The Best Counterfactual Novels

Could you talk me through the appeal of writing a counterfactual novel, and what the decision to create an alternate reality offers a novelist? Your latest book, Biography of X, is set in a contemporary United States that is very like, but not quite, our own. After the Second World War, the American South seceded, was run by a theocratic regime, then was reunited with the North. 

The counterfactual aspect of the book came out of a need to create a world in which two women could be married without it being an issue, and in order to create a world in which a woman could be powerfully creative during the 20th century in America without having to first account or apologize for her gender. Before I wrote anything I had this sense of X, a brazenly creative yet deeply flawed woman, and the woman who loved her and their relationship. I could see and feel it so vividly, but I didn’t want the plot to be encumbered by the sexism of the 20th century. So I tried to envision a different, but still deeply flawed, world where they could create and love and suffer on their own terms—more or less.

Was it difficult to keep these two timelines—that is, historical-reality and alternate-history—straight in your head while writing? Did you have to keep detailed notes as to what happened in which world, when?

I started writing this book in 2017 and worked a lot on it during 2020 and 2021. By now I’ve forgotten what it was like to write it. Sometimes I look back and it seems simple. Sometimes I forget all the wrong turns I took. I cut tons of other plot lines, historical events, characters. I know I kept all kinds of notes pinned on the wall like a conspiracy theorist. I assume it was difficult, but I have forgotten the difficulty here in late 2023.

The first book you’ve chosen to recommend is Loop by Brenda Lozano (as translated into English by Annie McDermott). It’s a stream-of-consciousness novel, which declares: “Plots come and go, action is secondary. The voice is what matters.” In what sense do you consider it a counterfactual novel?

There’s a sense of porous boundaries between the main character’s internal reality and what she can see. There’s all this marvelous slippage. I suppose it’s counterfactual in that it’s a book that’s not content entirely with factual reality. She has the feeling that Proust is walking around in her neighborhood. It’s wonderful.

Why do you recommend it?

It is an absolute delight. The main thing I read for is the voice of a story— not the plot or the setting or even the attributes of the character aside from the way they speak. I think you have to understand your appetite as a reader to choose the right book to read. You should choose this book if you want to spend some time in the company of a voice that feels like a very good, old friend of yours taking you on a nonlinear tour of the way she writes in between her life and everything she’s ever read.

Next, you’ve chosen Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee. Costello herself is a writer who appears like something of an alter ego for Coetzee. Can you tell us more?

There’s a long chapter in which Costello gives a lecture about ethical vegetarianism.  It’s my understanding that this lecture was one that Coetzee gave, as himself, in his ‘real’ life. He’s created this alter ego, in a way, a female academic, and he sets this fictional/non-fictional self through a world that’s essentially identical to our own. In this way, I feel this book carves out a little space between the novel and the essay, which is a place I’m very interested in exploring.

What do you admire about it?

Many things; Coetzee is a genius. But you have to hand it to a novelist getting his essayistic lectures to do double duty. He writes with total authority and joy.

Next up, you’ve selected Screen Tests by Kate Zambreno – can you talk us through it?

This isn’t, strictly, a novel, but I’d like to argue for a wider definition of the novel in the English-speaking and English-reading world. In other countries, a novel is often just thought of as any book that isn’t trying to pass itself off as a fact. Story collections, as we call them, enjoy a second-class citizenry for no good reason. I think this is a mistake.

For this and many other reasons, I’m recommending Screen Tests as a counterfactual novel because it is a collection of writing written from a consistent point of view, that of Zambreno, as a character, in a certain mood. No, it’s not a novel with a single plot threading through the stories, but it is a novel if you can accept a single line of thought as no more or less valid than a plot. It’s a perfect book. One night some years ago I woke up at two in the morning in a very unusual moment of insomnia, and I went downstairs like a child on Christmas and I pulled this book from my shelf and I read the whole thing over the course of a few hours then I went back to bed. Best case of insomnia of all time.

The fourth counterfactual novel you’ve chosen to recommend is Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas, as translated by Anne McLean. It’s told in the form of a lecture—tell us more.

It’s a very confused and confusing lecture—but that’s a feature, not a bug. You have to be willing to walk with Vila-Matas as if he’s some kind of intoxicated tour guide of a city that doesn’t even entirely exist. It’s wonderful. Like all the books suggested here, the drama comes in the turns of thought. If that sounds boring to you, it probably will be boring to you. If you’re the sort of person who cannot be bored when left alone to think for a while, then you will probably enjoy this and all the other books here.

I think that brings us, finally, to These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Minna Proctor. We have previously featured Jaeggy’s short fiction—Sue Rainsford recommended her short story collection I Am the Brother of XX, describing each piece as an “intense burst” that embodied the aphorism “arrive late; leave early”. Why do you recommend These Possible Lives?

As with the Zambreno, this is breaking form a little, but I am begging you not to let this stop you from reading this and every other Jaeggy book. If you really need to imagine this book as a novel, think of it as being narrated by a fictional character who is a very creative aspiring biographer summarizing the lives of a few different people about whom she might later write a whole biography.

I wonder if, while writing a counterfactual narrative, it called into question the idea of ‘factuality’—would you agree?

The slippery nature of facts is very much a theme for our era—difficult to escape and imperative to grapple with.