The idea of purity — or, rather, the quest for it — is at the subtle heart of Disintegration In Four Parts, a set of novellas by Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Emily Anglin, Devon Code, and Lee Henderson. This strange, charming, and wistful collection springs from a one-sentence starting point: “All purity is created by resemblance and disavowal.”

This sentence is not easy to parse, but its point seems to be this: Purity is either admirable or loathsome, depending on who is judging (and who is being judged). The saint is beatified, the fanatic reviled. Many revanchists admire Robespierre. The more prudent have a drink and shy away.

All four contributors approach the theme differently, and each story is tonally unique. If you weren’t told they were connected, you wouldn’t easily uncover the connection. The novella by Ah-Sen, who initiated the book project, hews closest to the theme. The story is faintly Borgesian, inventing and exploring an artistic movement driven by rival lovers which takes on the air of a cult. Each new literary invention, each new feat of artistic and philosophical daring is upheld by adherents as pure Brilliance, no matter how ridiculous or, worse, duplicative. The story is largely comic, but not to the narrator. (Could it ever be?)

Henderson’s contribution is a fictionalization of Kurt Schwitters’s escape from Nazis to an internment camp in northern Norway, a real episode in the pathbreaking artist’s life. Hunted by Nazi planes while crossing oceans, he and his fellow escapees were not exactly prisoners in Norway, but neither were they guests. Henderson portrays Schwitters, a Dadaist, as something of a saint, a humanist who creates art even amidst enormous suffering and seems gently bewildered by the bewilderment of others.

Nazism was quick to reject Schwitters and his decadent art. Their fanaticism needed clear lines, rigid boundaries. Good/bad, evil/holy, art/filth, and so on — we’re on one side, and everyone else is on the other. There is, in this story, something of the absurd struggle of Ah-Sen’s; the worst kind of art critic spends more time defining what isn’t part of a school than identifying and describing what is.

Anglin’s story explores the theme on a smaller scale. An architect starts a romance with her boss, a world-famous architect-artist. The romance ends; she loses her job. In the process, she loses herself and relationship with her sister — while living on the literal top floor. There are vague rumblings about haunted houses, but nothing serious.

That’s the point, I think — and why Anglin’s story stuck with me in a way the others didn’t. It resisted any huge message, except that we change in relation to others. We are affected by them, and we affect those around us. We experience purist impulses — to imitate and to reject — constantly in our day-to-day lives as we strive to figure out who we are and who we want to become. When this happens to us, it’s par for the course. But when it happens to others, we wonder why they’ve stopped resembling themselves. We wonder what they’ve rejected. We seek purity in others and reject it in ourselves.

In Devon Code’s story, the last of the set, an older woman gives a diaristic account the end of her life in which she refers to herself, with a distance that is either admirable or off-putting, as “one,” i.e., “Thirty years ago, when one’s mother is about the age one is now, one goes to visit her.” This isn’t just a device; the narrator is looking at herself from a distance. That visit with her mother is perhaps the most disquieting part of the book. The mother compares the end of her life to being in a museum at closing time and having to deal with a persnickety, fidgety child who just wants to push her along and doesn’t care about art.

It is clear what is meant: There is a gap between who we are and who we want to be, but our days are full of ordinary obligations, and mortality nags at us, too. We just want to linger with what we admire, but we are always pushed away from it, in the same scary direction. We are never fully in control. It’s here, at the boundaries, where most of us reject purity, knowing that life is weird and absurd, and that we leave nothing behind but our small impact on others. The fanatic and the saint, who are often one and the same, loathe that. They try to impose definition on art, on memory, on others, on themselves. In Disintegration in Four Parts, the themes become clear, as they do in life, when we take a step back, and suspend the impulse to define.

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