It’s a sunny August afternoon on the Greek island of Patmos. The autobiographical narrator of Andrew Durbin’s Skyland floats in the Aegean Sea, and his companion Shiv points to a neighboring island. “There are day ferries,” says Shiv, but Durbin hesitates. The island, Lipsi, is known for its historic citadel, but Durbin finds it boring. Besides the citadel, he muses, Lipsi is “a lump of rock and sand, like any other.”
Greece has about six thousand islands, and human beings inhabit fewer than three hundred of them. Are they really all the same? Is it history that distinguishes an island from a “lump of rock,” or is it spirituality? Is it art or science, war or peace? The answer seems to be beside the point—just as he raises a question, Durbin quickly loses interest. The exchange occupies just half a page, but it captures a problem with the novella as a whole: our narrator spurns experience for the dull comfort of illusion.
Skyland takes place in the summer of 2017, Trump’s first year in office. Durbin flees the States, weary of the President’s media antics, and meets Shiv in Greece. Together they embark upon a week-long search for a portrait of the French writer Hervé Guibert, which may or may not exist. The evidence is flimsy, and back in New York the narrator’s boyfriend calls the trip an “excessive luxury, even if the rooms had only cost us a few hundred dollars.” But Durbin is obsessed with Guibert, and nothing can deter him from his quest to see his idol’s face.
It’s a dubious motive for a vacation, given the political climate, but one that Guibert might have appreciated. Like his forebears Proust and Genet, he was notorious for embellishing and fabricating the details of his life, and research suggests the portrait was just another elaborate piece of self-mythology: “[Guibert] was not always truthful, even in his most explicitly autobiographical fiction,” writes Durbin. “The difference between imagination and reality didn’t carry much weight for him.”
Skyland seeks to fashion its author in Guibert’s likeness, with a similar goal of self-mythology. Durbin’s untruths spring not from deliberate obfuscation, but from blundering lethargy: he recites a full biography and analysis of Guibert, but he won’t tell his boyfriend the exact cost of his travel fare. Likewise, he can’t distinguish Lipsi from Patmos, yet he remarks on the citadel’s “devotion to the lotus flower.” Skyland is brisk but dense, freighted by a sense of dread.
Gay writers have historically exploited the boundary between fiction and autobiography, for both formal and political ends. Guibert’s oeuvre demonstrates just as much: in blurring the details of his life, the writer sought to denounce the falsehoods and hypocrisies of middle-class French society. But Durbin never clarifies just what taboos he seeks to break, or what stakes the portrait carries for his narrator. He tells his story so imprecisely that he mangles its narrative impact. His lack of precision makes the novella more of a formal exercise than a fully realized project. Indeed, Skyland feels slightly irresponsible, like playing a sadistic game of RollerCoaster Tycoon. Durbin builds the steepest possible incline, quits the job mid-construction, and places his reader in the very front seat.
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To be fair, this is what makes RollerCoaster Tycoon a fun game. As a child I spent hours playing it, my algebra homework stuffed at the bottom of my knapsack. I gave my amusement parks garish, tone-deaf themes, like Wild Wild West and Ancient Egyptian Sands. I placed barriers in front of the toilets and watched my guests’ faces go red. And I never finished building my roller coasters—I wanted cruel, godless infrastructure. “Look at the people,” my friend next door once said. “It’s fun to watch them die.”
Now I spend my nights on YouTube and Twitter. I don’t write, so I just keep scrolling, waiting for the moment I finally log off. My adult years are bogged by inertia, by a sluggish shift from the active voice to the passive. Durbin’s narrator also faces this particular strain of malaise, and much of Skyland frames it as high-stakes prestige drama: “In Greece, I am wracked by a sense of the ever-arriving present, person, painting…. Endless anticipation, as if Patmos is a waiting room and soon, a boat will arrive at harbor to ferry me to the place where I’m supposed to be.”
In promotion for his first novel MacArthur Park, Durbin expressed his problems with the formal constraints of conventional literary fiction and explained his preference for autofiction. “I like to get entangled,” he told writer Lucy Ives. “[Autofiction raises] a number of backend issues about my status as a viewer.” The interview provides useful context for Skyland. Durbin once coveted the role of voyeur, or what Isherwood called the “camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”
Critics have yet to reach a consensus on autofiction—is it a legitimate movement, or just a PR gimmick to place Ben Lerner in a marketable context?—but plenty of us are losing patience with its practitioners. In The New Yorker, Katy Waldman argues against Durbin’s preference for entanglement, or what she more shrewdly calls the “self-reflexivity trap.” She critiques recent novels by Lerner, Sally Rooney, and Sheila Heti for “[severing] the interior world from exterior events…. [The self-reflexivity trap] insists that an alluring, intelligent, and popular person remains, despite everything, deeply self-loathing.”
Waldman’s essay helps explain why a reader might be repelled by Durbin’s sour attitude. A week in Greece with your best friend, a quest for a portrait of your favorite writer—maybe it’s not Durbin’s dream vacation, but in 2017, it’s a strange reason to mope. The dissonance between his crankiness and his cozy circumstances is grating. It’s tempting to proclaim Durbin a victim of the self-reflexivity trap. But still, it’s an incomplete framework through which to discuss autofiction. Waldman criticizes the aforementioned writers for their “[reluctance] to engage with change, agency, and suffering, [turning] instead to awareness.…Meanwhile, the actual substance of living—a person’s history, hopes, and contradictions—is rendered as fixed, eternal, and inert.” Though compelling, Waldman misses the intent to represent passivity itself behind much autofiction, and Skyland in particular. Durbin and his peers are portraying a widespread sense of futility, a pervasive fear that we’re beholden to the whims of far-right nationalists and Silicon Valley tech bros. The rendering of a character’s life as “inert” is not a fallacy, but a deliberate craft maneuver.
If being overwhelmed by current events is the self-reflexivity trap, then most of us have succumbed to it. I certainly have: I’m overstimulated, agitated, exhausted. I remind myself that I’m not the first person to live through a period of political upheaval, but my attention span for history falters, so I refresh my Twitter feed. This is, I suspect, what makes Durbin’s narrator so jaded: “I’ve never staked my research on the promise of assured answers,” writes Durbin. “This isn’t quite the grand, unfurling cliché of travel—‘what matters is the journey, not the destination’—since all I want is a destination, an end point. No cheap Norwegian Air flight matters more than its arrival city.”
It’s no wonder, then, that Durbin can’t “come to the emotional material…unless I begin somewhere else, whether it’s a fiction or not.” A drastic change in the human experience, he seems to argue, occasions a drastic change in form. Still, regardless of form, a novelist must deliver the emotional material—and much to Skyland’s detriment, Durbin falls short on vulnerability. There’s an icy texture to the book, an awkward sense that the camera opens only for details that flatter Durbin’s ego.
Iciness aside, Skyland is tolerable when it resembles a camera rather than RollerCoaster Tycoon, capturing images instead of engineering events. His portrait of Greece is vibrant and elegant, and his descriptions of food stir my appetite and wanderlust: “We ate dinner on the communal porch overlooking the bay. A salad of cucumber, feta, and different olives I bought from a roadside stand…fermented, the stall’s owner explained, using a mix of different spices and salts from a thousand-year-old recipe.” Even better, a midnight hookup with a fellow island-goer features “cocaine, a bottle of tequila, lube, and condoms in a Prada satchel, its zipper tied with a silver chain.”
The portrayals of people are similarly enticing, but too often Durbin kills the mood. On the boat to Patmos, for instance, the narrator spots “a couple reclined on chairs across the pool from us, their two sons sitting on their laps.” The setup is compelling on its own, but the ambience quickly fades when Durbin remarks that “[the boys] were a little too old to be lying on their parents, but then the intimacy between families in Europe was unfamiliar to me.” How old, exactly, is “a little too old?” Qualifying the image with vapid musings diminishes its impact. By the time the younger son “grabbed his dozing father by the chin and kissed him on the lips,” the intrigue has been lost.
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Commenting on MacArthur Park, Durbin described his fiction as concerned with “the representation of place rather than the place itself.” The statement raises doubts about the author’s credibility: if he fails to distinguish Lipsi from “a lump of rock and sand,” should we really trust him with the burden of representation? Would you bring a broken camera on vacation? “That’s part of [my work’s] strangeness,” he insisted. “It purports to stake a claim…and is therefore subject to disagreement, to a mix of feelings, to a difference of opinion and experience.”
Durbin and his peers aspire to simultaneously acknowledge and complicate the role of the storyteller, and then to tell an engaged, convincing story. In trying to do both, argues Waldman, they fall into the self-reflexivity trap: “The result…is a crop of protagonists who are to be congratulated for spending enough time contemplating themselves that they can correctly diagnose their own flaws.” Again, it’s a tricky accusation. Life is hard, after all, even for those who have enough time and privilege to contemplate their flaws. But I worry that something ethically dubious is at play in Skyland. The narrator’s behavior suggests that Durbin advocates for a “mix of feelings” so that he can manipulate the terms of readers’ disagreement, position himself above criticism—if readers don’t like him, it’s because they fail to appreciate his wisdom. It’s like blaming RollerCoaster Tycoon’s virtual tourists for boarding an unfinished ride. Beyond just self-disparagement, the narrator begins to treat his fellow travelers cruelly and carelessly as well, yet he doesn’t acknowledge his wrongdoing.
Let’s start with the late-night hookup. Shiv is off on a date, so a Grindr guy drives his moped to the narrator’s hotel. He’s a handsome English jewelry-designer who spent the summer island-hopping with his husband. The hookup gets muddled when the designer shares his marital woes, which the narrator finds disingenuous: “I wondered if he was lying, or testing some alternative version of his life that might make him more compelling as a character.” It’s a strange grievance, especially coming from a writer who spends seventy pages exalting Guibert for doing just the same.
The designer cuts the cocaine and pours the tequila, and the narrator resents the man for talking about his “rich loveless husband.” When the guy stops the hookup mid-kiss, the narrator breaks down: “His mind was elsewhere, the coke had left him cold. He said, ‘I don’t think I’m feeling this. I’m out of it’…I wondered if he thought I was unattractive. The days on the island, in a small room without a mirror, had warped my self-image.”
The designer is clearly inebriated, his “small cock” flaccid, so he asks to spend the night. “No, I think you should go,” says the narrator. “I’ve had a long day and I need to sleep.” Isn’t the guy too wasted to drive home? “I wasn’t sorry,” writes Durbin. “He had a big house, with plenty of rooms. He would make do.”
“I thought you’d be nicer,” the designer says. “What had given him that impression?” asks Durbin. “How had I been especially cruel?” If he wants to know: the designer could have killed himself. It’s astonishingly negligent, irresponsible in its framing of the guy’s intoxication. There’s nothing liberatory here, nothing that resembles Guibert’s depictions of violence. It’s not even a profession of shortcomings or flaws—it’s a whiny, ludicrous complaint. Does Durbin really think it’s fine to let a hookup drive home drunk, so long as he inhabits a “big house, with plenty of rooms?” Or if he distorts your “self-image,” makes you feel “unattractive,” then your nastiness is justified?
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In literary fiction, the self-reflexivity trap is averted typically by way of epiphany. “Historically, these journeys have involved growth,” writes Waldman, “and the painful reconciliation of action and belief.” The revelation haunts the protagonist, and for a brief, glorious moment, his perception of the narrative transforms. The roller coaster reaches its peak, lurches forward. The passengers scream.
Perhaps Durbin’s rejection of conventional craft is motivated by his resistance to the epiphany. It’s easier to “get entangled” in avant-garde poetics than to grow enough to realize that it’s cruel to force a hookup to drive home drunk. Yet this explanation contradicts Durbin’s commitment to paying homage to the New Narrative movement—a noted precursor to 2010s autofiction, and a frequent subject of Durbin’s work as Editor-in-Chief of Frieze. “I want you to read [New Narrative],” he wrote in his eulogy to the late Kevin Killian. “I’ve always thought they sounded like unrealized scripts from the Hollywood studio system, full of silvery possibility.” The aftermath of the gay liberation movement spurred the New Narrativists to implement a text-metatext approach to storytelling, which fused critical theory, appropriation, hyper-referentiality, and pastiche. The objective, as scholar Diarmuid Hester’s recent book Wrong reminded us, was to forge a fluid network between the text, the reader, and the gay community. “They tried not just to represent and affirm gay experience,” writes Hester, “but also, and more importantly, to encourage in their gay readers a critical awareness of late capitalism.”
For a novella as queer as Skyland, New Narrative offers context that Waldman’s critique misses. Perhaps the hookup passage is meant to capture the cross-class tension between rich gays and poor gays. Still, Durbin’s scene-building is far too fuzzy for his reader to intuit this particular subtext. From the passage, both men seem pretty bourgeois; aside from the Prada satchel, there’s no evidence that the designer is richer than the narrator. There’s no justification, either, for Durbin’s fixation on the designer’s neglectful husband and tiny penis. Plenty of poor gays have unloving partners and small cocks—how does the remark serve the story, other than to emasculate the designer? Why not just eat the guy’s ass?
Ultimately, Durbin holds his fellow gays in contempt: he belittles them, renders them inferior to him, even as he praises the radical queerness of Guibert and New Narrative. His scorn becomes especially fraught in his portrayal of Shiv, the novella’s sole nonwhite character. Given the aforementioned iciness, the narrator’s travel companion infuses Skyland with a highly welcome warmth. He spends 2017 in Europe finishing his dissertation, but “in the great tradition of advanced education, he’s found himself endlessly distracted by wine and boys.” The line is sweet, but Shiv has not just “found himself” in this situation. On the contrary, his pursuit of sex is restless, audacious, active.
The duo spots a group of Frenchmen at the beach, and the narrator “stares at them…hoping they might take an interest in us.” Meanwhile, Shiv approaches one of them, “by far the cutest,” and rides the guy’s cock at a nearby farm, “fucking among the half-wild chickens.” Durbin characterizes the duo as a solitary unit, as “us” being ignored, even as Shiv independently pursues the Frenchman. They resemble college freshmen realizing they have nothing in common. “We had promised to have fun, with or without the other, and I hoped he was having plenty of fun,” writes Durbin. “I decided to walk to the taverna and see if they would call me a car.”
The tension builds: “In Greece, [Shiv] was less anxious than he had been in New York…. Nothing bothered him. This frustrated me—mostly because I couldn’t seem to let go of New York.” I get the sense that Durbin is lying about the true source of his frustration, just as he claims to find the designer’s marital woes insincere. The dishonesty itself is relatable; it’s common for gay men to envy those whom they perceive as more sexually liberated. Plenty of New Narrativists get jealous. But Durbin’s choice to universalize his envy, to presume that his readers share his petty attitude, is irritating. Shiv rightly rejects Durbin’s inhibitions, so can’t we reject them too?
Skyland’s treatment of sex and relationships annoys me—I can’t help but think Guibert would have rolled his eyes at Durbin—but it’s mostly harmless. At the novella’s climax, however, his contempt has ugly consequences. The week in Greece reaches its end, and the duo boards the day ferry to Lipsi. To the narrator’s surprise, the crowd is marked by its “underlying conservatism…. These people, in their best suits and dresses, belonged to another island.” “They’re staring at me,” Shiv says, seeming to intuit a racist tone in the passengers’ gaze. Durbin, too, notes their “mistrustful eyes,” but insists that he could “feel their eyes on the back of my head, too.”
Here, the tension flips. Shiv falls into a quiet state of panic, yet the narrator minimizes suspicions of racism: “[Shiv’s] mind [was] on the island coming into view.” Meanwhile, Durbin turns his own attention from Shiv to a group of nearby passengers, “handsome young men…their lowcut shorts bunched around their crotches to reveal heavily tanned thighs.” It’s a bizarre, dismissive reading of Shiv’s interiority. How could he know that Shiv’s mind is on Lipsi and not on the racist atmosphere? The exchange offers Durbin the perfect chance to interrogate his framing of the duo as “us,” to explore the ways they are divided not just by sexuality but by race. And yet he doesn’t seize it—he ignores Shiv and stares at “those meaty thighs.”
White progressives are often sincerely oblivious to the racist body language aimed at their nonwhite friends. But when a group of Greek soldiers confronts Shiv, it becomes impossible to read Durbin’s intentions as privileged ignorance: he is willfully negligent. “We were the last to disembark and most of the passengers had already dispersed,” he writes. “The soldiers stepped forward and I realized, too late, that they had been waiting for us.”
For “us”? The soldiers ignore the narrator and confiscate Shiv’s wallet. The narrator stands still and spots nearby townsfolk, remarking that “none stepped forward to ask what was happening.… I recognized in their flat expressions the even keel of a satisfied patience, that what they had been waiting for…had finally come about.”
Six pages earlier Durbin brushed off the racism in the “mistrustful eyes,” insisted they were staring at “the back of my head, too.” But now that his friend has been racially profiled, he blames the Greek townspeople, smears them as bigots. Perhaps an intervention might have aggravated the soldiers, but Durbin doesn’t even entertain the possibility. His passivity comes across as smug, sadistic projection—how else would he recognize a “satisfied patience” in their “flat expressions”? The Greeks should be standing up for Shiv, but the white American narrator has no moral obligation here?
The soldiers release Shiv. “We watched the waves and tried to imagine the Homeric similes they might have inspired,” writes Durbin, who seems unwilling to admit that the incident didn’t happen to “us.” “We invented our own metaphors for the morning and afternoon, then fell silent until it was time to sail to Patmos.”
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Once, my mother stood over my shoulder and watched me play RollerCoaster Tycoon. “You have homework,” she said. “I did my homework,” I said. A fire raged on my computer screen, tore through the amusement park. “Your math teacher called,” she said. “I’ll do my math later. I’m having fun.” Tourists ran in circles, waved their hands in the air. “That’s the game, just killing people,” said my mom. “You think that’s fun?”
That was the first year I failed a class. The years slogged by, and I kept collecting Fs on my algebra tests. A sense of hysteria suffused my adolescence, a fear that I’d soon drop out of school, get rejected from college, have no option but to become a fat, ugly janitor. I bit my nails, pulled my hair, screamed and cried and cursed at my mother. I did everything but turn off RollerCoaster Tycoon.
It’s naïve to suggest that logging off would solve all my problems. Likewise, a critique of Skyland resists the straightforward moralism of the self-reflexivity trap—maybe life in the 2010s really has made such a reading impossible. Still, Durbin seems far too attached to his role of voyeur and the alibi of neutrality it provides. This is the story of a man who makes a hookup drive home drunk, who dismisses his nonwhite friend’s confrontations with racism. Why doesn’t the narrator experience any meaningful consequences? Why does he seek the task of representation, only to shirk the burdens that accompany it? I respect Durbin’s ambitions, but the novella reveals him to be an untrustworthy storyteller.
We should read Skyland, then, as a response to the renewed interest in autofiction and New Narrative, and as one of its worst misinterpretations. Queer readers, of course, might reject my argument. Given the right wing’s decades-long co-option of “personal responsibility,” and the homophobia and sex negativity implied in its gestures, I understand the purpose of a self-affirming approach to queer fiction. But ultimately, what Durbin asks of us—to witness his cowardice yet elevate him as brave—is unreasonable. “My book isn’t meant to win me a lot of new friends,” Kevin Killian admitted just before his death. “I’m really the worst person in the world.”