In 2025 I read Crocosmia by Miranda Mellis.
Nightboat Books sent me an advanced copy of this novel last year. The novel was hard to love stylistically and structurally, so I can’t say that I would recommend it. Nevertheless, I thought the work was a built around a compelling idea about the role of art in a “rotting” world and so I typed up a review and tried to place it with some lit mags.
I wasn’t able to find any takers for this review, so I’m sharing it here for posterity.
The Novel as Compost Heap of History
There is a well known rule among writers of fiction, don't try to write about utopia. It is a fool's errand. In seeking to create a plausible utopia, you consign yourself to two possible fates. Either you will fail miserably and in so doing highlight your own innate biases. Thomas More, the originator of the modern genre, famously retained slavery as key feature of his Utopian society. Or, perhaps an even worse fate, you will succeed and create a perfectly boring fantasy where nothing worth reading about ever happens. See, for example, the excessively mundane primitivism of Aldous Huxley's final novel, Island.
Dystopias are inherently more interesting to read because they contain, implicitly, the hope of better. The drive to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles pulls the reader along. Whereas utopias invert this equation. If they ever depart from the descriptive mode, their pristine image is quickly spoiled by the need to imbue the narrative with some sort of tension. The stasis of perfection gives way to an exploration of potential avenues for disruption. Conflict. Opening up these avenues necessarily mars the original ideal, like muddy footprints in freshly fallen snow.
It should come as no surprise then, that stories set in utopian societies that do not wish to destroy them have a tendency to become preoccupied with the edges. Sometimes it's the spatial edges. What lies beyond the borders of this perfect society? Does it threaten the established harmony? Sometimes it's temporal. What came before? What had to be overcome in order to arrive here?
In the opening of her latest novel, Crocosmia, Miranda Mellis states directly that "[a] problem is always temporal." So we might be tempted to understand the work as utopian fiction of the latter concern. Despite this opening, though, she is quick to complicate the assumption.
The novel opens on Maya as she is sitting comfortably in the shade of a 700-meter tall crocosmia flower, inhabiting the utopian future that her mother, the artist and activist Jane, worked tirelessly during her childhood to bring about. In the shade of the flower, however, Maya's thoughts are not on the perfection of her present. Instead, she's preoccupied with the mystery of her mother's disappearance. A disappearance which coincides with "The Great Turning," the inexplicable, simultaneous beheadings of seven heads of state that removed the final obstacles that were preventing the flourishing of nascent utopian societies all around the world.
Maya remembers three distinct periods of her childhood before Jane's disappearance. There's their brief, alienating time living in a city. The most critical years of her childhood, and the period the narrative affectionally lingers on the longest, is their time spent with an anarchist collective, called the "Anarchstery" (a clunky portmanteau of "anarchist" and "monastery"), a rogue convent peopled by interesting, like-minded characters who have withdrawn from the decaying world and are committed to the practice of bringing about the next. And finally, as Jane fully commits herself to the realization of her socio-political project, a secluded bungalow deep in the forest.
Mellis is not concerned with realism, or of writing a utopia that appeals to the rational — the inexplicable 700-meter tall flower on the first page represents a significant clue. The form of her novel suggests a preoccupation with the agents and catalysts for change. Jane's commitment to her project of change and Maya's ambivalence constantly play off one another. Raising questions about art's role in cultivating and nurturing the elements necessary in society to escape our present rot and nurture something new that might flourish.
In one of the novel's most instructive scenes, Jane is teaching at a university. It's a temporary teaching position, required because she's enrolled at the university to help her define and realize the reformational project she's more and more dedicated to. She performs the teaching job begrudgingly, rejecting traditional approaches to pedagogy, resenting administrative guidance to follow the rote curriculum. This incompatibility of pedagogical goals comes to a head when a supervisor decides to sit in on her class lecture, unaware that Jane had long since stopped giving the lectures and instead allowed students to direct the course of the class as it unfolded that semester.
Tense with anxiety, Jane decides to deliver a lecture directly to the supervisor. She situates her as the avatar of the institution and delivers an off-the-cuff diatribe against teaching that prioritizes recitation over experience. "As for me," she defiantly asserts, "I am one of those neurotics, one of those animists, who believes that we can change the world by a mere thought." Her heroic confrontation is undercut, as soon as it ends. We learn that the supervisor spent the previous evening at her dying father's bedside. Jane's rebellion against the institution is brushed off, sidelined by the reality that the supervisor can't be bothered to enforce anything anyway. The burden of her own life weighs too heavy on her mind.
Therein, you might say, lies the rub. The world before "The Great Turning" is distracted and impotent. Institutional norms are held up for their own sake, but nobody bothers to enforce them anyway. A crucial thematic touchstone for Mellis through the book is the idea of compost. The idea that "[o]ld forms, in dissolution contributed to new ones." The book, then, is perhaps better understood not as a description of a utopia, but rather an exploration of the liminal space between societal decay and the hope of a future blossoming.
In her other writing, Mellis shines as a poet who layers meaning on top of meaning and an essayist who peels away the layers of others' work and reveals the shimmering theoretical under pinnings. This perhaps explains, why the biggest criticism that can be levied against Crocosmia is that these strengths are deployed simultaneously within the same work. The result is a narrative that is somehow both too descriptive and too vague. Both the death of the old world and the birth of the new feel half-realized. The event that bridges them is somehow both clearly defined and unexplainable. Of course this is by design, the entire narrative is couched in the subjective, and perhaps self-deceiving, perspective of a neglected daughter who spends much of the duration pondering her mother's absence. Maya is a passive protagonist par excellence. By couching everything in her subjectivity, we experience the world and all the events that created it as both banal fact and unreliable interpretation. Each page drips with a confounding admixture of both the self-assuredness of manifesto and the uncertainty of speculation.
Nevertheless, all of these elements work to challenge the form. And we are forced to acknowledge that this not a utopian novel. It is a work that looks toward the possibility of a better future, yes, but it is not interested in the shape of that future so much as it is interested in the role that art might play in bridging the gap between here and there.
Crocosmia represents the novel as the compost heap of history. Where the rotting death of the present can be used to fertilize the roots of a more hopeful future.