By Miguel Angel Garcia Jr.
At first glance, Eugenie Montague’s debut novel is a murder mystery of its time – metafictional, immersed in internet culture and social media, filled with cultural commentary and an underlying sense that, in a post-COVID world, the only ones winning are the ones on top.
Scratch a little under the surface, and the bones of “Swallow the Ghost” are made of denser, more human stuff.
Told in three parts in three different styles – three different voices, even – Montague channels Dostoyevskian polyphony, Cortazar and Kafka (pardon my literary name dropping, but the book is filled with it) to create a world in which the same story is told through different points of view. Each is filtered through the particular world views of the characters, and subject to the biases and suspicions that each of them hold.
Jane, Jesse and Jeremy. Three J’s. I wonder what that means? If it means anything at all. In its varied forms and styles, “Swallow the Ghost” is sometimes reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño, or even Michel Houellebecq’s “The Map and the Territory,” and wears its influences on its sleeve by including a reference list. A book lover’s dream.
In the first section, “Groundhog Day 2!” we get to know Jane, a young marketing professional working in New York City. She’s been tasked with helping a mystery writer, Jeremy, get his fictional characters out of his head and onto the internet in a way that makes them seem real enough to connect with readers on a deep level, and go viral. Centered on a girl named Rita who has disappeared and is feared murdered, the fictional world they create takes on a life of its own, inspiring devotion and even obsession in the people who are following the mystery.
LEARN MORE: El Paso Matters Book Club Q&A: ‘Swallow the Ghost’ author Eugenie Montague
Jane is a complicated character, and her presence, and then absence, center the story as it progresses. In Jane’s part, Montague does a great job of unsettling the reader through repeating passages with slight variations over the course of the section. This establishes that Jane is dependent on routine. She does the same things every day, wears the same clothes, follows the same route and engages in certain activities out of a need for control. She’s obsessive-compulsive, prone to depression, always on her phone and drawn to escapism, whether through doom-scrolling on X (formerly Twitter), reading books, hanging out with her best friend, or distracting herself with alcohol and sex. Sound familiar? She’s living an exaggerated form of the millennial condition (think protagonists in books by Ottessa Moshfegh or Pola Oloixarac). Spoiler alert: she dies.
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In the wake of Jane’s death, the writer she was working with (and sleeping with), is arrested and charged with her murder.
In the second section, “It’s the Internet, Jesse,” an investigator working for the defense (Jesse) recounts his story — how he became a PI, why he abandoned his dreams of being a journalist, why he’s so depressed. His mom is suffering from dementia. He moved back in to care for her and took the investigator job because it offered some stability and better pay.
This chapter is where Montague shines. The longest section of the book, it is also the place where all the threads of the story come together. Jesse combs through Jane’s life, rummaging through the digital detritus left in the wake of her death, waxing poetic on the way we leave an image of a life on the internet, and philosophizing about which existence is truly real. We are left to wonder what offers the most accurate picture of a person, digital or analog, what a person says, or what they don’t say. Jesse tracks down other potential suspects, comes up with theories for why different people might have wanted Jane dead. He back-tracks and moves on, excuses some suspects while holding grudges against others, discovers he’s wrong about someone and then right about them and back again.
All the while, we read about his struggle to care for his mom. His day job is investigating a murder to defend the accused murderer, but the important work is at home and at the doctor’s office, where he navigates the very real fact that his mother’s mind is going. In the inevitable role-reversal that time engenders, she is dependent on him to keep her clean, fed and safe.
In the everyday experiences that he recounts — his mother starving her cat because she thinks she’s fed him already, her lack of personal hygiene, his freakout when she soils herself in public, her getting lost in a memory and thinking she’s reliving the past — Jesse appeals to the readers’ heart in a way that fosters trust in us to take his version of the story at face value. Monatague uses his voice to point us toward other potential suspects, and we listen to him. This might be a mistake.
In the third section, which takes the form of a transcript of a live discussion between Jeremy and a publisher named David, we get a sort of post-mortem on the whole thing. Jeremy has been destroyed, or so he says, by Jane’s murder and the aftermath of his arrest and subsequent exoneration. Unable to really write anything for years, he talks about writing and the way he conceives of himself as a writer, and reads passages that he has written more recently, which tell the story of his psychosis and the things he experienced while living with his sister and her family during the COVID shutdown. Offering theories about intertextuality and the form and function of fiction writing, this is an extended love letter to writing and reading hidden within the framework of a mystery.
Once the final page is turned, I can’t say that there is a resolution. Much like Velery saying that “a poem is never finished, only abandoned,” I feel like Montague leaves us hanging in the way that life leaves us hanging, but that is not a bad thing.
“Swallow the Ghost” plays with genre and form, incorporates and upends conventions, and tells a good story in a very enjoyable way. It offers plenty for the lover of good books to chew on, and would benefit from multiple readings. I can’t wait to read what else Eugenie Montague comes up with next.
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