Rooms for Vanishing spurns the chronological narrative arc of traditional storytelling in favour of a surreal web of nonlinear moments and memories. It’s an unconventional format that Nadler believes more aptly reflects the experience of surviving a major calamity, rejecting the custom of popular fictionalised Shoah narratives to end on a contrived note of redemption.
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“When the typical plot structure is overlayed onto narratives about catastrophe, you can end up with this kind of tendentious historicising about the Shoah in which the end of that story is always happy,” Nadler said. “I don't really accept that we've been ‘redeemed’ - and that was the sort of genesis for this as a project.”
Eschewing a neat beginning, middle and end, the novel tells several stories concurrently, each at a different point in time, a different place, and perhaps in a different version of reality altogether: Sonja, nearing middle age in 1970s London, is grieving the death of her young daughter; mother Fania, a masseuse in Montreal in 1966, is haunted by sightings of the woman she could’ve been; Arnold, the patriarch, is celebrating his 99th birthday in Vienna with grandchildren who are not his own; and Moses, an old man in New York in the year 2000, is preparing to meet his first grandchild.
Each Alderman experiences otherworldly phenomena, be it ghosts or doppelgangers or unsettling distortions in the natural order of their lives. Nadler's foray beyond the confines of realism proved a useful tool for exploring the abstract mental state of grief, helping to chart the “liminal state between mourning and madness.”
But Nadler also leaned into surrealism and non-linearity because it felt like the most appropriate format to use during the strange, uncertain period when he wrote and revised the book. It was during the pandemic, an era of contemporary upheaval and disarray around the world, and a politically chaotic time in the US.
He likened the “cognitive dissonance” many readers might feel when approaching certain surreal elements of his book – a character might be deceased in one story, alive in another – to the sensation of stubborn incredulity so many people felt during that time and continue to feel now. It’s the same feeling Nadler said he often gets while watching the news in the morning, learning about fresh disasters around the globe and thinking to himself, “that can’t possibly be true.”
"It's this sort of continual disbelief in reality,” Nadler said. “We're living in a senseless moment, and it seems to be promising to get more senseless all the time, so I think adhering to the narrative structure that we've always known and that guides most fiction, it doesn't feel right at the moment.”
The same could be said of the splintered, grief-stricken era with which he concerns himself in Rooms for Vanishing, an era marked by the sort of violence and pain that the human mind will do anything to protect itself from – including choosing not to believe it.
“There’s something kind of essential and universal about the language of catastrophe and survival, no matter who you are or whatever context you bring to it,” said Nadler. “And the large project of being alive, I think, is believing in the veracity of the stories that people tell you about their suffering.”
Rooms for Vanishing is now available for purchase on Amazon
