In The Land Of Simplicity: A Novel
By Mattie Lubchansky
Pantheon
What did Mattie Lubchansky know? And when did she know it?
Whatever the answer, she has mind-blowing news to report about how our society will function in 2081 after the smoke clears from climate change and political warfare.
Lubchansky reveals the news in a new graphic novel called In the Land of Simplicity. According to her report, democracy has disappeared. So have rivers and parks. Billionaires have built gates around urban centers like Manhattan to rule over fascistic surveillance city/states. (A quibble: I’m guessing trillionaires will be the new billionaires by 2081.) Out in the exurban boonies, doomsday-prepping Libertarians prowl in packs for survival. And a 1970s-vintage nonviolent back-to-the-land utopian commune/cult called the Spiritual Association of Peers is growing its own food, governing itself, and unleashing its hang-ups with a nightly “mass ritual” featuring orgiastic sex and bloody fistfights.
Simplicity follows the spiritual and political journey of an anthropologist named Lucius Pasternak. New York City’s billionaire overlord sends Lucius to visit the commune to document its ways for a history museum before (unbeknownst at first to Lucius) the overlord wipes it out.
At the commune, Lucius, who is trans, comes to see his sexual liberation as tied up with political liberation in the form of resistance to forces of oppression.
Lubchansky is the latest author to help us envision where current political and environmental crises are leading us and the moral and ethical choices facing us. She cites as influences other authors who have tread this ground, including Octavia Butler. The difference here is that Lubchansky offers her take in illustrated form. True to her cartoonist roots, she doesn’t bombard us with verbiage. In some of the most intensive scenes, like those depicting sexual encounters, Lubchansky dispenses with words altogether, to powerful yet understated effect.
Other times she distills complex ideas into concise phrasing, still letting the images deliver the punch. Here are multi-panel musings that accompany the climactic moment when Lucius decides to take action by fighting back against murderous forces sent to destroy the commune:
Too long I have been only an observer. But no longer ... I figured something out tonight ... It is not an abstraction ... I can be part of that ...
Lucius makes that declaration while hugging Amity Grown-Shy, his commune guide to both political and sexual liberation, while brandishing a burning branch, striking faceless helmeted gun-wielding guards. Old-school comics-style “CRAK!” “THWIK” fight panels are interspersed with moving facial close-ups.
Zooming through the action-packed pages, I found myself no longer asking What did Mattie Lubchansky know, and when did she know it? Instead, I wondered: Is she just reporting/predicting the facts of how our world in unfolding? Or is she issuing a call to resistance?
“I don’t want to have like a capital C ‘Call to action’ in the book, because it is a work of fiction,” Lubchansky told me during an interview on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. “I think it’s important to understand that violent power has never been ceded just because they felt like it.”
In a surprise twist, Lucius and the communards succeed in overthrowing and trading places with the forces of oppression. They take on the Man, and win. We don’t learn the details of how that happened or what happens next when the commune moves inside the urban gates. The only intel Lubchansky gives us on how the commune crew will govern liberated (?) Manhattan comes from old-regime guards who dismiss them as “lefty crazies” and “a bunch of Communists, queers in weird robes” who turn “the place upside down” and institute “mob rule.” We know that’s not the true story. Rather than divulge the details, Lubchansky trusts us to imagine what liberation can look like.
Ultimately, it may not matter whether Lubchansky intended Simplicity to be primarily descriptive or prescriptive. She has done the hard work of imagination, of reporting vividly and incisively from the near future. Powerfully and honestly told — including revealing the internal contradictions in the commune — Simplicity does the job of confronting us in a fresh way with the world we’re wreaking, and the not-so-simple necessity to take a stand. Like Lucius, we need to discover that stand on our own.
Click on the above video to watch the full conversation with author Mattie Lubchansky about her new graphic novel In The Land Of … Simplicity. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”
