[Text Publishing; 2024]
The most interesting way to read The Degenerates by Raeden Richardson is as a study in all the ways we do not cope with the fixed circumstances of our lives. It opens with Somnath, a street beggar living in Bombay in the decades before it became Mumbai, who risks everything to immigrate to Australia and give his adopted daughter Maha a better life than his. She lives shrouded in the rewards and the consequences of his hard work, and when he dies unexpectedly, she is left with a mysterious gift for absorbing the life story of any creature, human or not, simply by looking at them. She calls these creatures her degenerates, and the project of the novel is to make their suffering known.
The novel has no one main character, instead weaving a single narrative through the overlapping stories of Maha and three of her disciples. We meet Titch Clement in the immediate aftermath of his best friend’s livestreamed suicide. Ginny Antonoupolous comes to us on the heels of twenty-four years of being ostracized by her own family and suburban Melbourne community. Each character seems constantly on the cusp of turning a corner and making it out, only to find again and again that true salvation does not come from escaping their pain, but from sharing it with Maha, and allowing her to translate it into writing. It’s a romantic view of documentary writing and a rather morbid one on self-determination: You’re born with your fate and to bear it is to have it read back to you from the perspective of a kind stranger. This overarching theory gives the story its emotional backbone and draws the characters into a single mutually sustaining arc of pain, purge, and reclamation.
The Degenerates is formally ambitious, unfolding through vignettes between one and five pages long within larger thematic chapters and making generous use of white space to visualize both the isolation of its characters and the shared rhythms of their lives. In Titch’s story, blankness serves as a poignant representation of the void left by a sudden death. The name of his late best friend is replaced by empty space, and only in Maha’s perspective do we learn that he was called Skeater. I found this to be a subtle yet highly effective way of expressing the novel’s thesis: Only in revealing the ugly and painful truth of our experience to others can we accept it as truth.
Richardson writes his characters in terms of verbs and adverbs, emphasizing the ways in which they move through their own personal Melbournes. He sometimes delves into flashback, but rarely lingers on reaction. I found this lack of interiority frustrating at times when it wasn’t entirely clear why a character was doing something or what they hoped to get out of it. However, it also challenged me to pay closer attention to minutiae of the language and let the action speak for itself. For example, Maha experiences a devastating loss early in the story, and we are not really told how she feels about it, only how she moves through her surroundings in the aftermath and how her surroundings respond. But they do respond: “Maha took the overalls and hung them in the wardrobe. Then she curled on the floor where her father’s body had lain. The size of her sorrow darkened her shadow on the wall.”
The Degenerates’s primary characters are bound to each other by the written word. Somnath leaves Maha with stacks of empty notebooks and pulp magazines full of cryptic fables, Ginny hires Titch to work for her at the bookshop, and Maha makes herself a beacon for messy, unresolvable pain, seeking out stories on the street and handing out flyers calling herself “Mother Pulse—Your Subterranean Storyteller and Lifelong Listener.” The act of narrative, of applying a third person perspective to someone else’s life, is elevated to the level of divine grace, and Mother Pulse becomes the patron saint of degeneracy. In their hour of greatest need, Titch, Ginny, and an ensemble cast of similarly troubled Melburnians wind up on Maha’s doorstep.
As a group, the degenerates’ defining trait is being unhappy in their lives and unable to catch a break. This is in no way an unrealistic type of character, but in the case of Ginny, her desire to leave the suburbs seems to overwhelm all other aspects of her character and leaves her feeling somewhat two-dimensional. She is the hated child of an alcoholic ex-beauty queen and a weak-willed father obsessed with money. For reasons unexplained, she still lives at home at twenty-four despite repeatedly being put up for adoption as a child and seeming to think of nothing else but leaving: “One day, the whole sad house would sit snugly in her rear-view mirror.” More puzzlingly, we are told that she has an English degree and has spent every Saturday of her adult life buying books, but her relationship to literature remains underdeveloped and largely irrelevant to her personality as we see it play out on the page. After failing to get her sister to read “feminist essays,” Ginny wonders “how her sister could live without trying to understand herself. There were so many things to learn, she thought. What else was the point of life?” But it is not entirely clear what she enjoys learning about, or that she wants to understand herself. The closest she comes to engaging with literature as a means of making sense of her own life is putting on Jack Kerouac’s American Haikus while “joining her tribe of crypto traders to forge a borderless future, one without visas, or national identity, or the melancholy of home.” Her hobbies and employment ventures—cryptocurrency, bookstore management, restaurant work—are relevant to her character only insofar as they are part of a larger plot to get to New York. It’s possible that Ginny does have complex tastes and ambitions and we simply do not have access to them in Richardson’s mode of externalized characterization, but to me this seems like a waste of her potential. I kept waiting for her pronounced love for books to find its place in the novel’s thematic preoccupations and it never does; the underdevelopment of Ginny’s relationship with books undermines her place in the narrative as a story about storytelling. As compelling an interlocutor as Maha is, I think Ginny’s perspective as a dedicated reader could have added complexity to Richardson’s exploration of writing as a mode of connection.
Richardson’s prose is strongest when he allows himself to get weird and wordy and dwell in the details of a character’s perceptions. It’s clear from the way he writes Melbourne through their eyes that he is well acquainted with the landscape, its people, and its effects on the mind. Mumbai too, although a minor character, is full of lively detail and compelling representations of the city’s class dynamics. His writing of New York is not quite as sharp, adhering closely to the well-worn image of the city as a gritty fantasyland of wild youth and possibility. But nothing beats the stunning suburban landscapes depicted with startling clarity of imagination through the eyes of Ginny and Titch. From the fire escape of her bookstore job, Ginny observes, “Muddy lawns hemmed kitsch houses, parking lots smothered rusted railroads and thousands of aboveground pools shone like doped-up pupils along fences and sidewalks.” I was totally delighted by this description. It’s at once funny, disdainful, and vaguely chilling, a combination that will be familiar to anyone with a complicated relationship to their hometown.
In the novel’s final chapters, storytelling is pared down to its most essential quality in the world of the degenerates, which is empathy. We are left with the reminder that Maha’s gift is born of grief, of the fear and pain that has defined her own life, and she too is a degenerate. The salvation she gives her followers is not a rebirth, but a release that comes from recognizing the self in another; and importantly, it can’t undo the suffering they’ve already endured. The Degenerates is less a celebration of the liberating power of narrative and more a quiet, probing exploration of what it means to look someone dead on, to not shy away from the hard edges of life’s unfairness, and in looking, to soften them.
Rachel Robinson writes short fiction, book reviews, and memories. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
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