LOTE by Shola von Reinhold

It’s not short, it’s not sad, it’s not sexy… yet somehow this novel isn’t shit!

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There is an optimum size for everything, and though what that optimum size is can be a very difficult and arguably subjective thing to decide, one presumes there is some measure of consistency across the book-reading world that the optimum length for a novel is somewhere between 200 and 300 pages.

I’d argue – of course, I enjoy literature and literary distraction more than I enjoy large objects – that the lower in that range the better, and that 150 pages – or even fewer! – might be even better, but I suppose if I were to assert that then I would end up yoked (by this sick conservative anglophone society and its grotesque hunger to enforce nomenclature and categorisation rather than revel in the glorious disorder and mess that is life) into a needless debate about “what is a novel?” and “what is a novella?” and what, as we careen towards a smaller and smaller point, “what is a short story?” (Short stories are to the English like pornography: we don’t know what they are, but we know we don’t like ’em!!!)

What, then, am I – is anyone – to make of a book that is not only almost three times as long as my preferred length of a novel, but is well over 50% bulkier than the Tories of the publishing industry would consider preferred?

This, then, LOTE by Shola von Reinhold (2020, Jacaranda) is inarguably longer than a novel has any right to be, any need to be: novels should be short, should be sharp, should be neat and should be tight…

Miraculously, then, this almost 500-page text manages to be all of those things other than “short”, and it manages to do while bending (but never quite breaking) novelistic tradition, while eschewing clear and comprehensive analysis, while opening questions without resolutions, while satirising not only the elements of its narrative that align with contemporary realities, but satirising, too, the very idea of what it is to be a novel, especially what it is to be a giant, complex, polyvocal and intellectual novel: somehow LOTE, which looks like (as in it’s a massive book) it’s probably bloated and over-filled with cuttable text, is somehow absolutely the opposite: I could have – and I wish the text had – kept going…

LOTE ends but it doesn’t really end, shouldn’t really have ended, it offers no neat conclusions (which is good, there are none in life except for the epiphanies whose understandings we never execute) but also doesn’t consciously pan away in the midst of an unfolding action scene…

There are endings without endings in literature, and this isn’t that, but there are also endings that are endings, y’know, and it isn’t that either…

There’s some ambiguity and there are some tightly knotted threads, but honestly – and I dunno why really – I would have liked more of one, more of either (probably the ambiguity tho as it would have been more in keeping with the rest of the text) and-

But I mean what do I know?

It’s a great novel, and it’s also a first novel, so saying it didn’t have the greatest ending in the history of literature is trite nonsense, especially coming from someone as basically nonexistent as I am.

I’m saying this empty comment on the ending because LOTE is very very very close to being a flawless novel.

This giant, near-intentionally emotionless text, well, protagonist, who is, I think, a psychopath? Or otherwise disconnected from the thoughts and feelings of others, but not in a violent way, this isn’t horror, right, it’s-

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What I’m trying to say is that even tho this novel is nearly 500 pages long and is about art theory and is about research and is about archiving – all of which sound boring, right? That’s not just me? – it isn’t boring.

Even though it’s possibly the most chaste book written for an adult audience I’ve ever read (Von Reinhold is younger than me but not soooo much younger than me that I would have instinctively presumed they’re one of those Gen Z New Puritan types (I don’t know what they’re called?) that you often see depressed-coded people older than me complaining about online), even though it posits that ideas and knowledge and history and art are important (which I used to believe, too, and hope one day to do so again but it’s sure af not happening while I remain in this deep rut of a living death I’m rotting in atm 🤪), LOTE isn’t earnest, it isn’t overdone…

LOTE isn’t smug, it isn’t annoying, it isn’t dull.

This, then, is what makes it clear that LOTE is very very very close to being a masterpiece (and one could make the case that it’s so close that it is one): that it can be a book about ideas, about thought, about history, about archiving, about art theory, about creativity, about ritual, about knowledge and about intellectual research, that it can be all this, doesn’t then become alarmingly horny (as basically all the other good novels about these topics tend to do (e.g. The Magus, e.g. The Name of the Rose, e.g. [insert another example if I can think of one]) and still doesn’t end up remotely boring…

This should be impossible, this is almost impossible.

To be this rigorous, this articulate, this clear, about these inherently boring subjects (shut up, archiving is boring and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, it’s admin) without causing as empty-headed a reader as me to start to bite their fingers off in boredom is genuinely impressive.

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What’s this book about? What’s the story? Who are the characters?

If you want that, read a proper review. It’s about history and race and gender and about modernism and about historicisation and about erasure, about appropriation and about art, about life and living and about society, about literature and creativity, about boredom and passion and interest and travel, about class, about London, about museums, about archives and about identity and about all sorts of other very interesting things.

No, it’s not sad; no, it’s not sexy, and no it is absolutely not short. But it’s fucking brilliant – provocative, raucously funny, intelligent without being smarmy and uses multiple voices of alleged different sources in such a way that it makes the over-hyped mediocrity of Trust even more apparent in comparison.

Read LOTE, it’s great.

Order direct from the publisher here.