Utopia by Heidi Sopinka

“She’s driving a speed addict’s car in an inside-out shirt, on painkillers, with a hand wrapped in gauze, on her way to find her husband’s dead ex-wife. If she concentrates hard enough, these things will snap into a logical pattern” (146).

If you find these two sentences enticing, then you might be inclined to read Heidi Sopinka’s novel Utopia. In the first section of her novel, we are introduced to two central characters: Billy and Romy, conceptual artists in 1970s America. Billy is a successful artist, primarily by virtue of being male and stealing some of his best known works from Romy. Romy, meanwhile, is taking on ambitious experiential works about light and has a track record of projects that seem in conversation with real-life artist Marina Abramović. Romy has not been as successful and the reason is because she’s a woman. In the opening twenty pages or so of the book, we discover that Romy is a new mother to Billy’s child and we find them all at an artist party getting sloppily drunk. It is on that night that Romy falls to her death, and it’s never quite certain Billy is innocent of murdering her.

From there, we flash forward to Paz, another budding artist and Billy’s second wife. The novel then becomes a sort of inverted version of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, which Sopinka has the good sense to acknowledge directly. While Paz is in conversation with her friend, she starts the conversation, “Last night I dreamed —” and her friend interrupts, “That you went to Manderley again” (23). For those unfamiliar with the novel, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” and the novel’s unnamed narrator is haunted by the dead and perfect Rebecca. She feels she is forever in her shadow. Sopinka’s Paz goes through a similar experience, feeling overlooked for her art and by her partner, remembering Romy as an incredible force. As a result, she feels a sense of unreality hovering over her: “I dreamed, not for the first time, that I was in an apocalyptic wall of flames” (23). She then insists that her friend touch the table, and Essa tells her, “Nothing is wrong with this table.” Paz, in turn, “has an uneasy feeling that this does not feel like real life, exactly” (23). When Billy leaves for an exhibition elsewhere and leaves Paz alone at home with his daughter, combined with the fact that she finds Romy’s old diaries, is a perfect storm for her to descend into paranoid speculation and dissociative behaviours.

As the book progresses, Paz becomes less and less certain of herself and more resentful of the gender dynamics in her relationship. Here’s a passage after making love with Billy:

After, she looks over at Billy sleeping. How can he always sleep? She’s always flopping around like a fish that’s been caught. She sits on the bed holding her knees to her chest, wishing she still smoked. Her eyelids flicker. She’s taken a sleeping pill and is fighting it. The curtains move in the breeze and she gets up, hearing a little clicking noise that she follows downstairs, walking slowly. She sits on the couch, the sound of crickets loudly coming through the windows. After a few minutes she walks out onto the porch. In her half-sleep state, she thinks of him sleeping above. He gets to come and go, sleep with her, not give anything away. She lets it happen, but still she can’t help thinking how much power he has. He told her he was glad to be back, and she believed him. But what gets said in the middle of the night doesn’t matter. Daylight cancels everything, and you always have to start again. (114)

The passage captures that sleepy existentialism and morose midnight reflections I’m sure most people have experienced. Sopinka effectively captures that kind of hyperawareness that happens towards night. Paz’s restlessness is very true to life, and the final lines of the passage punctuate the scene really beautifully: “what gets said in the middle of the night doesn’t matter. Daylight cancels everything, and you always have to start again.”

So let’s start again. Utopia is, in some ways, two novels at once. On the one hand, it’s a thrilling and suspenseful mystery: what happened to Romy? On the other hand, it’s a kind of künstlerroman for Paz to discover who she is as an artist. In some ways, it matches the tonal register of Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi or Second Place by Rachel Cusk. It’s also like two novels in that it alternates between being tantalizingly uncertain and bludgeoningly direct.

Both of the registers have their merits, but I’m more inclined towards the mysterious, paranoid side of the equation. In that respect, the relationship between Paz and Romy is most effective. Paz lives in Romy’s shadow, who had lived in Billy’s shadow, and now finds herself obsessed with her husband’s dead wife. Paz cannot escape her jealousy when she finds Romy’s diary, but also must grapple with the guilt of having read it:

The next time she opened it, she found a thin notebook with pale-blue lines, writing of Romy’s detailing works in progress with a kind of murderous compression that verged on poetry. There was a scrap of paper wedged in as a bookmark that fell into her lap. Paz unfolded it. In Billy’s writing, it said ONLY YOU. Her stomach contracted. The words seemed to leap out at her, bringing a flush of jealousy, and then shame at herself for having looked at them. (25)

First of all, I like the characterization of Romy’s writing as “murderous compression that verged on poetry.” The terse note from Billy that says “ONLY YOU” is just the right phrase to inspire that jealousy in Paz; she is another, which is a serious problem for the circle of women artists that accuse Paz of stealing Romy’s life (including her work). Yet, in flashbacks we see that Romy and Paz seem to have their own special connection, opening up to each other in ways that they typically do not (despite Paz’s completely awkward fan-girling)..

In addition to the ambiguity of whether Paz is married to a murderer, Sopinka turns the screw further when Paz starts receiving postcards from Romy. Romy is supposed to dead, but is her death all a performance piece? There are a number of details that throw question on her death; supposedly only one person saw her body. She had also discussed plans for a big artistic project that takes place in the desert. These tidbits, along with the fact that postcards are arriving to Paz with succinct yet ominous messages, create a great dramatic tension. Is Paz part of a twisted game that Romy is playing? Will she emerge from the shadows to show that her death was all part of a performance piece? After all, she fell to her death and had already taken photos of ‘falling’ (which Billy stole and got credit for).

I opened with the passage of Paz driving into the desert. She accidentally severs her finger, and then drives into the desert to follow a lead on the postcard. Paz follows Romy’s footsteps, which again feels conceptual, and then discovers more and more clues before finding Romy’s final artistic project and sharing in communion with it. I won’t spoil more at this point, because that core mystery is finely wrought.

The other component of the book is a direct commentary on the art world that leaves no room for ambiguity. Setting the book in the 1970s is a smart move in that respect, and there’s a clear pattern of male artists getting away with all kind of misogyny while women are left debating how to make it in the art world. There are some hardline views and debate amongst the women, who at times cannibalize one another and at others try to challenge the fundamentally competitive nature of a patriarchal art world.

Towards the end of the book, Billy is taken to court and questioned about Romy’s death. The presentation is excellent; the narration alternates between court transcripts and Paz’s masterwork art project. Going back and forth every few sentences has a great dramatic flare and it’s an effective culmination to multiple storylines. The court transcripts routinely downplay the importance of art in women’s lives and to pathologize women’s experiences. Here are a few examples:

THE DECEASED’S FUTURE PLANS FOR EXHIBITIONS, HER GUGGENHEIM GRANT, AND THE CREATION OF A LONG-TERM PROJECT HAVE BEEN OFFERED UP BY THE PROSECUTORS TO RULE OUT ANY NOTION OF SUICIDE. (OF NO CONSEQUENCE.) 

[...]

EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT THE DECEASED WAS GIVEN TO IRRATIONAL OUTBURSTS OVER MINOR OCCURRENCES AND WAS PRONE TO HYSTERIA, PARTICULARLY AS A POST-PARTUM FEMALE. (ADMISSABLE.)

[...]

WITNESSES SAY SHE LIVED FOR HER WORK. (HEARSAY.)

[...]

ACCORDING TO SEVERAL REPUTABLE SOURCES, THE DECEASED’S WORK HAD, QUOTE UNQUOTE, DEATH VIBES TO IT. (215)

The importance of Romy’s work is downplayed as being of no consequence and that she lived for her work is mere hearsay. What does get accounted for by the court is her post-partum depression and that her work supposedly had “death vibes” (which is a hilarious critique and hits too close too home for casual art commentary).

I’ve not presented the climactic moment for Paz that is interwoven with the court case. In part, it’s because I feel like it ought to be experienced. The other component is that, all things considered, it felt a bit saccharine. Towards the end of the book, there are a lot of feel-gooderies and optimistic moments that don’t entirely hit the mark. It’s a bit of a shame because so much of the book is well-written and the tensions in the text feel a little too easily resolved for effective payoff. 

In terms of style, Sopinka is often rich in description and imagery. An early passage in the book really got me invested in her rich language: “From the porch, [Paz] watched the lawn losing its green, like a lens tightening. Bodies of flies piled at the windowscreens. She began to wander when Flea was sleeping, searching for what, she wasn’t sure. She’d move through the rooms looking over her shoulder, with the methodical self-absorption of a thief, even though she knew Billy wouldn’t be home for hours and that it wasn’t possible for the kind of truth she was looking for in a drawer” (25). The image of a lens tightening is fantastic, especially given the artists’ work with photography. Paz’s characterization with “methodical self-absorption of a thief” adds to the awkward tension of her relationship. Elsewhere, in fact from the passage that started the review, Paz captures the spirit of a manic artist beautifully: “Paz is suddenly ravenous. She fishes around but she’s already finished most of what’s on the passenger seat. She kicks off her sandals and drives in her bare feet. She looks at herself in the rear-view mirror and sees that her shirt is inside out. The heat makes the scenery look almost two-dimensional. It gives it a radical geometry” (146). At the end of that section, there is some great imagery about the two-dimensional desert and its “radical geometry.”

Throughout the book, since the artworks are often so connected to place, there is a lot of description of the setting. There’s a transcendent kind of moment when Paz tracks down Romy’s work with light—which actually reminded me, partially, of an art work I saw in New York where there was a crisp cut square of sky. In any case, Sopinka’s descriptions offer some rich material. The book offers some great visuals.

Towards the end of the book, there’s a short section that wraps things up. There’s a twist to the book similar to Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise which is fine, though not quite as dramatic or mind-blowing as Choi’s novel. The bulk of the book stands on its own well, but the final section adds a few more dimensions and solidifies the feminist impulse of the text.

Overall, I was really impressed with Utopia. There is a lot in the book to like, and even love. The central mystery of the book really finely developed. The characterization in the book is really effective, which leads to strong relationships between characters. The writing is generally strong, if overly ‘clean’ towards the end. Heidi Sopinka is one of the writers I’ve read for the first time this year and is one of my “new writers to watch.”

Happy reading!