Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World

November 29, 2021
Poet Fletcher’s tender debut novel (after the collection It Is Going to Be a Good Year) follows a 20-something couple facing the end of the world. In the not-too-distant future, Sam works from home in Brooklyn, busying himself with the tedium of resubmitting invoices for proofreading gigs while Eleanor braves her daily commute. Their romance began after they ran into each other at a party several years earlier, during which the sky ominously (or fortuitously) opened up. Now, as more harbingers of end-times emerge, such as a threat of a nuclear attack on the city and the secret police (“just like regular police, except secret”), Sam spends a good portion of his days planning the meals he cooks for Eleanor, each dinner becoming an event, perhaps just enough to maintain optimism. Fletcher confidently describes Sam and Eleanor’s staid domestic life with punchy, declarative lines (“It’s so hard, sometimes, to try to love the world with an open heart”). It’s a style that mostly endears and occasionally grates. Still, this emotionally resonant dystopian succeeds at turning the end of the world into a new beginning.

December 1, 2021
A young couple copes with bad weather and looming apocalypse in this debut novel. Sam and Eleanor share an apartment in Brooklyn. She designs websites. He freelances as a proofreader and cooks nice dinners. They're young and in love, although Sam's college debt hangs over him and Eleanor's thyroid nodule could portend trouble. They are the main story, but the first-person narrator also presents recurring motifs such as epic snowstorms, an impending nuclear attack on New York City, commuting woes, secret police who put people in black plastic bags and take them away in vans, historical events such as the killing of Black activist Fred Hampton, a German orchestra that wolves hold captive in an Italian castle, and angels in various contexts. The narrator frequently refers to violent acts by regular police, as in "the cops are shooting children in the street." There's a faux naif quality to the voice here, as if the narrator wants to write a nice love story but the incessant bad news from the nasty world keeps getting in the way. The prose is naif-appropriate. It has the graceless exuberance and emotional swings of a letter home from summer camp. The narrator occasionally throws up his hands in frustration: "Sam brought her coffee, or he stayed in bed. I can't tell you everything that happens." While the voice and prose can be humorous and even charming at times, finally they become tiresome. And frustrating since it's clear that a sharper intelligence lies beneath the ingenuous facade. Fletcher brings it out for the historical asides, for the rants on debt, even for the detailed recipes of the meals Sam prepares. His decision to assume a pose somewhere between Forrest Gump and Mister Rogers--"Listen sometimes we just have to let things in the world be nice"--doesn't serve him well. A strange, amusing work that leaves one puzzled by the author's choices.

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December 1, 2021
Fletcher's unusual debut novel evokes a surreal, heightened version of reality. It follows Sam and Eleanor, two Brooklynites whose lives are constantly unsettled by a bombardment of shocking news--potential nuclear wars, unexplained planes crowding the sky, and the growing threat of the secret police. In this world, everything is precarious, including Sam's work as a freelancer. Sam finds solace in constantly devising sumptuous meals to cook for Eleanor, described in exacting detail by the narrator, whose voice and opinions often take over the novel. The digressive prose of the narrator is relentless, hyperactive, and indignantly and understandably angry at police brutality, student loans, and the many under-acknowledged horrors of American history. Indeed, it is like a story being told by someone who keeps falling down Wikipedia rabbit-holes (and Fletcher even thanks Wikipedia in the acknowledgements). In a story similar to Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions (2006), Sam and Eleanor find comfort in each other's presence as chaos engulfs the world. Strange and glib, this is a Lynchian love story that captures the relentless ridiculousness of the contemporary moment.

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