Barrelhouse Reviews: Overstaying by Ariane Koch
Reviewed by Devon Halliday
Translated by Damion Searls / Dorothy / September 2024 / 176 pp
The narrator of Ariane Koch’s Overstaying lives in a small town, in a crumbling house her parents have long since abandoned and her siblings will someday come to claim. In the town there is a mountain, a railroad station, a circular bar called the Roundel, and besides that, only houses, smaller than the narrator’s own. One desultory afternoon she makes eye contact with a visitor across the railroad tracks; she follows him to the Roundel, they have a brief exchange in their respective languages, and then it transpires that he’s moving into the tenth room of her house, bringing his mattress, his plastic bags, his poncho, his appetite, and his drainclogging fur slash hair.
The visitor is not human, exactly. Perhaps he is not exclusively human. He has “doelike eyes” and “sharp teeth,” “furry arms” and “fur-covered brushfingers.” “He paints skin on his body so that it looks like skin,” the narrator observes suspiciously. “He makes little dots for freckles where he has freckles already. He washes his hairs so that later he can get them greasy again. Paints his lips with lip-colored lipstick.” He is capable of “jogging through the woods in oversized leather gloves and a neon-pink down vest,” but “he can barely lift his legs, his back is humped, the corners of his mouth droop wet-earthwards.” He’s a pitiful, sometimes contemptible sight: “His limbs are much too long. The visitor’s limbs flop around and have no function whatsoever. I laugh and snort, coffee comes spurting out my nose, when I see the visitor’s head, whose narrowness can be explained only with recourse to a tragic genetic accident.”
Just as the visitor refuses to cohere physically, he refuses to cohere on any emotional plane. He is plagued by howling nightmares, but sleeps so deeply that the narrator can roll him up in a rug. “I drag the visitor complete with his carpet around my house, intentionally bumping him into all the corners and doorframes. Then I let him, complete with his carpet, tumble down the stairs, but he doesn’t even consider waking up… cool and cylindrical as a cucumber… In the morning, the visitor rises at the crack of dawn and signals good cheer, whereas I, completely shattered, can barely raise my head,” the narrator grouses, but at other times it’s the visitor who is haggard and listless, and the narrator who has “consciously and rationally decided to avoid the visitor and his despair.” Sometimes the visitor is helpless to leave, scratching at the window glass; sometimes the narrator peers desperately through her binoculars to find out where in town the visitor has run off to.
The visitor is sapping the life out of the narrator, or she is sapping the life out of him. The narrator is protecting the visitor, imprisoning him, feeding him, starving him, taking advantage or being taken advantage of, seducing or being seduced. The novel’s fragmented structure allows all things to be true in turn, never contradicting because they never meet. Unlike novels that explore each nuance of a complex relationship dynamic, Overstaying nips individual bites of nuance out of many possible dynamics: the dynamic of unwelcome guest and longsuffering host, of flighty guest and possessive host, of affectionate guest and indifferent host, of parasitic guest and complicit host.
It is thanks to this inconstancy that Overstaying manages to evade allegory. Is this a novel about immigration, about ownership, about lost generations and lost places, about the corrupting nature of stasis? Occasionally, yes—but mostly it is a novel about the narrator and her relationship to the world, the visitor expressing aspects of that world like an outgrowth.
Through all the reversals in the narrator-visitor power struggle, the surreal shifts in the visitor’s nature and abilities, and the fluctuating boundaries of their relationship, the only clear and lasting impression is of a life out of control. “Just a moment ago,” says the narrator, “I had been immersed in everyday life, counting the stripes on the sweater, smoothing down the bedspread, seeing the filaments of dust dangling from the ceiling, pouring tea into a glass. Then, all of a sudden: the stripes overlap like pick-up sticks, the bedspread is piled up alarmingly, the filaments of dust are a-tremble, the tea hangs in midair like a glass sculpture before splattering to the floor.” It’s as if someone has picked up the narrator’s life and violently crumpled it, everything scrunching and smashing inwards. Her habitual discontent is disturbed by sudden stabs of pleasure and loss. It’s reminiscent of falling in love, though the narrator never names it as such: “The last thing I thought before I fell into his clutches was that I had to be careful not to fall into his clutches.”
The visitor’s allure correlates to his likeliness to leave. When he lounges on the couch, outstaying his welcome, the narrator vacuum-seals and welds the snackboxes shut to “starve him out.” But when he hurries to the front door, “he is to be stopped straightaway by flinging oneself across his path.” The visitor can’t be allowed to depart nor to settle in; his loneliness is irritating, but his independence is intolerable.
His happiness, too, is intolerable: “The visitor’s new optimism vis-à-vis life is like a screeching power saw in my ears. His intact moral state like a thorn in my eye… While he goes around filling all and sundry with joy, the deepest imaginable abysses sprout up inside me. I never intended for the visitor, a lost soul I took in out of the goodness of my heart, to slip out of his sadness.” Love is possessive and jealous—that isn’t news to anyone—but here Koch evokes a particular nastiness woven into the fabric of love. Wishing someone to stay in a state of need at all costs; resenting any competing sources of joy; simultaneously desiring and shirking responsibility: these are recognizable strains of real-world love, exaggerated and distended in the novel’s absurdist circumstances. “When the visitor opens his mouth to say something,” the narrator tells us idly, “I love beating him to the punch.”
The narrator is proud, and at the heart of this pride must be a deep well of shame and self-loathing, though we never quite glimpse it: “The fact is, all my life I’ve longed to go away but then I’ve never left. The fact is, I’ve been thinking about leaving and talking about leaving my whole life long but I’m still here. I am the oldest fossil of all, and I hate this small town so much that I’ll have my revenge on it by never actually leaving.”
Like the narrator’s spiteful love, this stubborn self-sabotage feels familiar—more than familiar, it feels somehow modern. We are besieged by options and alternatives, better ways we could be living, better people we could resemble, bigger problems than ours to overcome. Confronted with this world or one like it, the narrator refuses all self-improvement, as if the pursuit of happiness is a sordid racket that she alone knows better than to fall prey to. “If the house caught on fire,” she speculates, “I wouldn’t take anything with me, but I also wouldn’t leave.” Nothing here has value except her own doubled-down commitment to it—there’s a kind of nobility in deciding to hold onto the nothing that you have.
What fascinates me about Overstaying is less the absurdity, the fragmentary structure, the physical instability of the novel’s world, and more the portrait of the narrator that emerges through the cracks. “I’ve never said I’m proud of how wicked I am,” she says. “And yet I must admit I’ve come to terms with it relatively quickly.” Her wickedness—spite, contempt, control, passivity, pettiness, indecision, paranoia, stubbornness, inconstancy—is unique only in its honesty. One great pleasure of reading Overstaying is basking in that wickedness a little while, since after all it’s not so much more pronounced than the sharp or petty instincts that slip through our own minds unremarked.
There’s also surprising delight in the narrator’s mulish outlook on life. Take the following passage, where she imagines a possible future with the visitor: “We could found the worst moving company of all time. We would always show up too late, would always be in a bad mood, would bump the most valuable piano into everything; the corners of every piece of furniture would be blunted or broken off, the stairway walls scratched. While hauling the pieces that are much too heavy for us, we’d scream constantly. We wouldn’t carry anything, actually, just scrape it along the floor, or else throw it right out the window. We would then sweep up the shattered furniture lying on the street and toss the pieces and smithereens into a van.”
This intends to be a litany of rage, but mostly it sounds like fun. Maybe it’s that we, turning one’s dreary protest against life into a co-conspirative performance. This might even be the incidental takeaway of Overstaying: that the presence of others turns life into a bizarre and complicated game, and that, however aggravating it can be to haggle over the rules with strangers and lovers and fur-covered visitors, it’s much better than playing alone.
Overstaying isn’t the kind of immersive that grabs your lapel and insistently stares into your eyes. It’s the kind of immersive that sits down beside you at the airport, quietly engaging in some weird pastime that you keep glancing over at until gradually you’ve abandoned your chicken Caesar wrap to watch with your jaw a little agape. It’s slippery, indecisive, and occasionally piercing. All the wisdom and beauty it has to offer are irreverently packaged and left on your doorstep without a note. The more I flip back through the book, the harder it gets to summarize, and the better I like it.
Devon Halliday is a Pushcart Prize winner, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow, and a 2024 Anthony Veasna So Scholar. Her short stories have appeared and are forthcoming in Ploughshares, One Story, Idaho Review, West Branch, Indiana Review, and Ninth Letter, among other journals. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University.