Reviewed by Abby Walthausen

In her recent book Sun Seekers: The Cure of California, Lyra Kilston makes the case that much of modernist California architecture came from TB epidemic; interiors were designed to capitalize on the mythically healthful landscape. In an aside in Trisha Low's new book-length essay, Socialist Realism, Low recounts how architect Richard Neutra handed out psychiatric surveys to his clients, hoping that he might design a healing space to reflect their innermost psychic penchants and patterns. And although Low opens her book with her own move to California (via New York and Singapore), she is not exactly seeking comforts physical or mental. She asks, "Really though, has the concept of the West ever been anything but a diorama of survival porn?"

These are not the words of a person who is content with comfort or who is looking to settle. Her remark about "survival porn" is brought on by reminiscences of reading Little House on the Prairie as a little girl, and realizing suddenly, as an adult, that the true action of the series had nothing to do with the coziness that foregrounds her recollections, but everything to do with cycles of destruction and disaster. That little house was rebuilt many times. All that emblematic homey-ness was constantly in danger and in flux. 

Because Low uses an inventive, loose essay structure to relentlessly examine her life, to elide the personal and political, the most obvious point of comparison is to a book like Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. But a less likely affinity lurks under the surface—because of the way Low disappears into other artworks at every opportunity, she recalls the narrator of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. Like a transgressive Binx Bolling, movies and aesthetic experiences are the things she most treasures in life. "The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives," writes Walker Percy. Low likewise is distant from people and from lived moments, while film brings out her full passion. And she takes away equally cathartic feelings from the experimental films of Chantal Ackerman—a hero of hers—as she does from a documentary about One Direction. She watches the singers' mothers shop for cardboard cutouts of their sons and she weeps: "I mean, it's sad because without projecting our impossible illusions upon our objects of desire, without a constant falsification of the world through other human beings, we probably could not live. If we gave up our utopian fantasies, it would, in fact, amount to renunciation of life, a denial of life."

Low tells us that she had moved to California for a partner. We learn almost nothing about them, but soon enough the two are watching Rosemary's Baby together. At first it is through the lens of New York real estate porn—she is in California looking back—and then it is through the lens of the abject terror she finds in domesticity. Suddenly, acts like making food for her partner and considering her curtains leave her nauseous. "I mean, my housewifery's just aesthetic, right?" she asks, attempting to comfort herself. If Mia Farrow is beholden to a demon even in her beautiful home, Low worries at the idea that settling down, romantic love, and home are all similar illusions, ones that lead to submission. 

Low refuses a fixed identity in a sexual sense, in a racial sense, and in an artistic sense. When friends attending her poetry reading tell her they love her vulnerability, that she's revealed a true self, all she can think is that they're getting it wrong—she's read the suicide notes of her earlier poetry book The Compleat Purge to audiences before, she's been more vulnerable. And part of her bristling against a fixed identity is that she sees the comfort of identity as yet another unreliable "reality." She calls marriage something that "can look like heaven but trap you like hell." She ponders on a LARPing sex game a friend of hers is involved in, one which gratuitously, homonormatively, glamorizes the AIDS crisis. 

Low questions ideals and suspects them of lying outside the realm of reality, not just as an empty exercise but because she was born into a highly constructed utopian attempt: her native Singapore. She finds herself reading Lee Kuan Yew's book about the building of Singapore, how its brand of socialized democracy works. Brilliantly, Lee and Low have the reader convinced for a moment of the lawful, orderly life, full of filial piety and constant economic growth. And then there is a final thing, a policy never enacted, that poor women who volunteer themselves for sterilization after two children will be awarded a free apartment. That is where Low and the reader stop, backpedal. Live life to society's norms—no more, no less—and your domestic space comes easy. Do the fiscally salubrious thing, a home will reflect it, mirror it back at you. 

Extreme as the example is, this is a bargain that Low fears of every home, of every concession to domestic or "normal" life. If socialist realism is something fixed, proscriptive, and important to reject, Low prefers her realism to look like "an aesthetic weaving affect so true that it makes it seem as though artifice could become entirely powerless to reality. I could live in it." But whether art is explicitly didactic or not, Low is still in favor of the idea that she can and must learn from it. But to learn, she has to be able to move the furniture around, to bring her own fisheye. It is maybe why she believes that representations of love that have nothing to do with love are the best, like one she half remembers from the film In a Lonely Place, like ones she half remembers from her life. "You on the couch, me making coffee by the stove," Low writes. "Anyone looking at us could tell we were in love," Bogart says. Moments of domesticity cut by distance have the most potential for tenderness. There is a whole room's worth of framework between them, onto which shared ideals can be gingerly projected. What is a living room but a vacuum fit for construction porn?