One day, Ben takes his lunch break at the museum across the street from his office. He asks a woman at the ticket desk about free admission; he’s been informed that the magazine he works for is a corporate sponsor. The woman counters with the museum’s universal “pay what you can” policy, in response to which Ben quickly and needlessly clarifies, “do you mean ‘pay what you want’?”. Ben is the hero of Mike Powell’s farcically ordinary novella, New Paltz, New Paltz (126 pages; Double Negative), and pointing out such meaningless discrepancies is one of his characteristic tasks.
Ben, a fact checker for a gossip magazine, wanders through the museum as he wanders through his city, a vaguely romantic New York of the early aughts. He is seemingly ambivalent about most things, noticing commonplaces and tossing off charmingly obvious observation after observation. Powell writes with a certain syntax of simplicity, granting an easy profundity to the novella’s very sentences. He opts for similes over metaphors, nicely announcing the nonliteral as nonliteral. Most of the brief, episodic chapters end with an aphorism or an image, plainly put. Thoughts arise with the obviousness of punchlines.
As Ben steps away from the ticket desk, he appreciates an escalator ride up to the galleries, admiring “that feeling of moving without moving, of rising at that diagonal angle and watching the room open up underneath.” He continues: “It felt angelic somehow. Like how an angel might move.” Here is the novella’s typical tenor: appreciation of nothing too much, written in obviating prose, not just “angelic,” but also “like” an angel.
In the 20th-century painting wing, Ben comes across Balthus’s The Mountain, a painting whose ordinariness captivates him: “a meaningless moment in a sea of meaningless moments.” Of such monotony, he clarifies, “[the figures’] meaninglessness didn’t bother me… it touched me; with a few exceptions it was the life I would remember having lived.” Powell’s plot is strung together in much the same way, meaningless moment after meaningless moment.
The novella does begin with a suggestion of romantic comedy, Ben confessing on the very first page to having fallen in love with a college dropout from the titular New Paltz, a small town upstate. What ensues, however, is mostly unpredictable, meandering monotony. Even as Ben attempts to tell a romantic story, he gets distracted, recalling instead a wide variety of wanderings about the city, a sea of meaningless moments. He watches dogs play in the dog park, gets very drunk at bingo, talks to a kid at the chlorinated lake, and considers his upbringing at therapy (“Even as a child I understood that there was happiness, and then there was this other thing, unhappiness. My parents had wandered from one side of the line to the other.”).
Ben wanders near the edges of a meet-cute. The love interest’s name is Lucy, and she first appears at the dog park and then at a party on the Fourth of July. On the balcony of the apartment where the party is being held, in one of those luxury apartments that are “sprouting up like dominoes in reverse,” Ben tells Lucy a story about peeing in his grandmother’s shower. The pair meet later, this time intentionally, on some unspecified later date, at the museum that houses The Mountain. Ben seems to have done some research on Balthus, explaining “how even though he was a figurative painter, there was no painter or group of painters that could explain in some genealogical way why his paintings looked the way they did.”
Ben, like Balthus, is out of step with time and history. He stays in the office past midnight fact-checking a piece, and the magazine pays for a town car to drive him home. As he waits in the dark outside, he watches workmen emerge from a steaming crevasse in the street. Another time, he walks home from work over the bridge: “Cars passed but I felt severed from them. Planes passed but I felt severed from them. A stillness held over everything…” Ben’s New York is unparticular and full of strange temporalities. Absent the internet, this picture of the city seems somewhat nostalgic. Composed mostly of banalities, of workmen and cars, this New York isn’t precisely historical either. Just as Ben can’t quite fall in line with the romantic plot he announces at the novella’s start, he also doesn’t fit so neatly into history.
Ben and Lucy’s romance and the simplicity of the novella’s style and setting come to a head in the final chapter. Ben takes the bus up to New Paltz and sleeps on Lucy’s couch. Lucy sleeps in the other room, with her boyfriend. The next day, Ben accidentally insults Lucy when they are out on a walk. It’s an anticlimax without much disappointment for a hero who’s bound to ramble, the final turn in a novella that turns relentlessly, humorously toward the mundane.
Benjamin Flaumenhaft studies Comparative Literature at Brown.