Fog and Car – Eugene Lim

[Coffee House Press; 2024]

Eugene Lim is a novelist who engages in the complex social and political facets of twenty-first-century modernity. In Dear Cyborgs (2017), he addressed issues of art and political protest, while Search History (2021) dealt with AI, virtual reality, and racial identity. Both novels are contemporaneous and overtly political. So it was a surprise to discover Lim’s 2008 debut, Fog and Car, published by his own Ellipsis Press and now reissued by Coffee House Press, to be a very different kind of novel: a tale of lonesome domesticity that transcends into a metaphysical suspense story, set long before the techno-crazed present day, more focused on the interior worlds of its characters than society at large.

The titular Fog and Car are a recently divorced couple, Jim Fog and Sarah Car, both attempting to start afresh after the breakup. Fog has moved back to his hometown in Ohio, where he spends a first summer in the haze of memory and nostalgia, surrounding himself with the woods, creeks, and riverbanks of his youth. Car has moved to a noisy New York apartment where she quickly begins inviting over friends and gets a job in a bar. The duality of Fog and Car is clear. They are their names. One is hazy, the other dynamic. A contrast perfectly captured by Lim’s prose.

Chapters ping pong back to each other, first Fog, then Car, illuminating their interior minds through patterned phrasing. Fog is in a prismatic state, filled with memory and uncertainty as he returns to familiar landscapes. Visiting a lake, Fog remembers paper boats, toy soldiers, a tin can being whirled with hot coals inside—“whooping whooping circled by light.” He has flashes of thought, often about a friend, someone important in his life he no longer knows. “There were two losses he remembered. Two endings.” Detail is spare and lyrical. These passages rebound against Car’s chapters, written in a far more propulsive, direct style, marking the difference between the two states of mind. Excited by the city, Car fills a van and drives there, in a hurry:

Soon she was fighting the weekend traffic, feeling like she was returning to a familiar game, one that she missed. She honked her horn generously and felt like each mile was bringing her closer into the city’s heat and noise.

Compare this to Fog’s cryptic contemplation:

Say this: was there some moment past in a rosebush he as a small child small enough to travel in and under this bush and meet with a boy, this among secrets.

 Unlike Fog, Car is quick to adapt to being alone. After only a few months, she quits her job in a bar. She drinks to celebrate. “Tonight, I’m out to annihilate myself.” Car likes to drink to excess, to erase herself. She admits to feeling jealous of Fog’s “talent for nostalgia” and his ability to find comfort in memory. “Car envied the sediment in his brain, the strength he got from a connection but made light of it, told herself that forgetting also had its comforts.” 

Only once we know Fog and Car well enough, it seems, Lim removes the formal surnames and they become the more familiar Jim and Sarah. At this point, the novel takes surprising and unforeseen turns, flip flopping in genre and tone. The motif of identity turns oddly Lynchian when Frank Exit is introduced. Frank is Jim’s childhood friend; he was best man at Jim and Sarah’s wedding, but they have lost touch with seemingly no way of reconnecting. When Sarah happens to see Frank Exit on a Manhattan street, he is unrecognizable to her, possibly in possession of a different body. She decides to follow him around the city. Unaware he is being tracked, he leads Sarah to a psychic and a brothel. She befriends a fellow heavy drinker, a vagrant who also knows Frank. From languorous sections about trips to the local swimming pool and cleaning apartments, Lim introduces a new tone to the story, swerving realism for strange, narrative pastures, much like the ones trod by Jesse Ball, particularly in A Cure for Suicide, which also examines identity and memory.

Jim meets somebody new, Judy. By complete chance, she also knows Frank Exit. In no time at all, Fog and Car has a new identity of its own, has turned into a different novel altogether, a metaphysical suspense mystery more aligned with Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy than with the character-centered, quiet realism of the opening section. Still, the characters’ pursuit of identity remains, binding this about turn. Once Frank and Judy are introduced, our understanding of who anyone is feels increasingly uncertain. Characters’ relationships to sex, substance, work, and memory disarm as much as they elucidate. Jim realizes during sex with Judy that he has entered, “a world without, finally, a problem of identity. He was a nerve, skin. He forgot his name and became her belly button.” Like Sarah, he likes being able to annihilate himself, letting his identity come and go. 

Fog and Car is split into three parts: Mirror, Marriage, and Mirage. The novel smartly rests on these pillars. Beginning with watchful reflection, we are presented with an image of Jim Fog and Sarah Car which later becomes entwined with others, a coming together that finally cedes to a question of truth and reality. Who we are and who we want to be sits at the heart of Fog and Car. In an interview for Full Stop, Lim calls this novel “an investigation of different styles, different ways, different forms.” Characters, like Lim’s stylistic choices, shift and transform, alongside their inner selves. The novel suggests identity is a beguiling, perhaps not even achievable thing: just mirror, marriage, and mirage.

If notions of identity are hard to pin down, so too is the era in which Fog and Car is set. Time is just as illusory as identity. It is a pre-internet, pre-cell phone age. As Lim admitted in a recent interview with Full Stop, “The lack of technology is what makes it so odd—people can’t be disconnected these days. Fog and Car only had language and form—it was a different world.” Indeed, the world of Fog and Car is a strange yet wondrous pre-technological space, a simpler, bereft society, both innocent and adrift, where time is illusory and its people inward. Unlike much of his later work, Lim’s not concerned with how we behave in the swell of a modern society, but how to function on our own, in the isolation of a self. 

Simon Lowe is a British writer. His stories have appeared in EX/Post, Breakwater Review, AMP, Akashic Books online, Ponder Review, and elsewhere. His novel, The World is at War, Again, was published June 2021 (Elsewhen Press).