Soft Lighting – Jared Joseph

[Bench Editions, 2025]

You’ve just finished reading Jared Joseph’s Soft Lighting. It’s a novel of sorts that may consist of a monologue, a dialogue in which all of the interlocutors’ individual identities are overshadowed by a monolithic (if not Big Brother-ly) “I”. It’s decidedly an experiment in voice, intent, and compositional procedures, as an afterword by the author makes clear. Although it does channel its considerable verbal energies through inciting incident, complication, and dénouement, Soft Lighting is perhaps most novel-like (think: less Victorian, more nouveau roman, but edging toward the Gothic either way) in its exploration of contemporary subjectivity: how the self so often experiences itself as a phenomenon always everywhere happening to itself; how the self can forget it is embodied yet cannot elude its own ambience; how the self’s agency is increasingly an agent’s, a specialist in outsourcing faculties (such as memory and imagination) and thereby amplifying their functionality at the expense of their qualities. Finally, Soft Lighting can be read as a love story, insofar as a love story can propose a new theory of matter. Or: a new theory for how the words we utter can matter.

You’ve highlighted many passages in Soft Lighting and jotted down a healthy number of annotations. But, above all, your experience with the book—itself largely interrogatory in tone, texture, and (allowing yourself some poetic license) sinew—has prompted you to compose a litany of questions.

These questions do not come all at once but accumulate in drips over several days. Some even drop into your consciousness in the form of components of more elaborate questions. Given how even the matter of a few days can attenuate human memory, to try to reattach each question to the specific passage in Soft Lighting from which it has branched would be futile. But you’re convinced that the book somehow holds all these questions, even if it never explicitly voices them. Maybe, you wonder, the only honest way to pry the book’s pages (and sensibilities) apart again is to make these questions instruments that another reader can pick up and wield.

• Are you the last one who believes that the novel is a kind of social experiment?
• Is the novel the kind of social experiment that can continue to produce meaningful findings, or is it time to defund the research?
• Haven’t most consumers of books in the U.S. defunded literary fiction by default?
• If you can imagine the wan sun bouncing off the terrazzo and shop windows of an abandoned mall, would you describe that lighting as “soft”?
• Should you take Soft Lighting’s description of itself as “without setting” at face value, or should you argue that, instead, it’s a novel with barely any setting?
• But what about an occasion, which must naturally take place in some setting, or have even a hint of setting trailing behind it? Doesn’t page three allude to a date—a potentially romantic encounter—winding down? Where is it winding down?
• Are the pronouns in Soft Lighting places? Aren’t all pronouns contested territories these days? Is Soft Lighting’s attitude toward pronouns a form of conscientious objection to the hostilities that fill their skies with flak?
• Aren’t the earliest, most dissolute rays of daylight “soft”?
• John Hawkes once stated that he “began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.” Does Soft Lighting feel a similar enmity toward setting, character, and plot?
• Is a desire to circumvent novelistic conventions and yet compose a text that can be called a novel a form of aggression? Is it a punitive act? Who takes the brunt of the punishment: the author, the reader, or the novel itself?
• Is writing a novel that’s not a novel akin to taking an off-ramp from a Möbius strip?
• “How to improvise one’s way out of history?”
• Is the novel in the age of a public discourse paralyzed by polarization obsolete?
• Isn’t the novel obsolete in an age defined by hyper-awareness of genocide repeating itself within the other repetitions of which history seems to be so enamored?
• “… maybe it looks like something repeats, but does it really repeat?”
• Does Soft Lighting have a single narrator, multiple different narrators, or a clade of cloned narrators?
• If there are multiple narrators here, aren’t they most likely queued single file, a line of them receding to the limits of your vision if not quite infinity?
• Is it too dim inside Soft Lighting to answer this question? Can a novel sustain spaciousness in the absence of setting?
• How do you have a face-to-face conversation with the person ahead of you in line? Behind you?
• “When did we become The Society of Obviously Wrong Questions?”
• What non-figurative images of conversing are available to the imagination? The literary imagination?
• Would you describe the lighting in an auditorium where theatrical or cinematic spectacles can be consumed as “soft”?
• Why are so many of your questions about the form of the novel, its “totality of vision or structure”? Are you that indifferent to the novel’s content, which is explicitly political at times?
• “And why is it that this world, this country, this self, can so easily blot out what is happening, the bombs my tax dollars buy to blow up these kids.”
• Is your indifference to content that feels its own urgency without irony a form (simultaneously soft, medium, and hard) of benightedness?
• Because there’s no way to take in a novel whole, not even if you finish reading it in a single sitting, isn’t it incumbent upon the novelist to invest in the paratextual infrastructure?
• “We’re fighting for soft suffering, then? The heroes’ job is to protect the current level of sustainable suffering, rather than work to relieve it?”
• “The interrogator wants you to say what the interrogator is already convinced is the truth. And the interrogator will torture you to get that statement.”
• In the age of AI (that is, an age of machine readers with sophisticated pattern recognition capabilities but no imagination), is the novel obsolete?
• In its scumbling of conversations, even the conversational (if not dialectal) mode, is Soft Lighting proposing that the novel can be a softer, more gentle, kind of software?
• Is believing the novel can help keep humanity from becoming obsolete the height of absurdity, sublime, or the worst kind of speciesism?
• Between which bands of the rainbow does the light of obsolescence reveal its true colors?
• Would you describe the feeble glow of smartphone screens being tapped and scrolled by some doomscroller immersed in bed rotting as “soft lighting”?
• “I thought I made art just as a nervous habit, personally, as a particular compulsion, it’s like biting my nails, I thought.”
• Why aren’t more reviews of experimental literature commensurately experimental in form?
• Is it the reviewer’s job to make their questions available, to have answers at the ready, to proceed from answers to questions, or to work backwards from answers to a different set of (new or not) questions?
• Doesn’t Soft Lighting start divesting itself of questions the closer it approaches its conclusion? Shouldn’t you follow suit? Or shouldn’t you up the ante?
• “Why do two friends talk most comfortably over one medium, and not another?”
• “‘And now, looking at the writing I write now, I write like this. I write like I talk, like I am talking now,’ I say.”
• Why is dismantling the distinction between talking and writing such a dream, and an American dream at that? Isn’t that impulse what’s most traditional about this experimental novel? How interesting is it that the same desire has both transmogrified working-class writers (Hemingway, Carver, etc.) into barnacles thickening the walls and gateposts of  MFA curricula and inspired unteachable, unreadable texts like Andy Warhol’s A?
• Is Soft Lighting discursive like an ad lib, or is it a stalling tactic, waylaying an absorption—with oneself, with “the present”—the attainment of which it knows would be nauseating?
• Does Soft Lighting become more disjointed or more associative as its nested dialogue (as for the trees in which those nests are nested: think data science, not dendrology) includes more and more anecdotes? More and more declarative clauses, even if they’re cushioned by hedges, breast-beatings, waffling?
• Does Soft Lighting’s wordplay, particularly its infatuation with false cognates, elaborate Rubenesque anatomies? Or is that the job of its run-on sentences: to conjure subjects?
• “How are my feelings making me a different person today?”
• Which refrain echoes more loudly throughout in Soft Lighting: “immiserate” or “love”?
• “’I love my brain because it protects me in ingenious ways that also make me miserable,’ I say.”
• Is the love expressed in Soft Lighting exclusively for human beings? And what if it is? What is a human being in 2026?
• “Is love transformative, or is it transferable?”
• Can a conceptual novel also be visceral?
• For the consciousnesses that occupy a novel, are their words their flesh?
• Is the desert of the “I” one in which each thought is, like the grains of sand in Blake’s cracked allegory, a world unto itself? Or the desert of the “I” one in which each thought adds another scintillation to the featureless expanses that inevitably disorient any tourist?
• “‘Language is built by a breaking of the rules. The rules are, I need you,’ I say.”
• Can novels make our being strangers to one another less strange?
• To achieve this, don’t novels need first to make us more strangers to ourselves? Or to make us less strangers to ourselves?
• “’Buy me an opportunity to become more myself,’ I say. ‘Buy me a ticket the fuck out of here,” I say, and I turn, and I leave.”
• Are you the last one who would deny that the novel is an experiment in capitalism?
• “… but maybe calling you ‘you’ doesn’t make of you a background, maybe it is how I built myself, maybe I am the first of you that is a me, an I, now, an I who does, or who is, which is the same thing, I think, or one requires the other, and I think most people think one has to be in order to do, but I think it’s the reverse, I think it’s the doing of something that makes a person exist, and this is the definition of politics…”
• Wouldn’t you describe the bioelectric storms raging tinily through a reader’s gray matter as “soft lighting”?
• If so, because all novels find themselves by getting lost in the labyrinth of a reader’s mind, isn’t the novel itself a architecture defined by soft lighting? And isn’t that definitionally low? Isn’t the novel a room one where we can sense but not see the walls, and we know those walls could be widely separated because the room wants to accommodate a multifarious “we”: authors, readers, narrators, characters (even when those characters are apostates of the novel)? Don’t we need to be thinking socially even in the most private (secret?) act of reading? And doesn’t practicing this tensile sociality (not (or absolutely) to be confused with socialization) help us navigate those other spaces in which the extremes to which human organization tends—isolation, anarchy, surveillance—obtain?

Joe Milazzo is the author of Crepuscule W/ Nellie, The Habiliments, Of All Places In This Place Of All Places and, in collaboration with Eric Lindley and Miwa Matreyek, Words In Danger Of Falling Out Of The Vocabulary. His writings have appeared Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Full Stop, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. He is also the Founder/Editor-in-Chief of Surveyor Books. Learn more at https://www.joe-milazzo.com.

Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities

The latest issue of the Full Stop Quarterly focuses on literary representations of dis(-)appearing (post)colonial cities across the Eurasian continent. Click here to read the introduction.