Barrelhouse Reviews: Dreams Under Glass, by Anca Szilágyi
Review by Amy Reardon
Lanternfish Press / September 2022 / 264 pp
Anca Szilágyi’s second novel, Dreams Under Glass, explores a young artist’s ache to make meaning in a world that feels meaningless. At the center of the story is Binnie Greenson, who makes assemblage: 3D dioramas of found objects that tell a larger story through their arrangement together. An assemblage itself, the novel delivers the reader into that lost-in-the-tunnel period of the creative process, that desperately empty space before the art reveals itself.
We meet Binnie at the epicenter of a global financial crisis—New York City 2008—where she has taken a paralegal job at a law firm. Her mantra: “Do. Not. Get. Used. To. Money.” Enter her college frenemy, anointed, privileged. “Ellen viewed life in New York as some kind of extension of an honors seminar, a place to spout opinions, knowledge, and political tracts with supreme confidence in a loud voice, always ready to follow up with emphatic disagreement.” Naturally, Ellen works at an art gallery. She offers to introduce Binnie to her boss at the holiday party, inadvertently setting a deadline for Binnie to produce new art. Terrified, she contemplates skipping the party, but what kind of serious artist is afraid to talk about her work?
Unfortunately, Binnie’s days—her subway commute, her day job, her new lover—all conspire to pull her away. Which brings us to the brilliance of this novel: the further Binnie drifts from her dioramas, the harder they pull at her from inside. The central conflict of the novel appears when Binnie reckons with that sizzling space between wanting to create and actually creating.
So Szilágyi illuminates her “dreams under glass.” Binnie makes sense of the elements of her life by assembling them into imaginary constructs in her head. In this way, the novel becomes a meta-diorama juxtaposing greed and poverty, comfort and pestilence, art and anxiety, ugliness and beauty.
Found objects and existing spaces collide to form the story’s landscape. One is Manhattan’s Lipstick Building, where Binnie and, coincidentally, Bernie Madoff both work. Binnie spots Madoff rushing past an angry crowd in the building’s lobby on the day of his arrest, forcing a collision of greed for greed’s sake with art for art’s sake. Another crucial space is her Aunt Ruby’s rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, the only legacy from her working-class parents. Early on, Binnie lives here alone. “Ruby’s tomb…Ruby died alone, scared, unfulfilled, her brightest days a rosy memory of suitors shiny with Brilliantine cream. She could never say: this is part of some great long string of disappointment. […] It was time to cut the cord. Before she hardened into a stone baby.” She gives up the safety of the rent-controlled flat in Brooklyn and moves into a perpetually cold studio in Midtown, scrubbing away decades of filth and setting up sticky mouse traps. Here, she hides her treasures (the found objects for her art) in a trash bag so her friends won’t see them, and recommits to making new work.
Szilágyi has meditated on ekphrastic writing, or looking at a piece of art as a way to enter prose. “Art provokes feeling and thought, and sometimes, hopefully, action,” she wrote in an essay for LARB. The process helped her find her way through her first novel, Daughters of the Air. It’s a method she passes on to Binnie, who discovers assemblage working at the library in college. “There’d been some artist books there and she’d become enamored with dreamy, obscure objects, like a book in the shape of a bed, with embroidered quilts and pillow cases serving as pages. She wanted to make dreamy stuff like that, stuff of wonder.”
In this manner, Binnie’s days unfold. Szilágyi adds playful, surreal punctuations to depict scenes through Binnie’s eyes:
In her fantasy world, if she’d made her Lipstick Building installation, one floor would be ‘Wild, Wild, Wilmington’ and encompass all of these objects: an avalanche of rogue cowboy businessmen, game show-style Mardi Gras hysteria, televangelist pyramid schemes, Madoff, Medici, slot machine cacophony, an unsettling soundscape of laugh tracks and mania, and, off in a dark corner, something less careful viewers might miss: a hunchbacked underworld god of jewels, a Quaismoto Pluto. A mixed metaphor monster, who wants to be loved, whom you want to love, but who must die.
Always, in the midst of ugliness, Szilágyi strategically places unexpected beauty, returning often to hoarded found objects, like Aunt Ruby’s cut-glass perfume bottle or a client’s glass eye. At dinner one night, the client accidentally expels the eye, which bounces and splinters into pieces. Binnie crouches to help, squirreling away the largest crescent chunk. Once these objects find their way into Binnie’s consciousness, they remain there, testing themselves in different configurations in search of the perfect fit. “The twisting house grew enormous in its multiplying, its overlapping corners forming facets like a cut-glass perfume bottle or a tower converted from steel and granite to pink rock candy, or thousands of shards and cracked glass eyes catching light.”
But as the gallery holiday party draws near, Binnie’s only progress is “Circular thinking, a regular rejection of ideas, a deepening self-loathing, and a dread of the rent coming due.” Her ambivalence for her day job reaches its apex when a massive infestation of oversized cockroaches covers every surface of the kitchen at work. “The room appeared darker than usual, despite the fact that it was windowless, as if someone the night before had shut off all the machinery sporting glowing buttons. Then the darkness—somehow—squirmed.” Cockroaches meet a Mardi Gras king cake, leading to a shocking office death. Binnie may be implicated, causing her mental health to spiral downward. Suddenly, the stakes are no longer whether Binnie can overcome artistic impostor syndrome; now her job and freedom may be in peril, as the novel’s sudden escalation mimics the arc of an artistic breakthrough.
As any artist knows, especially an unproven one, self-doubt is constant. Binnie embodies this struggle. Zigzagging between playfulness and despair, Dreams Under Glass asks how the fantasy of making art compares with the reality, leaving the reader to answer. But not without a hint from Binnie, who tries to explain herself to her lover: “I just want to live a life that feels alive.”
Amy Reardon’s work has appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, Alta Journal, Glamour, and Electric Literature, among other places. Follow her @ReardonAmy.