Author Emmalea Russo peers into the mysteries of the occult in her latest novel. Credit: Michael Newton
The year 2011 saw the release of two movies — one, an auteurist masterpiece by Lars von Trier starring Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg; the other a low-budget think-piece starring co-scriptwriter Brit Marling and William Mapother, then best known as Tom Cruise’s cousin — that shared a notably similar premise. Melancholia and Another Earth each portray the Earth as menaced by the approach of a rival planet. Von Trier’s film ends with the planet striking Earth, refuting the facile reassurances of scientific rationalist Kiefer Sutherland and vindicating his sister-in-law (Dunst), who knew there was nothing to do but accept or anxiously reject your own death and the deaths of everyone you love. The underrated Another Earth, likewise death-haunted, ends more enigmatically. The new planet arrives, then hovers at a distance. Instead of obliterating ours, it reveals a duplicate world on which our lost possibilities — dead loved ones; the victims of our crimes — are wondrously preserved.
Reinforcing the sense of something in the water, or perhaps stars, at the time of their conception, both movies contain a notably similar scene. In each, the female lead (Dunst in Melancholia, Marling in Another Earth) presents herself as a nighttime sexual offering — open and waiting — to the impending planet. In each, the scene is gratuitous (in neither does cosmic penetration advance the plot), and as such essentially meaning-bearing. Both women are shown in an act of partly purgatorial, yet heroic, death-inviting-and-defying self-abandon.
I do not know if the poet, astrologer, and 1990s cinema enthusiast Emmalea Russo had either movie in mind when composing her second novel, The Moon Papers, but it, too, is concerned with the arrival of a new celestial body. Granted, in Russo’s case, “Moon2” is artificial — an inflatable polyethylene contraption “one eighth as large” as the real moon and having “a strong analog vibe,” launched as an art project by the Mojave-based Collective for Constant Creation (“CCC”). Yet despite differences in tone, the three works share a mood — dispersed misgiving, sometimes accompanied by millenarian hopes — and also a specific interest in resonances between the celestial bodies and women’s sexual power. Each asks if these occult forces ought to be honored and even worshipped, or somehow tamed. For The Moon Papers, this also means meditating on the dark powers of art.
A cancelation novel’s lunar sequel
Against the background of the upcoming Moon2 launch, the novel’s main action unfolds in two settings: the Mojave Desert, where we follow Dean Konig, a disaffected member of the CCC; and rural Pennsylvania, home of Velour Bellmer, a 68-year-old pack rat and her daughter, Vesta Furio. Velour lives alone in a decaying mansion cluttered with antique furniture; Vesta, a painter, lives with her husband, Lars Arden, a gallerist three decades her senior, but is carrying on a cross-continental affair with Dean. Video calls grant the adulterous duo visual access to each other’s spaces: Vesta to the CCC compound, Dean to Vesta’s secret second painting studio, where she lets him watch her work. Meanwhile, a bat infestation in Velour’s attic draws local bat specialist Radko, who informs her she is hosting the “maternity colony” of an endangered species, which he cannot legally disturb. And so, in this ambiance of multiform gestation — natural and artificial, publicized and clandestine — the characters wait and Eros flickers. Radko and Velour feel attraction’s pull, despite their discrepant ages and his marriage to Chloe, a psychotherapist; Dean, unobserved by the husband, jacks off to Vesta’s video calls of herself fucking Lars. Lars, absorbed in his gallery work but sensing something is up, overrides his distaste for surveillance and plants a hidden camera in the potted cactus.
Most of these characters are returnees from Russo’s 2024 debut novel Vivienne, to which The Moon Papers is a kind of sequel. The Vivienne Volker of that novel was inspired by the historical Unica Zürn, lover of the surrealist puppet maker Hans Bellmer; at its center was a story about an artist’s cancelation. Vivienne, a textile artist in her 80s when the novel opens, had been slated to appear in a group show of “Forgotten Women Surrealist Artists,” until an online pressure campaign — wittily rendered in the novel’s opening pages by Russo, herself the object of a bizarre cancelation campaign in 2023 — results in her removal. The ostensible primary motive for the campaign is that of imposing “consequences” — for having allegedly incited another woman artist, her husband’s lover, to jump to her death decades earlier. But Volker’s accusers also wish to avoid the harms posed by the “violent nature of her work,” doll clothing whose innovations include cloth intestines and an embryo pinned to the stomach of a dress. Once the renegade gallerist Lars snatches up Vivienne’s work for a solo show, however, all turns out for the best — at least until one last act of mob vindictiveness. In the process, Lars gets acquainted with both Velour and the then 7-year-old Vesta. An epilogue shows Vesta at 18, rolling up to the desert compound of the CCC, newly married to Lars.
Vivienne distinguished itself with its pitch-perfect parody of 2020s art world safetyism, from the social media chatter that punctuates it like a tragic chorus to the embedded press release that declares “this is not an act of censorship. At the NAT Museum, we seek to foster artistic freedom in an atmosphere of safety. Wherever possible, we seek to reduce art-induced distress.” The novel’s deepest insight, however, that which lifted it above satire into vision, was to see in the acts of its dispersed internet chorus the most primal repudiation: essentially, a repudiation of nature, in its bloodiness and wildness, as embodied by Vivienne and her art. The primal “contamination” — to take up the theme of Russo’s essay on her own cancelation — was by the feminine principle.
Vivienne thus proposed an analogy between artistic and gestational creation, as revealed by the efforts of the internet mob to control both, a mission that the CCC takes up at the end of the book. Vivienne’s closing pages depict a CCC project that sees comatose women used as gestation chambers for new births. “Our work transforms the often unnecessarily messy and risky process of creating new life,” a leaked memo reads: “By taking reproduction out of the hands of chance and into the luxury of our desert facility, the CCC fosters safety and equity, while de-emphasizing the role of capricious and often harmful nature.” The stage is thus set for The Moon Papers, in which we see the CCC advertising a “fellowship” offering artists “VCs (voluntary comas) as vacations,” likewise for purposes of parturition.
Don’t let the CCC’s self-presentation as an arts “collective” fool you: it far more resembles Michel Houellebecq’s sterile ultramodern Europe than, say, the Big Sur hippie commune of his novel The Elementary Particles. In an apt parody of modern NGOism, the CCC is both nominally non-hierarchical and — in a Philip K. Dickian touch — funded by the shadowy Voortelle Corporation, as well as by the government (thus yielding the running gag, spanning both novels, as to whether its members have “bosses”). Any conceptual resonance between the CCC’s artificial moon and Vivienne’s detachable embryo, stapled to a dress and doubling as a purse, merely highlights the difference between these two modes of artistic creation.
In a strange way, though, the CCC’s existence attests to a continuing need for art and religion, even in the most degraded circumstances. The spirit, it seems, must externalize itself. A collective devoted to the technological manipulation of the birthing process seems to yearn for some emblem of its reversal of nature. This is what “Moon2” provides. Both literally and figuratively a mockery, it symbolizes the aspiration to mastery by duplicating, usurping, and thereby seeking to tame the cosmic symbol of the feminine and mutable. This will to power is captured in a witty detail when Russo shows a member of an internal CCC chat reminding another member that their project aims to displace the terminology one would have previously taken for granted: “You’re forgetting that we rolled out the phrase Moon1.”
A cancelation novel’s lunar sequel
The dubious conceptual project of the CCC is not the only artwork considered in Russo’s novel, however. Toward the end, the prevailing opposition between openness to the natural and attempts to restrict it — a dynamic also played out in Radko and Velour’s negotiations over the bats in her attic — reveals a new axis. This centers on the gallerist Lars, perhaps the most sympathetic of the novel’s characters, who represents a cussedly populist spirit opposed to the petty and conformist pretensions of the art world. (He is for much of the book a lone voice calling bullshit on the CCC.) Lars has spent most of the book waiting, with increasing impatience, for Vesta’s new paintings so he can include them in his next show. He gets more than he bargained for — a series of intimate nudes, unmistakably of Dean Konig, produced without either Vesta’s lover’s awareness or her husband’s, blowing the lid off both their affair and the inner sanctum of the CCC.
The strange permissions of art let Vesta turn a real affair — if her digital escapades count as one — into at once a genuine work of art and an act of infiltration, each of which paradoxically plays to the sympathies of her husband, and might thereby bring her closer to him. In its implied endorsement of Vesta’s acts, the novel thus ends up being a defense of a more traditional art — call it exploratory or Romantic — linked to Eros. Yet if Vesta’s paintings amount to “evidence” (as Lars can’t help but recognize) of their origins in illicit acts, they are not reducible to them. Both embodied and transcendent, such art is unsettling and ambiguous, far more so than the ponderous travesty of “Moon2.” The novel’s ultimate contrast is thus between art that is, so to speak, officially anti-authoritarian and art that opens itself to the dark forces of creation and love.
In moving beyond Vivienne’s cancelation plot, Russo seems, it must be said, to have decided against having much plot at all. With its chill vibe and reduced narrative drive, The Moon Papers feels at times like a set of thematic variations — a minor dependent satellite — upon its formidable precursor. Particularly toward the end, however, Russo’s second novel acquires a lunar intensity of its own. One awaits the next turn of the tide.
Paul Franz has contributed criticism and poems to the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and other periodicals.
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