Solidarity to Lenu is both a dream and a nightmare; she wants to join in, but she is too afraid to relinquish her unique self to give in to the triumphal we that Jill highlighted in Balestrini. To her, that “we” is irreconcilable with the solitude of independent being or, more specifically, the desired solitude of the autonomous female being. For increasingly, as she walks through the mass of protesters looking for a familiar face or name (her own), Lent finds it particularly hard to articulate the women from the mass or from each other. She sees men in passing and notes them individually as “handsome, ugly, well-dressed, scruffy, violent, frightened, amused,” yet the women she sees “stayed close together ... they shouted together, laughed together, and if they were separated by even a few meters they kept an eye on each other so as not to get lost” (TWL, 69). Only a few individuals “by themselves or at most in pairs,” move amongst the groups of men, and they are marked by their hard-won distinction from the other women: “they seemed to me the happiest, the most aggressive, the proudest.” It is 1968 and while Lent struggles to absorb “the lesson from France,” she is deeply terrified by the idea of losing the distinctly singular, female self she has worked so hard (albeit confusedly) to keep cleanly defined and bounded, in order to join the massed bodies of implicitly male solidarity.

[...] Lila is the most clearly defined character at various points, yet she is also the most willing to embrace phase changes and transformations, at once the most and least solid of forms. Thus, both her magical changeability and her lifelong nightmare of slowly dissolving margins—perhaps migraine or madness or something more mystical—might both be incomplete, primitive stages on the way to her ultimate desire and destiny, the sudden “elimination without a trace.” Maybe her proximity to the void is what makes Lila at once the most empathetic character (who feels other minds; around whom others dissolve) and the most remote one, that distant figure nobody can comprehend or touch, she who refuses to leave traces for anyone to hold onto (“I’ll come look in your computer, I’ll read your files, I'll erase them” [TWL, 29]).

When the four of us began this whole enterprise, we met in person to talk about our projections and anxieties about writing together. Over pasta and wine, we worried about the idea of reading books together, long-term: What if we all came up with the same ideas? How would we distinguish our voices as writers? What if we weren't original enough? It turned out that none of these concerns came to anything, though of course we all fell into certain patterns of reading and even raised the same questions or terms or ideas. We never thought the same things or repeated each other. It seems so obvious now: of course we wouldn’t, we are different people. And yet, that anxiety was so strongly felt. Why?

These are, of course, the very same fears that Lila and Lent express in their different ways—the fears of pollution and codependence that inevitably accompany intimacy of any kind. Considering Lila and Len, considering us, considering this venture and the novels it springs from, I wonder if there is a way to be confident in solidarity—in a personal way (and in a political one too, I think) but not subsume each other; to experience an intellectual and emotional togetherness that feels the giddiness of being overwhelmed with feeling but does not itself overwhelm. If there is a way to truly be with one another, and infiltrate one another, and communicate deeply, but not get lost in other minds. If there is a way to both be your friend and be yourself and not betray either. If there is a way to dissolve margins but not give in to the seductions of madness or self-obliteration. Perhaps that is the most defiant challenge of these novels to their characters and to their readers.