Taking place in a future so near it
might be happening already and you just don’t know it yet, Enclosure
Architect traces the creation and dissolution of one woman’s chosen family amid the
dissolution of larger social order, and, in doing so, also describes her halting and
brave attempts to remember and create.
In the background of this
intelligent, winning novel is an armed conflict, the origins and scope of which
are never fully revealed. Mortars and bombs reduce sections of an unnamed city to rubble; emergency
services are unreliable; business and money-making continues in select circles;
and partisans blow up the university (accidentally? on purpose?) where our
characters study art, and from which they receive “honorary (meaning meaningless)
degrees”, thus turning them out into the wreckage of the city and young
adulthood without even the benefits of having completed a formal education in art. (There’s a
sly joke here, I think.)
Against all of this, our narrator nonlinearly describes
their intertwining creative, emotional lives in squats, an exciting, voluntary poverty full of
dumpster-diving and art-making and navigating what it means to create without
the strictures (or architecture) of school, family, or society. They are beholden only to
themselves and each other.
What do they do with such freedom?
Take drugs and have sex? Naturally. Yet there’s also the sincere effort to
construct meaning from experience, to create something stable against a turmoil
that the reader doesn’t have to squint too hard at to see as being close to
what we’re experiencing currently in the USA. What else could the materials of
such construction be but individual moments, moments which Milliken renders
with acute and sometimes heartbreaking detail. Flip to almost any page and be
rewarded: “A beat-up table and instant coffee steam. The blue of a jawline
shadow no one was meant to see. And me. Together we completed our composition.
Then Marlene took my portrait, and I was gone.” Enclosure Architect finds heroism in such quiet, unheralded moments.
This reviewer is loath to reveal
too much or provide any kind of heuristic; part of the pleasure of this deeply
felt book is its unfolding, and the way it deals with the complicated nature of
memory. At its core, Enclosure Architect could be understood as an
argument against forgetting; that memory provides a basis for art and thus for humanity…our
own, and a shared humanity, if we’re lucky.
