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Summary
Summary
"Apocalyptic and psychologically attentive. I was moved."
-Tao Lin, New York Times Book Review
"A marvelously scathing indictment of a generation that has no choice but to burn. From Nothing's outset, [Wirth Cauchon] crafts scenes with complexity and a scary prescience. [ Nothing is] a riveting first piece of scripture from our newest prophet of misspent youth."
- Paste
"Like a movie adaptation of Daria as directed by Gregg Araki. The energy almost makes each page glow. Though this novel starts as Bret Easton Ellis, it ends as Nick Cave - thunderous, apocalyptic. The move into the grand and mythic separates Nothing from the usual stuff concerning the bored and the pretty."
- Electric Literature
" Nothing feels like the descendent of the masterful short stories of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son . [A] noteworthy debut."
- Bustle
"A burning mean and darkly mysterious read."
-Joy Williams
"I could tell you that Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon has written an utterly contemporary novel of our fragmented culture, a novel that I think might be the great American novel of the selfie, brilliantly alternating the narratives of two young travelers partying and searching and losing themselves in the wild West -- a Kerouac hitchhiker juxtaposed with the nihilistic, wanting, wandering Ruth and her toxic friendship with her prettier best friend. But this is what I want to tell you--this is what you need to know -- Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon writes like a beast, brutal and ecstatic. You need to read this."
-Kate Zambreno
"An edgy debut. Cauchon's characters have serrated edges... they'll get under the reader's skin."
- Publishers Weekly
"Claustrophobic. It's August and the hills are on fire and I'm reading Nothing . I see Wirth Cauchon's characters lurking around Missoula, outside the bars and walking along the river, lost and fucked up, abused and abusers, seekers, trustafarians, and ne'er-do-wells. Stuck in the limbo of youthful identity crisis, desperate for a way in or a way out."
-Jeff Ament
Ruth traded a dead-end life in Minneapolis for a dead-end life in Missoula. But in Missoula, she's got Bridget. "[Bridget] was gorgeous... but that wasn't it, that didn't quite explain it. What explained it was the curse. The curse of the unreasonably pretty, the curse of cult leaders and dictators. It sucked everyone to her, it consumed her, made her untouchable."
After a local girl dies at a party, signaling the end of fun for the twentysomethings of Missoula, James and Ruth become involved. But jealousy over Bridget quickly complicates things.
Nothing announces a nervy and assertive new voice, while also capturing the angst and foreboding that could mark it as an even grander generational statement.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Nothing, an edgy debut from Cauchon, follows Bridget and Ruth ("The first time I saw Bridget," Ruth narrates, "I knew right away we'd be best friends. Or enemies") as they stumble in and out of parties under the influence of booze and pills, not enough food or self-respect, and a vicious anger that manifests in Ruth as something more like desire. Oppressive smoke from nearby wildfires grows ever denser, the story's ticking bomb. James, a wanderer with a stolen gun and a wallet full of his stepfather's cash, heads Bridget and Ruth's way, tracking his dead biological father, guided by a handful of photographs and the rumors of some hobos. The hateful sexuality simmering behind Bridget and Ruth's friendship explodes into a relatively predictable menage a trois that kicks off a storm of violence, dramatically coinciding with the inescapable arrival of the wildfires. The relationships here are more complicated than they seem-the uncanny physical resemblance between James and Bridget provides a mystery that's easy for the reader to solve, but it's fascinating to watch Ruth misunderstand the obvious over and over, her clarity fogged by too many drinks and an inability to see her own value. Cauchon's characters have serrated edges; they're impossible to like, but they'll get under the reader's skin. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
"THE STRAIN OF holding the I together adheres to the I in all stages; and the temptation to lose it has always been there with the blind determination to maintain it." This quotation, from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment," is the first of the three epigraphs of "Nothing," Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon's bluntly apocalyptic and psychologically attentive first novel. Her two I's, Ruth and James, who take turns narrating the book's brisk chapters (until later, when Ruth takes over most narrating duties), are young drifters who seem to be in their early 20 s and have separately left Minneapolis for the valley town of Missoula, Mont. James, we learn, has hitchhiked and train-hopped in search of information about his father - a mission that, to some degree, appears contrived to give his life a concrete purpose. ("The only answer I got to Be what? Be who? was: Nothing.") Ruth, who similarly lacks a purpose in life (and chronically defers trying to improvise one), begins the novel with a one-word sentence: "Freak." Her private method of consoling herself is to shortcut through what some people work at for years - meditation, say, or philosophic study - to conclude, to name a few examples, that "Nothing would change," "But it didn't matter," "I didn't care since I was already as good as dead or dead." Ruth's only friend, Bridget, a third presence throughout, is in Ruth's view "unreasonably pretty" in a way that isolates her, but also an extrovert who craves approval. "Whereas," Ruth says wistfully, "I didn't want people to like me exactly. All I wanted was a way out. That's all I'd ever wanted. Even back in Minneapolis suicide was the only thing I could come up with. After that I'd been stupid enough to think I'd found an out in Montana. But then there I was, broke and alone just like before until I met Bridget." Ruth and Bridget's increasingly unfriendly interactions eventually require James to serve as an unhelpful, vague kind of intermediary. Ruth's insecurity ("James looked over but didn't touch me. If he cared he could've touched me") and self-loathing ("More than I hated Bridget, I hated my stupid ... self. Just a freak alone") - along with her financial situation and the wildfires threatening to engulf the valley - worsen as "Nothing" progresses. That Wirth Cauchon doesn't seem interested in totally maintaining the illusion that Ruth and James are people, rather than characters, is initially distracting. I half-expected to learn they were one character (Ruth imagining James, maybe), or thought Wirth Cauchon herself might appear within the narrative to explain why they share linguistic idiosyncrasies (the word "kryptonite," their descriptions of hair as "wild") and sometimes openly function as ciphers to reinforce mood and theme. But the distractions resolve, with gracefill directness, partly via what appear to be authorial clues: Ruth and James repeatedly imagine themselves in a movie and suspect they're watched by an unknown observer; James notes the unlikeliness of certain happenings and becomes increasingly paranoid. Soon I began to read "Nothing" as a metaphor for the relationship between people and the unknown. "Someone is watching us," Ruth says. "Someone planned it like this." In the end, I was moved when Ruth seemed released from her anxiety, her self-loathing, her belief that she's a "freak." I felt happy for her, imagining that she was experiencing a preview of her impending release from self into what, to her, is the unknown, her "way out." Ruth and James imagine themselves in a film or watched by an unknown observer. TAO LIN is the author, most recently, of the novel "Taipei."
