You Know You Want This
Kristen Roupenian
Simon & Schuster
Review by Justina Elias
Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” went viral in December 2017, two months after #MeToo had become a global phenomenon. Following a twenty-year-old woman through an ill-fated relationship with an awkward and manipulative older man, the story describes in uncanny detail the mental gymnastics many women perform to rationalize unpleasant (or even traumatic) sex. In her new collection, You Know You Want This, Roupenian delves deeper into the power dynamics suggested by her provocative title, yet to read these stories as feminist polemic would be hopelessly reductive. There are no clear-cut victims or predators here, just people telling themselves stories in order to live. It’s these private narratives, at turns poignant, funny, chilling and repugnant, that prove the need for fiction’s lingering gaze in the clickbait era.
You Know You Want This is an undeniably timely book, both in its sexual politics and its preoccupation with technology. Much has been made of the role texting plays in “Cat Person’s” misunderstandings: Roupenian captures the familiar handwringing behind an apparently flippant “Haha sorry yeah,” the subtle jab of a delayed response or a missing follow-up question. Technology also propels the action in “Death Wish,” where a depressed man is goaded into enacting a Tinder hookup’s violent fantasy, and in the 90s-era “Look at Your Game, Girl,” where a young girl shares her Discman and headphones with a strange man in a park. Far from gratuitous stage setting, these objects—smartphones, headphones, computers—stress a recurring theme in the stories: the inescapably mediated nature of human communication. “I just wanted to be seen,” one narrator laments of his disastrous dating life, yet again and again, Roupenian’s characters find themselves trapped by the limitations of their own perspectives. It’s a point made more ham-fistedly in the “The Mirror, the Bucket, and the Old Thigh Bone,” a fable-like outlier in which a princess retreats into an obsessive romance with her own reflection. Stories grounded in specific times and places better demonstrate the rift between reality and self-mythology that is, Roupenian implies, both intrinsic to the human condition and exacerbated by our increasingly ubiquitous gadgets.
Two stories best illustrate this relentless self-deception: the aforementioned “Cat Person” and its immediate follow-up, “The Good Guy.” Thwarting the common convention of placing the strongest stories first and last, this discomfiting couple appears at the heart of the collection, acting as flip sides of one coin (or a journey through the looking glass). In “Cat Person,” Margot enjoys building “an elaborate scaffolding of jokes via text” with the older Robert, but the connection collapses over the course of their first date, during which she retreats ever further into her own head:
As they kissed, she found herself carried away by a fantasy of such pure ego that she could hardly admit even to herself that she was having it. Look at this beautiful girl, she imagined him thinking. She’s so perfect, her body is perfect, everything about her is perfect, she’s only twenty years old, her skin is flawless, I want her so badly, I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anyone else, I want her so bad I might die.
Thus, much as Margot becomes “a prop for the movie that [is] playing in his head” during their dispiriting hook-up, so too does she dehumanize Robert for her own gratification. It’s a tendency echoed to disturbing effect in “The Good Guy,” where Roupenian spends fifty pages tracking one man’s descent from overenthusiastic teenage crushes to a habitual deception in which he presents as “cheerfully asexual, utterly unthreatening, scrubbed clean of any whiff of need.” Thus armoured against rejection, young Ted goes on to begrudgingly befriend a female classmate who becomes the star of his sexual imagination. It’s a familiar story taken to new and disturbing places here, most notably in a recurring fantasy where an adult Ted’s partner stabs herself with his weaponized penis (an image that finds an ironic counterpart in the story’s splashy conclusion). Once again, Roupenian proves herself a keen channeller of the zeitgeist, avoiding the obvious “Nice Guy™” trope even in the story’s title; when the term finally appears in the very last line, it does so with the sweaty, disappointing inevitability of Ted’s masturbation sessions.
Candid, raunchy, and unpretentious, You Know You Want This joins the ranks of Curtis Sittenfeld’s You Think It, I’ll Say It and Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women in its frank portrayal of desire and its pitfalls. Sex and death lurk in every corner of these stories, whether they feature a “pacifist, medical-marijuana-card-carrying Earth Mother” plotting revenge at her child’s birthday party or an ostensibly well-meaning volunteer hitting on his teenage student in Ghana. At times, said darkness can come off as heavy-handed, most notably in the BDSM-driven “Bad Boy” (a story so luridly literal it almost reads like anti-kink propaganda) and the clumsy parable “Scarred,” in which a woman sacrifices a naked man in a magical bid for power only to find she has sacrificed her own humanity in the process. Yet such decisive endings can make for gratifying reading, particularly in the closing story, “Biter,” where a brilliant twist on a workplace harassment suit acts as the cherry on top of a dense, dark, and decidedly devilish cake. To use a phrase from The Paris Review in reference to Curtis Sittenfeld, Roupenian is “disarmingly uncoy,” a political statement in itself coming from a young female writer. If she occasionally falters in her boldness, the payoff from her successes more than makes up for these blunders.
Yet subtlety need not mean coyness, and it’s when she steps back from her more salacious plot points that Roupenian evokes another author well-versed in the power of sex and fantasy. “Isn’t it true,” writes Alice Munro in The Progress of Love, “that all the people I know in the world so far are hardly more than puppets for me, serving the glossy contrivings of my imagination?” The language may be more elegant than Roupenian’s chatty prose, but the sentiment is familiar: ultimately, both authors argue, we are all held captive by our own minds, doomed to mistake mirrors for windows as we fumble for connection.
Near misses can haunt us as palpably as real trauma; the stories we tell ourselves supersede any objective reality. It’s a pessimistic message, perhaps, but also a unifying one, particularly against the too-often polarized backdrop of #MeToo. In her strongest stories, Roupenian, like Munro, evokes male privilege without resorting to caricature, exposing the private deceptions that sustain and undermine such hierarchies. Reading these stories, we can both condemn “good guys” like Ted and reluctantly agree, as he contemplates both his male and female classmates’ inevitable heartache, that “the world was pitiless. Nobody had any power over anyone else.”
Justina Elias holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Guelph. Her writing has appeared in Room, The Puritan, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere.