“The Copywriter,” Reviewed

Poppick, similar his narrator, is simply a poet, the writer of 2 jaunty and inquisitive collections, making him 1 of respective poets who person published novels narrated by poets successful the past fewer years. Ben Lerner, who blazed a mentation of this way successful the twenty-tens, is duly hailed successful “The Copywriter.” (“He sold out. He’s fundamentally a novelist now,” D__ objects, earlier admitting that helium loves Lerner’s novels.) But the publication much decently invokes a antithetic tradition, that of bureau fiction, whose taxable has ever been the unit and symptom experienced by originative minds arsenic they’re warped nether conditions of mechanization oregon depersonalization. It’s a genre littered with breached java machines, surreal unit interactions, and soul-withering bundle tools; the vibe is task absorption with a broadside of ego death. D__ belongs to an arcade of alienation that includes Joseph Heller’s mid-level advertisement exec successful “Something Happened” (1974), the beleaguered insubstantial pushers of Joshua Ferris’s “Then We Came to the End” (2007), and the virtuosically bored I.R.S. agents successful David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King” (2011)—white-collar workers who usage their verbal installation to marque thing happen, time aft day, until they discontinue oregon expire into a bigger nothing. The vantage of having a narrator with a poetic disposition is that helium tin tune successful to the metaphysical magnitude of this mundane suffering, articulating it with a metrical precision.

In 2020, Poppick published a poem called “Lugubrious Stars of the Tomb,” which employed the fig of a nun’s compartment to evoke the claustrophobia of dwelling successful time: “If you deliberation this damp small country you unrecorded successful / is each that’s holding you / you’re right. Every 2nd is simply a doorway / bolted shut. You tin perceive your euphony / down a few, but lone 1 oregon 2 volition open.” In “The Copywriter,” D__’s quest to entree the euphony down the doorway of each second, to not discarded his life, becomes a likewise spiritual pursuit. As a kid, helium attended temple and was barroom mitzvahed; arsenic an adult, helium seems much inclined to transmission his theological impulses into a originative practice. His parables, which gully inspiration from Jewish mysticism, are attempts to get astatine what his leader John Ashbery called the hidden “schedule” of the beingness done the secular supplication of art. Of his poesy cohort, D__ writes, “We’ve seen each different done immoderate benignant of crisis. But of what? Faith?”

D__ and his friends inhabit a hyper-specific milieu of existent and erstwhile poets who stock references and prophets and comport themselves not dissimilar concealed members of a dissident sect. They interest astir being “cut off” from poetry, peculiarly by the jobs that they request to prolong their regular lives and that they fearfulness whitethorn softly indoctrinate them into a contrary worth system. Their gigs enforce agelong hours distant from originative writing; much insidiously, they reshape time, transforming it from a subtle, redoubling enigma into thing strict, quantifiable, and nonrenewable. Several months into D__’s unemployment, Lucy comes home, exhausted, to find him perusing Proust successful his underwear. He hasn’t made dinner, due to the fact that helium inhabits a antithetic schedule, operating retired of Poetry Standard Time portion she is stuck successful Company Time, respective meridians away.

Like each believers, D__ indispensable besides grapple with the occupation of doubt. How bash you support thing live erstwhile you’re not definite what it is oregon if it adjacent exists? Poetry makes thing happen, poets similar to intone. In “The Copywriter,” D__ experiences his creation arsenic invisible, ineffable, lacking the numerical markers of worth possessed by, say, a commercially palmy caller oregon a viral social-media post. He writes Lucy an day pantoum; she breaks up with him anyway. He writes a eulogy for Ashbery, and the guy’s inactive dead. (Given his person group’s protracted mourning period, it’s unclear that helium tin rise immoderate spirits astatine all.) At 1 point, helium buys his twenty-four-year-old brag a utilized transcript of “The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property,” by Lewis Hyde, passing it disconnected arsenic a cherished keepsake. He explains that the substance reënchants online shopping, revealing the “invisible webs of relationality” down integer transactions; it’s a bare effort to support his job. The ploy fails, delaying but not averting D__’s scheduled termination. Poetry, helium concludes, is “labor’s ash.”

Still, D__’s creator efforts can’t beryllium truthful neatly separated from his commercialized ones. Some actions, the publication implies, mightiness chopped you disconnected from poetry. (In the people of his copywriting career, D__ is asked to trade connection advertizing a lecture by a warfare criminal; borrowing a operation from Bartleby, helium refuses.) But plying a bullshit occupation request not beryllium 1 of them. In fact, Poppick seems determined to beryllium that submerging yourself successful the inanity of the grindset tin wage originative dividends. One of “The Copywriter” ’s astir moving aspects is its expansive explanation of poetry, which admits bureaucratese and launch-party banter and could theoretically use to immoderate portion of life. D__’s copywriting struck me, astatine times, arsenic genuinely transcendent: helium dismisses a blurb helium writes for a decorator sandcastle kit arsenic “a series of words truthful anserine I tin hardly bring myself to benignant them,” but the solicitation—which begins, “Feeling pail? Dig this: you request sun, and a castle to telephone your own”—delightfully recalls Ashbery’s poem “Valentine.” (“The sanction of the castle is you . . . and it is besides built connected / Shifting sands.”) At different job, astatine a Jewish taste halfway reminiscent of the 92nd Street Y, D__ and a workfellow are asked to rebrand a bid called “Mimes successful the Afternoon,” which has been moved from Wednesday day to Friday night. They onshore connected “Mimes successful the Afternoon connected Friday Night.”