Lovers XXX

At The Box

It was from Caroline Calloway, who’s now moving back to New York from Florida exile, that I got an invite to the Allie Rowbottom Lovers XXX novel launch party at The Box. I absolutely love Allie, she said, you have to go, and you have to write about it.

I look up Allie’s new novel. Looks like it’s about LA in the 80s, the porn industry, the transition from film to video, girls with mommy issues. The Box seems like a fitting venue. Sure, I’ll do it. An exercise in the genre.

Tall, fair-haired, and blue-eyed, Allie looks like how I imagine the superwomen piloting the starships of the 22^nd century in the novels of that one masochistic Guatemalan sci-fi writer from Nazi literature in the Americas would look. I’ve met her and her novelist husband a few times (and seen them around at readings many more times) and they were quite genial. Meeting them, I sensed nothing of the cosmic SS demeanor, though in her prose you do get something of the stories of Faustian pacts with the devil, planets where the fount of eternal youth may be found…

I asked Nick Dove if he would be there and he said that he’d be taking pictures and that he’d be making his rent and more in a few hours doing so. Allie is the Jell-O heiress, Dove said, in fact the ancestral curse of the Jell-O fortune is the subject of her memoir, Jell-O Girls, and John Lippman—the party’s cohost who runs Volume 0, a sceney alt-literary magazine that’s also launching its 13^th issue at this party, with a picture of Rowbottom on its cover and an excerpt from the novel inside—is an LA money guy who used to work for Lehman Brothers and some music industry firms and now is the CEO of the subscription-based e-commerce service Book of the Month.

So that, I think, explains why they’ve rented out The Box, why I’m there, why Dove is there, and why there’s an open bar. I remember there was another party a few years back, for the launch of Rowbottom’s debut novel Aesthetica—a novel about a former Instagram influencer who seeks to reverse her cosmetic surgeries through the titular medical procedure, now set to be adapted to film—where they were giving out free botox. But I didn’t make it to that one.

When I get to the party I run into Caroline, who is trailed by a cameraman who immediately hands me a mic and starts filming an interview with me. I answer a few questions (“What is one taboo you wish wasn’t taboo?”), take off the mic, go get a drink. I notice Allie wearing a white dress made of sheets of paper. Strippers dance from hoops suspended from the ceiling. Someone draws charcoal portraits. Readings punctuate the evening, most of them by the writers featured in the Volume 0 issue, though I miss a bunch of them because I happen to be outside. The reading I remember most is Danielle Chelosky’s, the salonnière who runs the “Weird Fucks” reading series and author of a bunch of novels about abjection, whose piece begins with “In her plaid pencil skirt and white button-down, she crawled under his desk on all fours, taking him in her mouth. He was smoking a cigarette on a video call, occasionally reaching down to ash the Marlboro on her head. He was in conversation with other intellectuals about the influence of Dostoevsky on the current literary landscape…”

Those types of intellectuals you’d find at, say, the Granta parties, serious intellectuals who live lives of “quiet desperation” and whatnot—now that magazine has some great writing, some real first-rate fiction by authors who would never ever treat something as sacred as a book as an accessory in a thirst trap photoshoot…

At some point I’m on the balcony observing people below. I just need some names, I don’t need to actually talk to anyone. Marlowe Granados, novelist, Verso. Michelle “Gutes” Gutermann and Ali Royals, Byline magazine. Matt Weinberger, photographer. Ana (I forget her last name), “Neoliberalhell” podcast/Instagram meme page admin, and her fiancé Dan Mancini (“The last time I was here I saw a stripper shit on a slice of pizza, and a guy at that table over there, right in the front, ate it,” he tells me). Serena Shahidi, Tiktoker. Ella Emhoff, stepdaughter of Kamala Harris. A bunch of hot people I don’t know.

In the Volume 0 magazine, there is an interview with Rowbottom, which is itself prefaced by a letter from the editors, an exaltation of glamor in American literature. “In recent years, however, a certain conventional wisdom has set in about the “proper” way to promote authors. The idea is that authors should be serious and subdued, and let their work “speak for itself,” lest their personality overshadow or undermine the written word. We reject this notion.”

In the interview she’s asked what’s the difference between the New York and LA lit scene. Her answer is about how New York is more generally the intellectual one, and LA is the chill one with good weather, which is all true enough. But her answer misses something, something that’s expressed by the event itself. Essentially it’s all the LA people (and non-LA people who are nonetheless spiritual Californians) who are the most comfortable presenting themselves as influencers, who don’t really see themselves as defiling the art of literature in doing so, who don’t worry about the collapse of all the old institutions of the world of letters when they’re actually just hot and glamorous and are going to be loved for their boundless genius and eroticism anyway. I relate to this Californianism, or maybe it relates to me, which could be why you get scene reports about this and On The Rag and not the Granta parties.