FOUR BY FOUR, Sara Mesa's odd, claustrophobic, upsetting challenge to smugness

FOUR BY FOUR
SARA MESA (tr. Katie Whittemore)
Open Letter Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Set entirely at Wybrany College—a school where the wealthy keep their kids safe from the chaos erupting in the cities—Four by Four is a novel of insinuation and gossip, in which the truth about Wybrany’s “program” is always palpable, but never explicit. The mysteries populating the novel open with the disappearance of one of the “special,” scholarship students. As the first part unfolds, it becomes clear that all is not well in Wybrany, and that something more sordid lurks beneath the surface.

In the second part—a self-indulgent, wry diary written by an impostor who has infiltrated the school as a substitute teacher—the eerie sense of what’s happening in this space removed from society, becomes more acute and potentially sinister.

An exploration of the relationship between the powerful and powerless—and the repetition of these patterns—Mesa’s "sophisticated nightmare" calls to mind great works of gothic literature (think Shirley Jackson) and social thrillers to create a unique, unsettling view of freedom and how a fear of the outside world can create monsters.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There's enough animal cruelty in here for me to warn the sensitive to cross the story off their radar for good. It was a very close-run thing for me to finish the book, in fact.

What moved me forward was the nature of the story. It's a closed society, a hierarchy run on the tacit rules of conduct that never get enumerated and therefore are that much harder to fight against, to resist inside and out. The "colich" (as everyone refers to it) was established to keep the children within safe from...honestly, at this point, I can't help myself: from what, given that what happens in the "colich" is so utterly unspeakably awful...the Outside, the terrors of the unknown-but-known. (Like all "security states" the unknown being protected from must be known to someone or else how would one know it was worse than the security state?) Sexual assaults, class enmities, all the sins of the world are routine within the "colich" and the outside world's worse? Hm.

Anyway, Mesa's tight and tiny little microcosm of all authoritarian states is limned in hot acid on living flesh, her story unfolds as a fever dream had by a starving political prisoner might with all its abuses and horrors. Her singular talent for controlling the reader's attention...leaving the basic reality of the world outside the "colich" unexplored, undescribed, but making the contrast to the well-fed and privileged comforts of staff and students plain...creates the slightly seasick sense of knowing someone is being abused, but not quite knowing how. Still less realizing that it is also happening to you. Author Mesa's narrative, then, is finely balanced between the states of revulsion and empathy, between understanding and comprehending viscerally, always shifting the reader's attention away when clarity threatens to lift that so-necessary fog.

A lot like life in the world, then.

What makes this a four-star read, not a five-star one, is the nature of the animal cruelty (it's the reason not solely the fact that's so upsetting to me) and the strange, third-act summing-up bit written by a teacher who's no longer at the "colich" but which was presumably written while there and is now, suddenly, here in our face. The framing device wasn't as effective as it seemed to want to be in this case, and rather fractured the eerie, claustrophobic darkness that's prevailed in the novel until now.

As a reading experience, it's definitely one I can recommend to you. As an extended metaphor for the nature of wealth-measured success in Society, I can even urge it on you. As Spanish Gothic, it excels. As a gestalt, it falls only slightly—but perceptibly—short.