The Fifth Wall

by Rachel Nagelberg

Overview

A debut novel of great depth and power. “Art, grief, and technology churn in this excellent and raw novel…that profoundly explores the way we live with technology and how it informs our understanding of reality.”—Publishers Weekly

In this debut novel, conceptual artist Sheila B. Ackerman heeds a mysterious urge to return to her estranged family home and arrives at the exact moment of her mother’s suicide.

In an attempt to cope with and understand her own self destructive tendencies, Sheila plants a camera on the lawn outside the house to film 24/7 while workers deconstruct the physical object that encases so many of her memories. Meanwhile, as she begins to experience frequent blackouts, she finds herself hunting a robot drone through the San Francisco MOMA with a baseball bat, part of a provocative, technological show, The Last Art, and resuming a violent affair with her college professor. With a backdrop of post-9/11 San Francisco, Sheila navigates the social-media-obsessed, draught-ridden landscape of her life, exploring the frail line between the human impulse to control everything that takes place around us and the futility of excessive effort to do so. This thought-provoking work is for anyone who questions the status quo.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781574232288
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	05/15/2017
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Rachel Nagelberg is a novelist, poet, and conceptual artist living in Los Angeles. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Universityof San Francisco and has had poems and stories published in numerous journals.

Editorial Reviews

07/17/2017
Art, grief, and technology churn in this excellent and raw novel about a conceptual artist’s recovery from witnessing her mother’s suicide. Sheila arrives home to Berkeley, Calif., after finishing a fine art MFA at Cornell, only to walk in on her mother “poised in the foyer, facing a mirror, gun in her mouth.” Her mother pulls the trigger just as Sheila walks through the door. Rather than confront the horror of what she’s seen, Sheila attempts to turn it into art, hiring a builder named Jesse to tear down her mother’s house and setting up a camera to film its demolition. “I’m extinguishing its power. Eradicating its history,” she tells him, and notes that her “art has always been about documentation.” Sheila’s theorizing is insightful: she labels technology “one great big illusion we’ve all grown unaccustomed to” and wonders at how we use it to “conform our existence over and over.” Still, Sheila’s grand attempt at sublimating her trauma can’t prevent a “lack” from rising within her, what she understands as her body “screaming at me that I’m here.” She attempts to fill the lack through trysts with Jesse, a one-time film studies TA, and an MDMA-snorting fellow artist who introduces her to a debaucherous, surreal place called the Lost Theater. None of these men or experiences can fill the hole in her, though, leaving her to wonder, “Oh Sheila, why can’t you just mourn already?” Through her vivid depiction of Sheila’s emotional tailspin, Nagelberg’s novel profoundly explores the way we live with technology and how it informs our understanding of reality. (May)

Publishers Weekly