House Style

Overstaying by Ariane Koch, translated from the German by Damion Searls. Dorothy, 176 pages. 2024.

I think about Donald Barthelme’s story “Florence Green is 81” a lot—about twice a week, due to New York City’s parking regulations. The line “I begin to drive my tiny car in idiot circles in the street” aptly describes the indignity of moving a vehicle for street cleaning. The story’s narrator is a dinner guest of Florence Green, the rich and dotty hostess who nods off at the table, jolting awake to remind the party that she’d like to go away, that her upstairs bathroom leaks. “Florence I have decided is evading the life-issue,” observes the narrator. “She is proposing herself as more unhappy than she really is. She has in mind making herself more interesting. She is afraid of boring us. She is trying to establish her uniqueness. She does not really want to go away.”

The unnamed narrator of Swiss writer Ariane Koch’s Overstaying is not eighty-one—we can assume she’s stuck in the doldrums of her thirties—but I thought of Barthelme’s story again while reading Koch’s debut novel; like Florence Green, the narrator is evading the life-issue, practicing a histrionic and deliberately idiosyncratic unhappiness. In a state of adolescent spinsterhood, she rattles around a house that’s too big for her, collecting vacuum cleaners, becoming a subject of local gossip and speculation. She is terrified of boring her audience. And though she despises her mountain village, her threats of departure ring hollow. She’s still here:

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, even if I constantly act like I’m about to. I am the oldest fossil of all, and even if someone asked me on bended knee to leave here I would stay anyway.

As the stubborn keeper of the flame of her own misery, the narrator rejects the herd’s cherished pursuit of meaning and fulfillment. She is free to do as she does not wish, and she won’t be parting with that god-given right anytime soon. Living alone in her family’s house, the narrator waits for her brothers and sisters to kick her out because “they have the money to say that my house should belong to them.” She describes herself as the superintendent “to make sure it doesn’t fall apart,” a job she fails at: pieces of the home’s exterior fall off daily. She is the “warden of a ruin.” One day, “contemplating departure” again, she goes to the train station, but like Florence Green, she’s not serious. Enter “the visitor,” whom she spots arriving from origins unknown, swinging his bags with a potent combination of swagger and innocence. Clocking him again at the Roundel Bar, her favorite haunt, the narrator is intrigued. “The last thing I thought before I fell into his clutches,” she says, “was that I had to be careful not to fall into his clutches.”

She’s lonely; she’s curious; she has some half-formed thoughts she’d like to share with a new confidant—but really, the narrator isn’t sure why she approaches the visitor. “I can’t with the best will in the world provide an accurate calculation of my path,” she says. She stands before him, staring, so he speaks first: “Do you want to have a baby?” he asks, though it’s unclear if he knows what he’s saying. In a sense, yes: she wants to make the visitor her child, her ward—but also, maybe, her lover and friend. The visitor expresses no desire or need, no plan or destination, but the narrator describes his poncho as tent-like, and when he forms a triangle with his hands, she interprets it to mean roof. She’s eager to rescue him from a houseless fate—even if he doesn’t seem to care. She pretends her motives are noble: “taking in guests is a proper and civilized thing to do.” It seems equally likely that she’s trying to feel secure and powerful in her housing situation, exerting what influence she has over a vulnerable other.

The vast majority of the book is confined to the house, where she and the visitor explore cohabitation. They act out fairy tales. They sit outside, wrapped in fur, and drink cheap white wine. They eat each other’s food. While he sleeps, the narrator rolls him up in her Persian carpet and drags him around. “I sometimes forget that outside exists,” she says. “All that exists for me is an inside, and in that inside there is nothing but the visitor.”

We never learn the visitor’s name; according to the narrator, it’s so long it can’t be remembered. (The narrator’s name is equally mysterious: we know only that she shares it with a “misogynist judge,” an “insane biologist,” and an arms manufacturer.) His character recalls another line from “Florence Green,” when an aspiring writer identifies the point of literature as the “creation of a strange object covered in fur which breaks your heart.” In Overstaying, the visitor is unquestionably strange: “Something’s not quite right about the visitor.” He is, it seems, covered in fur. He does, eventually, break the narrator’s heart. Is he a walking enzyme of fiction? The visitor is hard to pin down as any one thing. He has “brushfingers,” sometimes described as claws. He wears spectacles. His hair grows very fast. He requires daily brushing. He howls at night. His limbs are too long, his head is too narrow. Perhaps he is a borzoi? He paints his skin the color of skin. He is an insect that doesn’t look like an insect, “one big traveling bedbug.” “I flip through a book about parasites,” says the narrator, “and in every example I recognize my visitor.” Collected, his features are equally beautiful and monstrous. He seems to lack guile and goal, as if his only function is to activate the events of the novel—or, more precisely, as if he is the event of the novel.

The visitor’s mystique recalls the erotic magnetism of other literary strangers: the cornered, compatible fish-man in Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban; the sexually dexterous sorcerer in Kathryn Davis’s Duplex; the wish-fulfilling devil in John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. But the narrator’s arrested development circumscribes the rites of intimacy. She and the visitor bathe together, intertwine their limbs on the couch, wrestle, play games—their actions largely confined to the choreography of childhood. Lonely and yearning, the narrator shrinks from human touch but wants to be desired, even preyed upon. Assessing a painting at one point, she identifies with the antelope in the jaws of a lion.

In Damion Searls’s sure-footed translation, Koch’s first-person voice achieves the stylized claustrophobia often associated with unhinged narrators. James Wood once described Knut Hamsun’s narrators as “self-unravellers,” a wonderful term for the frayed and fraying voice of the deranged I. The narrator of Overstaying claims to be writing a Holy Book, but in service to which god—the god of the sublease agreement?—remains unclear. She confuses being a prophet with letting a room; for her, how to live with others deserves a special kind of scripture, one that preaches the importance of wearing pants around the house. Her efforts to write a Holy Book expose the narrator’s own needs: no one will tell her how to live.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to see the holy text. Why does Overstaying tease but deny us in this fashion? The charitable answer is that the narrator feels protective of her work, or at heart knows it’s slight—a thing to be pinned to a shared refrigerator rather than distributed to a flock of followers. I sympathize with Koch, who probably didn’t want to interrupt the voice she so finely tuned, but I can’t help but see the scripture’s absence as a missed opportunity for formal variation, one easily incorporated into the structural advantages of the novel. But perhaps I’m just longing for my own sacred laws of living.

The narrator’s voice arrives in small doses, portioned to reduce the odds of getting sick on something so flavorful. Koch relies on the white space created by frequent section breaks to render a narrator of fragmented, mercurial attention. The short sections give the book a structural momentum that also makes it easier to move through its dreamy lack of consequence. Some sections consist of one or two sentences. Others operate by deliberate constraint, like using the phrase “Since the visitor’s arrival” at the start of every sentence, some of which are left dangling, forever seeking an independent clause to tie up and resolve the thought. This specific formal choice reeks of craft exercise and seems implausible for a narrator whose prose mostly—and to its benefit—jags away from something produced in a graduate writing program. But it is almost inevitable that a book with this much comic energy would suffer from a touch of inconsequential quirk. Koch’s gift means misfires are part of the package. I like vacuum cleaners as much as the next guy, but the narrator’s room of nuzzling nozzles felt overdetermined in its whimsy. Other flashes of odd detail are properly brilliant: the visitor, catlike, dipping his tongue in his coffee cup; the stooped back the narrator refuses to inherit from her family’s hunched patriarchs; the entrancing televised snooker feats of Mark the Shark.

Overstaying has a lot to say about housing—not in a particularly consistent or dogmatic way, but in a fumbling, ambivalent, and artistic one. It’s the tale of a home gone stale and, more largely and critically, of housing precarity and the moral rot that comes from wielding the privilege of property over others. Aware of her own advantages, the narrator notices the town’s unhoused people, but her sympathy falters, replaced by disgust: “How many times have I seen them crawling out from these holes tugging shapeless pieces of luggage behind them.” She ascribes a quiet dignity to an unhoused woman in a gray coat, an assumption that flatters the status quo and shirks any obligations she might have toward local inequities. At times, she seems to struggle to formulate her thoughts on the matter—perhaps because her own position is simultaneously precarious and privileged:

There are people who want a house but don’t have one and the people who have a house but don’t want one. There are people with ugly houses and people with other overnighting options, for example a mobile home, tent, or sleeping bag. The boundaries between the various categories of domicile are fluid, like boundaries in general. But we might say that someone who temporarily lays claim to domestic lodgings that don’t belong to them on the one hand steps across this fluid boundary and thus on the other hand may be termed a visitor.

It’s easy for her to say these boundaries are fluid: for her they are. For others, they’re more rigid. Overstaying depicts a world where power of property is sometimes mistaken for personality—and where you might confuse a religious text for a reminder not to walk around in your underwear. By the end of the novel, the golden handcuffs of the narrator’s family homestead have started to chafe and corrode, and views on housing sharpen into rancor toward the gamified humiliations of the real estate ladder:

People live somewhere, they pay rent, then they sublet the place to someone, who sublets it further to someone else, and so on. It’s a chain of subleases, each implying the next and suggesting that the highest goal is to own something. The subletters’ subletters sit on furniture that is second-hand or third-hand or passed down through a whole chain of hands that can’t even be fully traced back.

And then, in the end, the houses are usually empty, because the people living there have long since moved away, leaving behind traces of subsubsublets.

Weary with the cycle of leasing and letting, she knows she’s guilty of passive complicity. In the sublease chain, she’s somewhere in the middle: “the highest goal” of ownership unachieved, but not a victim of subsubsublets. Either more or less housing privilege would at least lend some clarity to her status. At one point, she musters the courage to confess, “I look for evil in the outside world but find it only within,” a succinct but uninspired articulation of liberal guilt. If she’s accusing herself of anything, it’s unoriginality and laziness: she’s just another kid coasting off of her parents.

Unhappiness aggravates her already morbid disposition, and the narrator fixates on death. She calls her fellow townspeople fossils and herself a “tomb-keeper,” returning to images of decay and deterioration throughout the novel. It isn’t just her house that’s falling apart; the Roundel Bar is also crumbling, its patrons growing wrinkled, petrifying before her eyes. She uses words associated with ancient Egypt, a culture of the fellow death-obsessed: “Next to the small town where I have come to rest, as if in a sarcophagus, there is a large mountain, rather like a pyramid.” Her fish perish, and she buries them in little graves in the yard. Meanwhile, “The new fish in the aquarium are swimming in the waters of death, suspecting nothing,” she says. “Are they still alive or already dead?” We might ask the same thing of her. Perhaps the visitor is a sort of guide, preparing her for that final journey. Until then, she and the other townspeople cling to their rotten and reassuring structures, pretending this is living.

I’ve seen the book’s original title, Die Aufdrängung, translated as The Imposition—a pejorative jab at the visitor that leaves the narrator unscathed. As a title, “Overstaying” cuts both ways. In the end, the narrator is the overstayer, the one who ignored the cues and calls to move on. (When the visitor tries to leave, she throws a magnificent tantrum.)

Voice-driven novels also struggle with overstaying their welcome, and Koch smartly ends things before style exhaustion sets in. On TV, the narrator sees people walking around in a strange country, and her final recorded act is to become a wandering stranger, someone flung (or who flings themselves) across the world, at the mercy of nations which will see her as visitor, as tourist, or perhaps as something more threatening: the traveler with no return ticket, the invasive migrant. As a story of both a stranger and a journey, the novel defies Tolstoy’s plot dichotomy, both elegantly mocking and ultimately succumbing to the urge for a grand happening. Why does she leave at last? The reasons are many, so her motivation is both unassailable and murky. Perhaps it’s the fatigue of complicity. Perhaps it’s time to be the antelope, place her body in the jaws of the lion. The narrator’s decision to leave represents her recognition that a place of power is no place for the writer, and a guide to life shouldn’t be written by one who hasn’t lived it.