three-piece suit with a gleeful penchant for expounding on systems theory. Add to this the ongoing urgency of the Occupy Wall Street movement—in this world, a collectivist effort that has grown in the years after the financial crisis rather than petered out—and the looming threat of GoodNite, an organization of “homegrown terrorists” bent on crashing the world’s electrical grid and taking down all of society with it, and it seems no wonder that all of C’s attempts to put her life in order seem to unravel into individual twists of wasted energy and ennui. And yet, C does go on, pouring herself into an artistic gesture that refigures the hopeless tangle of economic, biological, and climate systems as a generative act that embraces the nihilism embodied by GoodNite even as it makes something never before seen out of the fabric of the denuded world. Elements of the novel (particularly its exploration of cybernetics as a ubiquitous controller of domestic life) recall the work of such 20th-century greats as DeLillo or Sebald, but Stevens’ voice—which is meticulous, wide ranging, and moored in a different perspective from the 20th century’s predominantly white male hegemonies—makes her work particularly suited for the current century’s artistic needs.

Ambitious and powerful—a remarkable novel.