I knew Jenny Davidson’s name because she’s a professor at Columbia, which is where I went to college: I didn’t take any classes with her but I went to an informational talk she gave for people who might want to go to grad school in the humanities (which is something I decided I did not, in fact, want to do). Since her name was familiar, this book caught my eye as I was browsing the New Books shelf at the library, and the subject matter made me decide to take it home: it’s set in Morningside Heights (where Columbia is) and is about three grad students/post-graduate fellows at Columbia and the live-action role-playing games that two of them create.
I liked how concerned this book is with the idea of play, with the ideas and mechanics of games: it opens with an epigraph from Johan Huizinga about how play takes place in a “magic circle,” a space “within which special rules obtain,” about how games and the spaces they’re played in are all “temporary worlds within the ordinary world.” That’s all really interesting stuff, and stuff the book’s characters are interested in exploring. There’s methodical and logical Ruth, who’s creating a game called “Trapped in the Asylum” that’s based on Julius Chambers’s exposé of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, which was located where Columbia’s campus is now: her game is about creating an immersive and imaginative experience of a place and time that’s full of real facts and artifacts, real historical details. And then there’s Anna, whose game, “Places of Power,” takes a magical/fantastical approach, asking its players to move through a Morningside Heights in which the boundaries of the neighborhood, spaces like Grant’s Tomb and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, have been invested with protection against evil occult forces—protection that has faded and needs to be restored. And then there’s the game that Ruth and Anna create together, along with their friend/Ruth’s roommate Lucy and Anna’s brother Anders: it’s based on The Bacchae and so, aptly, is about the tension between logic and illogic, between the kind of approach that Ruth has to the world and to games and the kind of approach that Anna has. (Ruth, when talking about “Trapped in the Asylum,” says she wants to build a game that will “evoke a historically authentic sense of place”; Anna counters that it “might work better if it’s not the literal truth” (4-5).)
The other thing I really liked about this book is the setting: it’s satisfying to read a book where I can picture so many of the places mentioned, not just the buildings on Columbia’s campus (e.g. Buell Hall, which is indeed a remnant of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum) but also the bars and restaurants and parks in the area. The Heights! The Hungarian Pastry Shop! Max Soha! Brunch at Kitchenette! Sakura Park, which is right by International House, which is where I worked the summer after freshman year! It’s satisfying when an author sets a book in a place she clearly knows well, and when it’s recognizable to anyone reading it who also knows that place well: there’s a point when Lucy’s taking a yoga class, and before it’s actually mentioned where it is, I wondered if it was the studio above Silver Moon Bakery, which, indeed, it was.
On the down-side, I wasn’t sure, when I started this book, that I was going to be able to get past the dialogue, which sometimes struck me as weirdly formal or stilted. (One example, but there were others: when Ruth can’t find her lipstick, Lucy says “I will keep an eye out for it” (24). I can’t make that sentence sound right in my head at all. Surely it’d be “I’ll keep an eye out for it”?) Luckily, I eventually got engaged enough in the story that I didn’t mind, and the shifts in the narration help: the first section of the book is third-person omniscient narration but sort of focused more on Lucy’s interiority; the second section is first-person narration by Ruth; the last section is first-person narration by Lucy, in the form of a letter/narrative provided as evidence in a court case. I also liked the way that the text incorporates blog posts (mostly by Anna, but also a faux Bwog post) and text messages and emails. And reading about Ruth and Anna’s games, as well as their joint game based on The Bacchae, was lots of fun: the Bacchae-based game (“The Bacchae on Morningside Heights”) makes players choose whether they’re on “Team Dionysus” or “Team Pentheus,” with Anna as Dionysus and Ruth as Pentheus, and lots of debauchery on the Dionysian side. There is also some creepiness, largely in the form of Anna’s brother Anders, who arrives from Sweden unexpectedly after Christmas, and, of course, The Bacchae being a tragedy, I don’t feel it’s a spoiler to say things don’t end well. This ended up being a really fun read, and I’m glad I pushed past the occasional clunkiness.
Leave a Reply