Review: What We Lose, Zinzi Clemmons

Someone recently described the type of fiction that What We Lose is as “modular.” I am in love with this vocabulary word, and I might be at least moderately in love with modular fiction. It’s the kind of story (let’s see if I can actually describe it) that leaves your imagination to fill in some (or lots) of the connective tissue of the plot. Chapters are of varying length — some as short as a few sentences — and may not be strictly chronological. It is a type of storytelling at which fanfiction writers excel, so perhaps that is the source of my love.¹

What We Lose is a spare, slightly-but-not-at-the-expense-of-comprehensibility experimental (ex-spare-imental ha ha ha oh we have fun here at Reading the End), semi-autobiographical story about a woman called Thandi. Her South African mother is dying and dead, and Thandi is dating and marrying and having a baby, and all along she’s thinking about parenthood and Africa and race and loss.

For a book that clocks in at just over 200 pages, many of which are half-filled or less, What We Lose is impressively wide-ranging. Clemmons seems less interested in answering questions than raising them: Thandi wonders what leads women to marry serial killers. She considers her own complicated relationship to South Africa, a country her mother adores and that she fears. As she prepares to welcome (or at least accept) her own child into the world, she thinks about allegations of violence and murder by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the “Mother of the Nation.” There are photographs and charts to illustrate her ideas, but these rarely seem to resolve anything. They are visual aids, but they are not answers.

In 2018 I’ve felt resistant to literary fiction in a way that’s not typical for me, and I’ve leaned heavily in the direction of speculative fiction. Maybe it’s the government stuff getting to me, that I want to spend all my time in worlds that aren’t my own. But What We Lose was a reminder of how interesting and weird litfic can be. It’s a quick read and a really terrific debut novel.