In An Age of Misinformation and Propaganda Masquerading As News, Blake Butler’s Novel ‘Alice Knott’ Illuminates The Anxiety of Existence

Blake Butler’s new novel, Alice Knott, opens with a long description of a video of Woman III by Willem de Kooning being removed from a blank white wall with extreme care, held in front of a faceless audience, and then torched with a fancy weed-burner. It’s a dramatic scene, but the actions are at a great remove, given to us through a series of filters: a written description of a visual and audible medium, the video, which itself is capturing events in the past focused on a painting whose image we can only hold in our mind’s eye through Butler’s words. Moreover, the video itself has already gone viral, “shared online more than seven million times — a reach accrued in less than three nights following its debut” (4) so that it feels like we, the readers, are already behind, straining to catch up on this piece of content that, surely, everyone else is familiar with by now.

More viral videos follow, showing the destruction of other works of art whose last known owner was the eponymous Alice Knott. In their wake, ordinary museum-goers all over the world enact their own violence against paintings, sculptures, and other installations in what is understood as a wave of copycat vandalism. Alice watches these events get obsessively reported on: “No matter which channel Alice changes to, among hundreds, what they broadcast is the same, picking up the same thread where the last had just left off, like spinning plates; no choice but to listen, absorb.” (102)

Alice’s TV is full of pundits discoursing on whether or not they “get” “art” while also sternly admonishing its destruction, because, in essence, art is merely very expensive property in their eyes. Later in the book, museums are shut down to protect this property and, in lieu of famous paintings, people start destroying monuments. Meanwhile, of course, the world around this particular news story is as anxiety-inducing as ever: “as the list of affected works aggregates with increasing rapidity, the incurred damages [are] tallied in moments of segue between acts of more ongoing social harm: the crashing of the planes into the ocean or the menace of global warning or the criminal acts of candidates for local office in the throes of their campaigns or the newly discovered sex tapes of the surgeon general or the dark object newly rumored to be growing on the dark side of the moon or the reign of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s…” (97)

Early in the book, it becomes clear that Alice’s reality keeps shifting around her, so that, for instance, she suddenly can’t tell whether she’s listening to what’s on the news or to her own internal voice. But the changeable nature of reality and her memory’s malleability seems to be the most common experience of her life, one that started when she was very young. She recalls being an only child with a mother and father who loved her very much before a rupture of some kind occurred, her father disappeared, and her mother insisted that things had always been this way, just the two of them. The house they lived in corroborated this, changing shape around them, her father’s things disappearing as if they had never existed. Alice taught herself to drink around age nine or eleven, during the long summer her mother threw debauched parties. Then, suddenly, another rupture in reality, and Alice’s father was back—except he wasn’t the same man at all, though Alice’s mother insisted, again, that he was and that, moreover, he’d never been gone in the first place. A twin, Richard, was soon thereafter introduced, a boy who looked just like Alice, whose image was inserted into all her childhood pictures, except that he was terribly sick by then and quarantined in a room she was barred from entering.

Which of these timelines is the true one? Did Alice experience them just as she recalls? Did her child-self invent things to work through trauma and grief? Was her developing brain’s memory creation addled by alcohol? The answers to these questions don’t really matter; they’d only exist for a moment before reality would shift again, taking Alice and us through another looking glass.

Alice’s surreality is deeply destabilizing as the book unfolds further versions of various pasts, most of which she tends to accept because she suspects more often than not that “there has only ever been this instant, now, and now” (99) and that she only exists as she is in that moment, and always must have. This is a kind of survival skill — human beings are adaptable, and we tend to find ways to exist inside our realities even as they change, even as they become dangerous. Journalist David Roberts recently wrote about a version of this, “shifting baseline syndrome,” in relation to climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. But in a more philosophical or psychedelic line of thinking, if each of us exists just as we are in this moment, what happens to the versions of us who existed a moment ago and a moment before that?

One version of Alice — or possibly her mother, though potentially they’re one and the same — was (is?) an artist herself, and in a manifesto-like monologue she proclaims, prophet-like: “And in the make of every instant you become changed, a wholly different person with every second passing, and so each other life too in your wake, every instant of every hour, aggregating for every one of us alone until there is nowhere that is itself and never had been. The result is a greater dementia than already written in the blood of man…” (232) Does this mean that Alice’s reconfiguring reality keeps replacing her, or does some of her erode a little with every shift? In real life, as far as we know, the latter might be truer —Butler found his way into the version of the novel that held Alice at its center while his mother was sick with Alzheimer’s, as he told Shane Jones of The Believer. But Alice Knott isn’t doing any easy projectable psychoanalytic healing, for though it raises the possibility of multiple existences with varying memories, it positions these as lost and confused selves that exist over and across each other, from moment to moment, incoherently.

While some art — like this novel — is created precisely to dwell in these uncomfortable spaces, many of us turn to art just as often to avoid such existential questions; we seek it as a distraction, as entertainment. “I don’t have time for entertainment. We’re all sick enough already,” Butler told Jones, and Alice-the-artist agrees with him: “And though the function of our art, our reason for being, or so we thought, had been to try to nail down locations in this blather, provide points of significant recognition, lines of sight, this in turn served only to scourge the scene with more mirages, erroneous conclusions… awestruck within the pretty colors, loops and lines, we were being trampled, filled with sickness, suffocated, killed in our sleep, over and over, high on the conglomerate of fiction…” (233) This is a deeply pessimistic viewpoint, but also seems like a kind of warning, a dire call to pay attention to our own suffering rather than look away.

The anxiety of existence in an age of misinformation and propaganda masquerading as news is all over this book, in the shifting past that Alice needs to keep accepting about herself in order to move forward, in the destruction of art as a gleeful protest not against art itself but rather its safety being valued above that of human needs. The only clear hint of dystopia in Alice Knott is just how common dementia is but that is, arguably, just a pathologizing term for an already ahistorical culture hungry for distraction rather than truth. Then again, my interpretations say a lot about me and my own concerns, which seems to very much be the point: Alice Knott is ultimately a beautifully constructed maze full of trick mirrors; to reach its center, readers must accept that whatever we find there will be a reflection of our own anxieties about contemporary life and art, for the book won’t give us any concrete answers.