Calvin Westra's moth girl

7 thoughts on a novel that invents its own genre by repurposing our expectations and paranoias about seeking love through the text on our phones

1. I preordered moth girl as soon as it became available after having read and loved Westra’s previous novel, Donald Goines. Clocking in just over 400 pages, it hulks like a monolith in comparison to his other two rather slim published volumes of fiction, which for fans of Westra is great news. On a page by page and line by line level, there’s a feeling of invisible clockwork going on behind his ideas, establishing a clear case of the kind of artist who makes it look easier from a distance than it actually is to write with so much style. Though the clearest comparison I could come up with while reading moth girl was Richard Brautigan—particular In Watermelon Sugar—there’s really no great corollary to how Westra approaches his subject matter; he seems one of one in a way that remains hard to pin down no matter how stripped down it might seem, or how intuitively reflexive its world appears in attempting to define itself.

2. The vast majority of moth girl takes place through text messages, with any further exposition mostly relating to summaries of text messages, minimal actions performed by the protagonist, Hector, or startlingly placed fragments of metafiction, in which Hector communicates with friends who read the same book you are reading as you read moth girl. Should a book full of texts seem to dissuade you, for being too on the nose or something, worry not, as Westra is wise enough to shift the everyday context of communicating through phones into a more natural, flowing format, removing the text boxes and spelling errors that might more realistically replicate phonetime and reconstructing them as intersecting dialogues. For instance, rather than stacks of lines, an excerpt of multiple texts from the same person reads: “I maybe cannibalize the you/me conversations,” Hector said and then, “So it’s me asking moth girl,” and then ,”When she says chamomile, maybe I say story of my life.”

3. moth girl is elegantly structured, broken up into 333 modular parts spread across three different locations (Denver, Pueblo, and South Bend). Each of the parts is both self-contained and connective, tracking the developing textual minutiae of a mostly long distance relationship between Hector and moth girl, the latter of which we can only really understand through the lens of what the former provides us. These characters don’t really have bodies on the page; they don’t come together in expository scenes that offer license to the texted word; they really don’t have many characteristics at all besides what you can glean from hearsay and reading between the lines of the convos themselves. Again, though, because Westra wisely camouflages the tropes inherent in both models, experimental and traditional combined, the novel quickly takes on a feeling more like eavesdropping, or a detective story that refuses to keep track of evidence. We sort of seem to slide between the cracks of what goes on in the dialogues where the larger life behind the language must exist—a feeling that is freer and lighter than other would-be autofictive relationship novels, but no less complex in what it carries outside the larger spotlight.

4. What’s even more strange is how weird the world this novel is set in appears to be given the fragmentary way it bears its essence. When the real world does slink in behind the back and forth to reveal relevant details such as what the characters eat, where they hang out, or what they want, it does so in a funny mirror of sorts. Fans of Donald Goines will already be well aware of Westra’s post-satirical inventiveness; how he warps brand names and common pastimes to seem uncanny to the reader in spots where it couldn’t be more commonplace to the novel’s characters. Clucktastic Confections, Hydraulic Harry, Hotcake Helen’s, the Destroyer of Worlds skillet, King Soopers, Full Contact Badminton, and Night Owl Coffee (Tm) mingle weirdly with actual franchises and products such as Facebook, Walgreen’s, White Castle, and Garry Kasparov, manifesting a kind of perfect simulacrum of America where we’re both inundated by brands and plagued in our dreams by more mangy efforts at branding and marketing. It feels akin to Tim Robinson and Tim and Eric without being heavy-handed about it, and actually using its basis as a launching pad not simply for more absurdity, but for a meaningful, and even poignant, attempt to depict love in the time of the near death of the internet.

5. Given so much contextual set-up, I think it’s safe for me to state that Westra is hilarious, and in an often under-stated way given the length of the rope he’s lended the reader in order to get onboard. Every page in moth girl is ripe with Westra’s patent-seeming humor that in this moment reminds me of splicing Larry David’s timing with Lydia Davis’s compunction—again, a mode much higher and sharper that it might seem given the lowbrow tone of the setting, and the wide range of seedy interests that populate the vast majority of Hector’s conversations—tattoos, porn, depression, roommates, social media, gossip, jealous rage. The titular moth girl, despite being Hector’s main squeeze, is something of an elusive enigma all her own; by turns lovey-dovey and paranoid, all about Hector and terrified of him, we hardly can get a sense of her outside the way we might someone only known online, bifurcated through Hector’s continuing flip-flop between obsession over her and a conspiracy about her real world behavior that feels all-too-familiar in its catfishing and gossip modes. Though the characters never quite emerge outside their feedback loops, they do feel alive differently for not being forced into sideshows; they are what they say and almost nothing more—a more honest affect of realism, subverting the usual state where the reader can see from all sides what the characters can’t into something like the opposite.

6. All on its own, Westra’s timing and nuance is a well-oiled machine to behold, deftly wielding overlapping timeframes in text, misunderstandings and disagreements spread out over noncommunicative stretches, and wry one-liners that somehow ring out despite their stutter-stepping construction. Rather than seemingly flighty as a result of being all digital interaction on the page, the dialogues often seem hyperloaded in their offhandedness—an interesting culmination of bringing the texting style outside its usual confines, in that texting is frequently made of shorthand, naturally infused with big semantic leaps and offscreen takes. What we’re actually reading as it transpires between Hector and his various texting partners—most frequently moth girl, but also Pablo, Leon, Klaus, Linus, 4Sparrow, Will, and others—takes the form of a string of spotty evidence being used to reconstruct the events of Hector’s life, frequently clearly missing pieces and perspective, and thereby more suspenseful than its literal line by line action ever becomes. From section to section, then, the novel sometimes takes on the feel of stacked vignettes, loaded with sleights of hand as in prose poetry while seeming casual enough that they underline the parts of the everyday we phoneheads take so much for granted we hardly bother to acknowledge the significance they operate on top of.

7. Bringing the whole together, the novel as a life project provides fascinating framework for Hector’s life alongside our simultaneous experience of unpacking the messaging of his past and where it’s led him. His online-editor-of-academic-articles friend dislikes the book and spends pages near the end trying to convince him to rework it, which Hector simply massages straight into the narrative itself as part of the reality it means to hold forth, resolution or no. Moth girl, as an experience, feels well lived-in in this way, like seeing someone wriggle out of their own skin and then trying to see what they used to look like. As Hector’s desire for understanding moth girl, and therefore his life with moth girl, mutates across the 10-ish years the novel spans, we begin to see that what he’s taken with him is the desire to make something more from out of what otherwise could only be conceived in fits and starts, like a dream that makes perfect sense inside your head until you try to explain it to someone else. In a time when everybody and their mother wants to announce the novel is dying or dead, Westra proves by sheer will of style that such a question is more so a matter of the disingenuous having given up before they even started than the culture at large not having anywhere to turn; what we’ve been lacking is exactly this willingness to look long into the morass of America and still have an appetite afterward for an all-you-can-eat buffet with the homies.