Among fiction’s more compelling aspects is the sheer number of techniques that can be used to portray a world. In her new novel, The Visitors, Jessi Jezewska Stevens uses present-tense narration and free-indirect discourse to imagine a dystopian 2008 that looks an awful lot like that turbulent year as it transpired in this universe. Here is a refreshing novel by an author willing to take chances, to introduce storylines and characters without resorting to sanitized exposition, to play with rules and technique.

Once an up-and-coming textile artist, C, the novel’s protagonist, is now the divorced owner of a failing art supply store who is just scraping by in New York City. Her closest relationships are with Zo, her best friend, and Francesca, Zo’s ex-girlfriend. Added to this mix is one of the titular visitors, a garden gnome who takes up residence in C’s solitary, rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment.

Because C is a woman of an uncertain past and an uncertain future, Stevens’ use of the present tense is a fitting choice. In her sustained and sincere commitment to interiority and psychological depth, Stevens uses the present tense subtly and effectively to move between stage direction and inner experience. Take, for example, this moment, in which C, bathing, recalls her ex-husband’s departure:

Over the lip of the tub, she can see the hexagonal tiles, alternating white and black. They extend into the kitchen, too, where crumbs settle in the grout. She hates those tiles. What a pain they are to sweep! But what a great distraction they are when she ought to be focused on something else. She recalls standing on them with Max while having a serious discussion — at least, that’s what he kept saying. This is serious, he’d said…He droned on. There was Max’s art, hers, his life, hers. The berth was not wide enough for both of them at once. Max was fine with the idea of C. He loved her, in fact. He said it again, there in the kitchen, standing by his suitcases: I love you, he said. Only he could do without the particulars of C’s maternal desires.

This quote also illustrates Stevens’ refreshing and accomplished use of free-indirect discourse. In addition to showcasing her comfort in moving between her character’s interior and exterior worlds, the passage highlights her skilled temporal transitions. Moving freely between past and present, she gives C ever more depth and complexity.

Fans of Stevens’ debut, The Exhibition of Persephone Q (2020), will recognize her intimate renderings of New York City. While it is just as visceral and well-made, the New York of The Visitors is more ephemeral and grayscale. There are a number of additional similarities, the from introspective, at-something-of-a-crossroads protagonist to themes of feminism, domesticity, and the pursuit of art. But The Visitors is also a departure, especially in tone and narration. Stevens strikes a happy balance between playing the hits and finding its own way.

The Visitors stands as a pensive and important work while doing justice to the fantastical basis of its central premise. Helped along by that focusing present-tense narration, the reader adjusts with surprising rapidity to C’s most unusual visitor, the garden gnome, much as C does herself. Representative of the originality and inventiveness present in The Visitors, the gnome is an accomplished device. It is absurd — but it is also, we come to realize, something of a potentially-hallucinated avatar for the daughters C might have had. In a crumbling world, the utter strangeness of the visitor fittingly represents the comfort that can sometimes be found in the disquieting and the nonsensical.

In addition to allegorizing C’s personal conflicts, the 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement serve as important temporal markers. The era is having something of a moment in contemporary American fiction. Indeed, The Visitors shows a remarkable cross-pollination with other recent books, notably Elizabeth Gonzales James’ Mona At Sea (2021) and Lucy Corin’s The Swank Hotel (2021). Together with The Visitors, all three comprise something like a Great Recession Triumvirate, all of them differently original and skillful.

In The Visitors, David Foster Wallace’s hysterical realism is alive and well, with Stevens managing to condense an absurdist hyper-plot, a plot to excess, down to one rather charmingly mundane heroine in about two hundred pages. The Visitors tells an interesting and important story while remembering that its characters have inner lives and its readers are capable of a little cognitive effort. This alone makes The Visitors rare and exciting company.

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