Exalted by Anna Dorn Book Review by Peter Dyer
Exalted by Anna Dorn
Book Review by Peter Dyer
Unnamed Press
ISBN: 9781951213480
Publication Date: June 7th, 2022
Emerging as a young creative subsisting on a diet of Lana Del Rey’s music, the podcast Red Scare, and Coke Zero, law student turned Los Angeles novelist Anna Dorn released her debut novel Vagablonde in the spring of 2020. Vagablonde was brash, crass, gay, and addictive, painting a lurid portrait of the Los Angeles music scene, populated by the titular character Vagablonde and the number of artists whose music she feverishly consumed: Yaeji, Kelela, and Lana Del Rey, to name a few. A friend gave me a copy of Vagablonde during a massive book rut, a time when I kept starting and stopping various novels (I had attempted an Ann Patchett book before I started Dorn’s novel), but Vagablonde stopped me in my tracks. I had never read anything like it before, a novel for adults that felt reminiscent of the novels I loved as a teenager: The A-List series by Zoey Dean, Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar, and Secrets of my Hollywood Life by Jen Calonita.
Anna Dorn’s writing, down to the word, is filled with LA nostalgia. When Eve Babitz passed away in December, I found myself thinking about which living writer would continue to write LA in all of its unvarnished glory. Lana Del Rey is more focused on the heartland now, Courtney Love is chronicling her life in London instead of burning palm trees around LA, Babitz and Joan Didion have passed, but Anna Dorn remains, steadily releasing a book each year (Vagablonde, Unnamed Press, 2020 and Bad Lawyer, Hachette, 2021), embracing being blissfully out of touch in the California sun, while still keeping her finger very much on the pulse.
2022’s Anna Dorn offering, Exalted, features more of what we’ve come to expect from her protagonists: queer, pugnacious, contemplative women written in the style of Ottessa Moshfegh and Melissa Broder, two authors who have led the new literary vanguard of novels that simply feature Women Being Sad, lovingly grouped together into a Goodreads list entitled “women vs the void.”
Exalted finds Dorn playing with a dual-perspective narrative, always a tricky thing to do as a realistic fiction writer. It sometimes feels like it takes a genius to write a novel that switches perspectives with each chapter. How do you take your voice and make it sound like someone else’s? Often, authors will write in a removed third person, acting as simply a spectator to the action, refusing to dive head-first into the madness themselves. In Exalted, Dorn bravely takes on the perspectives of antiheroines Emily and Dawn. Dawn, a 48 year old lesbian with Borderline personality disorder, has just been broken up with by her girlfriend. Through Dawn’s various interactions we come to realize that, in her past interpersonal relationships, Dawn has been manipulative and abusive. Emily is an internet astrologer in her 30s, flailing in the wake of a recent online cancellation (she reposted something from another astrology account and passed it off as her own) and spending her days struggling to make rent while pining after Beau Rubidoux, a gorgeous, exciting guy she meets in the DMs.
In an essay by Maxine Swann on Chris Kraus’s cult feminist novel I Love Dick and its subsequent TV show, “I Love Dick on television marks the rise of the female loser,” she writes, “Let’s imagine, for example, a parallel version of this male loser: a woman in sweatpants stuffing her face with pizza while she watches TV and masturbates to men who have spurned her. Does she exist? Would she even be allowed?” In Anna Dorn’s novels, she exists and is allowed. Dorn’s protagonists are the opposite of girlbosses; they’re one-time creatives trying to get by on doing as little as possible. Emily charges $200 for astrology readings she barely puts any effort into, bullshitting responses based off of generic horoscopes online. Dawn is waiting tables at the same restaurant she always has, bumbling through toxic relationships with women, showing no desire to change or improve. Emily and Dawn both hate themselves but they are, according to themselves, never the problem.
When handsome photographer Beau Rubidoux slides into Emily’s DMs on her Astrology Instagram page @exalted, she immediately becomes obsessed. The astrology bit sometimes feels played out in the culture, but Dorn revives it with such ease that I kept consulting my birth chart while reading, wanting to see if I shared any placements with these characters. In true “female loser” fashion, Emily starts hanging out at the coffee shop where Beau posts Instagram photos from. She follows his every move, trying to cleverly stage a meeting. It’s reminiscent of the movie Ingrid Goes West, or books like The Shame by Makenna Goodman and even Kraus’s I Love Dick, the obsession that arises from meeting someone once, or sometimes not at all. It speaks to the parasocial relationships we form with random people online, utter strangers promising some sort of solace. For much of the first half of the book, Emily chases Beau around LA. Her yearning is relatable albeit painfully sad, I found myself thinking a lot about my own missed connections, the (in my opinion) genderless concept of the “loser” taking up residency in my brain.
On the other side of town, loner Dawn and her son have fallen out of touch, and she’s just ruined one of the only solid friendships in her life. She drinks a lot, thinks about how much she hates her life, then rinses and repeats. I’ll admit to being more interested in Emily’s narrative, as it felt more similar to Dorn’s engaging voice in Vagablonde. Dawn’s story seemed to have less going on in it, and Dorn clearly connected more with Emily as well — Emily’s sections were typically a lot longer than Dawn’s. It made sense, Dorn is closer in age to Emily and she felt like a supporting character from Dorn’s first novel. In Dawn’s sections, Dorn sometimes committed too heavily to Dawn’s Gen X identity and her anti-Millennial bit, cringeworthy at times but typical of an author’s first attempt at writing a narrator older than themselves.
Much of Exalted feels pleasantly plotless. Dawn and Emily’s circumstances are expertly drawn and engaging, though after a while the reader starts to wonder what else will happen…until Dorn executes an almost perfect twist near the end of the book — one that I barely saw coming. It makes Exalted a deeply satisfying read. Everything is worth it in the end — even the times when I thought Dorn had gone off track.
Imbued with her trademark swagger, Exalted is an excellent summer offering from Dorn. After finishing, I felt like cruising down Wilshire Blvd. blasting Lana Del Rey, on my way to save all of these characters from themselves.
Peter Dyer is currently earning his BA in Creative Writing at Western Washington University. He writes both fiction and non-fiction largely inspired by visual art, music, people watching, and myriad novels, particularly works in translation by women and queer people. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, he currently lives in Bellingham, WA. Peter is on Instagram and Twitter @peters___online.
Anna Dorn is an author and writing teacher living in Los Angeles. Exalted is her second novel following her debut, Vagablonde. A former criminal defense attorney, she also published the book Bad Lawyer.
20 July 2022
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