Contemporary Authors

• So Many Olympic Exertions ( novel) Kaya Press (Los Angeles, CA), 2017

• Bookculture - http://www.bookculture.com/blog/2017/09/20/qa-anelise-chen-author-so-many-olympic-exertions

  QUOTED: "I feel like I’m reading and writing sport somewhat against the grain, or using it as a vehicle to tell a different kind of story that people aren’t used to. Pick up any sports autobiography or biography by a famous athlete—you’ll see how it’s usually the same story: winning, losing, overcoming impossible odds."
  "So when I started out, I had zero interest in the sports narrative because I thought, wrongly, that there was nothing more to extrapolate from this kind of story—it bored me. But then if that were true, why was I spending all this time watching the Olympics, reading about sports, going down the youtube rabbit hole, etc? I was really obsessed."
  "I realized that you could write about all the in-between moments, the quiet moments when nothing is happening."

  Q&A with Anelise Chen, Author of So Many Olympic Exertions
  On Wednesday, October 4th, Book Culture on 112th is excited to host a reading celebrating Anelise Chen's debut novel So Many Olympic Exertions. So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press 2017) is an experimental novel that blends elements of sportswriting, memoir, and self help. Anelise Chen's essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR, BOMB Magazine, New Republic, VICE, Village Voice and many other publications. She teaches writing at Columbia University, and writes a column about mollusks for The Paris Review. Anelise answered a few questions about her book, sports, and the writing process. Read her answers below!

  1. On Twitter, you told me that “There was a moment when I realized I had written an *entire* book about sports. Me! Sports!” But as I read So Many Olympic Exertions, it seemed more like a natural fit that this story of anxiety, grief, and personal growth would also be intertwined with these brilliant moments in sports history. Why do you think there’s a hesitation on the part of so many writers (and readers) to venture out of typical nerd territory to write and read about something like sports?

  That’s a funny phrase: “typical nerd territory.” But you’re right! The ESPN watching population and the nerdy experimental novel reading population often seem mutually exclusive. Why is that? I’ve done a lot of research about this, and there are a lot of theories—Barthes suggests that athletes who think a lot are generally doomed to failure. Is there something about sports that resists interpretation? Sometimes I tell people I’ve written a novel about sports and you can sort of see their eyes glazing over, and then I have to say, “It’s not really about sports. It’s about exhaustion and failure,” and then their attention perks up again. But other times I tell people I’ve written a novel about sports and they get really excited, but when I say it’s an experimental novel about exhaustion and failure, they become confused.

  So I feel like I’m reading and writing sport somewhat against the grain, or using it as a vehicle to tell a different kind of story that people aren’t used to. Pick up any sports autobiography or biography by a famous athlete—you’ll see how it’s usually the same story: winning, losing, overcoming impossible odds. These biographies are supposed to offer a glimpse into the psyche of a champion, a clue as to how they got there. And if you pay attention to the short documentaries that get produced around the Olympics, the ones that introduce the viewer to some athlete or other, the question is always the same: Will they be able to win? Then if the athlete loses, they drop off the radar immediately, because they fail as a character in the narrative we’ve prescribed for them.

  So when I started out, I had zero interest in the sports narrative because I thought, wrongly, that there was nothing more to extrapolate from this kind of story—it bored me. But then if that were true, why was I spending all this time watching the Olympics, reading about sports, going down the youtube rabbit hole, etc? I was really obsessed. I was looking for something but I didn’t know what I was looking for yet. Sports narratives seem limiting and obvious—the only possible outcome is either victory or defeat—and I didn’t think I had anything more to say about that. But then one day I heard Jean-Philippe Toussaint read “Zidane’s Melancholy.” Something definitely clicked for me. I realized that you could write about all the in-between moments, the quiet moments when nothing is happening, when the ball is on the other side of the field, or when the star player is looking up at the sky during the most important match of his career.

  2. In So Many Olympic Exertions, you explore how both sports and academic research are physical activities. In a library, she thinks, “And here I am, writing about bodies, bodies, bodies.” How do you shape the relationship between the physical body and the written page?

  My friend and I were discussing this over dinner one night: When we talk about the corpus of an author, why are we only ever referring to their written work and not to their bodies? The body is immediate and forces you to attend to it, when it’s hungry, tired, sick, but we always want to pretend like it’s not there, or as though it were an inconvenience. A certain kind of critic might hate me for saying this, but I love thinking about the ways a writer’s body affects their literary output. What is it like to write from an incarcerated state? What is it like to write when one is paralyzed, or alternately, when one is in motion? What is it like to write when we are stuck in a certain mood? This is why I love looking at handwritten notes and manuscripts; there’s something physical about it, the hand moving across the page. The pen makes a trace in the same way dancers move through space. We still live in the physical world, and writing is only a part of it, but we like to pretend that intellectual labor is somehow operating on another plane. But it’s all the same thing.

  3. When reading the book, I was struck that there’s no real moment of epiphany where, all of a sudden, Athena’s figured out how to fix everything. But things do get better. How do you plot Athena’s growth and change throughout the book?

  I was trying my best to keep her in motion. The film Café Lumière by Hou Hsiao Hsien was important to me because that movie is really all about movement and mood. About this sense of oblique longing that animates us and sends us on journeys. There’s no arrival in the movie—even as the girl boards one train after another—and she never finds what she’s looking for. That’s what my days feel like to me. And I really wanted to resist any kind of redemption narrative—the typical sports narrative as I discussed earlier—but it was still difficult to resist completely because I read so much self-help and I still believe in something like progress. At least I believe in moving from one place to another place. I tried to put Athena in a different place than where she started, and I didn’t put any value judgments on that place.

  4. You’re also writing a column on mollusks for The Paris Review, and your project there reminds me a lot of So Many Olympic Exertions. When writing, how do you turn subject matter like sports or mollusks into these touching personal narratives?

  I honestly don’t know where I get my ideas from. I don’t know why I become fixated on certain topics. I always tell my students to keep a journal so they can be alert to the things they notice. I call them hot spots. It starts with taking notes. And gathering. I am constantly taking notes, and once in awhile I transcribe my notebooks. That’s when I notice patterns and shifts. I notice the general atmosphere of the notes, my mood, the particular context. And then I begin shaping the notes into something like a story. Theme and metaphor aren’t enough; you have to have a story. And a story is just change over time. So you have to wait and see how things develop, even after you find a motif that works. That’s why it took me so long to finish this book. I had to wait to see how the story developed.

  5. We always like to ask, what are you reading right now? Are there any particular books you’d recommend?

  I haven’t read a book for pleasure in awhile—I’m always either prepping for a class or writing a review or something—but the last great book I read for myself was Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. It put me in a trance for days. It also felt healing and powerful, and I hadn’t experienced that with a book in awhile. I kept recommending it to everyone, but I think it’s one of those books we get exposed to too early, so everyone was like, Oh, I already read that! But we should all re-read it!

  I also loved Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile and John Haskell’s I am Not Jackson Pollock – both these books experiment with persona is really invigorating ways. Also Haskell’s book, which I read as a younger person, is even better now that I’m somewhat middle-aged, because it has to do with all the complexities of desire that I didn’t understand then. It’s really, really good. Kind of unbelievable actually. The language is spare and perfect, with these surprising swerves of logic. You can read both of these books in a single day.

• Electric Lit - https://electricliterature.com/anelise-chen-thinks-you-should-quit-64e36a038087

  QUOTED: "In 2010, it felt like capitalism had failed us as a structure. Its rules had led us off a cliff. In a sense we were all playing a badly designed game. And people were beginning to see that it was a daisy chain of 'and then whats,' and were looking for ways out, and even investment bankers started committing suicide."
  "So with Athena’s friend, the one who killed himself — he’s opted out of the game. This doesn’t seem right to her, I think, this idea that you can actually drop out of the game. She had looked up to him. He was a standout student when they were in school together, he seemed to have it together, he seemed to have a promising future. But he still opted out."
  "Figuring that out is part of Athena’s conflict. Is it okay to opt out? Is it okay to quit? Is it okay to stop running? What will ultimately happen? If you recognize that whatever game you’re playing — soccer, academia, investment banking — is a dumb one, or if you reject the game’s parameters, you don’t have to continue on with it. But then the question is, what can you do?"
  "The book ends before there’s a resolution. I don’t know if it’s a cynical book, or if it’s hopeful. It’s still trying to figure that out. I don’t know ultimately what Athena discovers."

  Max Ross
  Aug 23, 2017
  Anelise Chen Thinks You Should Quit
  The author discusses her new novel, the rhetoric of persistence, and the capitalist obsession with competition and success

  Author Anelise Chen

  The narrator of Anelise Chen’s debut novel, So Many Olympic Exertions, is in the eighth year of her Ph.D. program and stands at risk of losing her funding. Her research area is sports, and after learning that a friend of hers — an ex-boyfriend — has killed himself, the narrator, Athena, becomes obsessed with athletes who give up: those who make the choice to do so and those whose bodies choose for them. She spends hours on YouTube watching videos of marathon runners and Iron Man competitors collapsing just before or directly after they’ve reached the finish line.

  For Athena, whether or not one crosses the line is arbitrary. The effort itself is absurd. So is most everything else. The story is set in 2010, in the wake of the Great Recession, when newspapers were still patchy with items about “bank employees jumping off bridges [and] consultants swallowing their guns.” In other words, when the rules governing the American economy — the great game in which all of us participate, however skeptically — had just been rewritten, and the industry’s fiercest competitors found themselves abruptly disqualified. Chen marks such developments subtly but incisively. Before long, So Many Olympic Exertions reveals itself to be a book about much more than sport; its focus is on American systems — athletics, academia, capitalism — whose demands for achievement and continual progress can never be satisfied.

  As Athena struggles to complete her thesis, the reader follows her trips to the gym, the library, her therapist’s, an academic conference in Chicago, her parents’ home in Los Angeles, a writer’s residency in Greece. She is on a mission — to finish her dissertation — but it remains unclear, despite her travel, whether she ever approaches any nearer to her goal. Chen is a thoughtful and inventive writer, and the world she creates may remind readers of certain paintings by Gustav Klimt, wherein the characters are rendered in a doleful realist hand as their surroundings shimmer with gold leaf.

  I spoke with Chen about her book via Facetime Audio. Mostly we discussed athletics — watching and participating in them, and how difficult they are to quit. She was in residency at the Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, and at various points our connection cut out; the residency’s internet and phone service, she explained, were unreliable.

  Max Ross: What first got you interested in the field of sports research?

  Anelise Chen: It was the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. I was in a hotel in Mystic, Connecticut, and the men’s luge was on TV. Earlier that week, during a training run, one of the competitors had died — something was wrong with the course, and he lost control and went over the side of the track. It cast this pall over the entire Olympics — everyone was calling it the cursed games. And while I watched I kept thinking how morbid the sport was.

  I thought: The luge is such a good metaphor for how life actually feels. It seems like there’s no strategy to it. From a viewer’s perspective, it looks as if the competitors go, “Okay! I’m just going to throw myself down this track at really high speed and hope for the best!” Obviously there is a lot of strategy to it, but visually it looks completely desperate.

  At the time, the economy was really bad, and this feeling of futility and things dying was in the air. And two of my friends had just passed away, a week apart from each other. It was like one event and another event and another event in rapid succession. And then I happened to in front of a TV when the Olympics were on. Before that I’d had no interest in sports. But suddenly I was enthralled.

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  MR: The way Athena watches sports, or studies them, doesn’t seem typical. She obsesses over the moments when athletes fail — when their bodies give up.

  AC: When we watch sports, I think it normally has something to do with wanting to see the glorification of the body — of life. We’re watching really well-honed bodies in motion, and it’s life affirming. And the will to win is life affirming. The effort athletes put into their pursuits… They’re trying so hard! It’s so much!

  And the act of watching activates the same areas of the brain as if you were actually moving your own body. Watching is powerful. Watching is analogous to doing. So spectatorship really becomes a conduit for experiencing what the athletes are experiencing. It’s entering into a heightened state.

  On the other hand, it can begin to seem as if watching sports is some sort of ritual we’re performing to ignore the things that are really bothering us. To allay anxiety, and ignore difficulty and disappointment and — taking the metaphor to its furthest end — ignore that death exists. Ignore that we’re mortal beings, and that our bodies will ultimately fail us. By deadening us to these experiences, watching sports provides an antidote. But it can be a dangerous one.

  It can begin to seem as if watching sports is some sort of ritual we’re performing to ignore the things that are really bothering us. Ignore that we’re mortal beings, and that our bodies will ultimately fail us.
  MR: Have you participated in any sports yourself?

  AC: I was a swimmer and a water polo player, and I was really bad at both. I became intimately acquainted with failure. And sucking, and losing.

  I was competitive through high school, and we — the water polo team — had this really amazing coach. He’d coached members of the Olympic team before, and had been a college coach for a long time. So we were actually really good. Which meant that I was the worst player on a really good team. I think that contributed to my feeling that I just couldn’t cut it.

  MR: But I imagine it was difficult to give up anyway…?

  AC: Yes! It was really hard to give up!

  The rhetoric of persistence is so convincing. And it’s definitely part of the capitalist machinery. You’re told — in various ways, and from very early on — that if you’re bad at a sport or a game, it’s your own fault. You weren’t trying hard enough; there’s some innate deficiency that is your own. With that, youth sports very quickly becomes an issue of identity. And then the stakes comes to seem impossibly high, and it becomes impossible to quit — if you quit, you’re giving up who you are.

  But actually, with athletes, a lot of who’s good and who’s bad is freak circumstance. Funding is so much a part of it. And parental involvement, or the region where you grew up, and who expects what from you. And genetics. Some people are just bigger and taller than you. It’s not an equal playing field at all.

  And yet, somehow when you lose there’s so much shame. And when you quit there’s even more.

  Somehow when you lose there’s so much shame. And when you quit there’s even more.
  MR: At times your book reminded me of that Garfield Minus Garfield webcomic, where someone’s removed Garfield from every panel, and the strip then just seems to be Jon, alone, talking to himself. But when you think of the comic as it’s supposed to be, with Garfield present, it’s still just Jon talking to a cat. Which is no less absurd.

  Your book, I feel, evokes the absurd in a similar way, by thinking through what would happen if we removed competition from athletics, if athletes martyred themselves in training for no actual event.

  AC: I thought about that idea a lot. The inside flap of the book is a still from Paul Pfeiffer’s interactive video piece Jerusalem (2014). Pfeiffer is a visual artist, and in this project he manipulated footage from a 1966 World Cup match between England and Germany. The players ghost in and out and you can’t see the ball they’re all chasing after. It looks like they’re running up and down the field for no reason.

  Excerpt from Paul Pfeiffer’s ‘Jerusalem’ (2014)
  His other work plays with the same idea. He’ll take footage from famous sporting events and Photoshop out all — or the majority of — the players. When the context is removed their activity becomes absurd.

  MR: After seeing those images, it’s hard to feel that the game is anything but absurd.

  AC: Games ultimately are absurd. There are random constructed rules. And the outcome is meaningless. It doesn’t affect world politics — except when it does — but speaking generally a game has no actual purpose to it.

  It goes back to Pfeiffer’s work. If you have no opponents, and the rules of the game aren’t there or aren’t apparent, then the game loses its meaning. Why is this figure running up and down? If there’s no context, you see human life for what it is: just running up and down a field for no reason. In a way, if you perceive life from a certain angle and are inclined to think, ‘Well, we’re all just here playing this game with arbitrary rules, and ultimately we’re just alone on the field,’ then the striving and the sense of meaning and the sense of purpose — they all just dissolve.

  There’s also the video work of Philippe Parreno. He made this film called Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. It follows the French soccer player Zinedane Zidane for an entire match, and only Zidane — just a zoomed-in view of him. He’s kicking turf. He’s spitting. He scowls. But you can’t see the larger game he’s a part of. It gets at the same idea. What is he doing? What is he experiencing? What is it all for?

  If you have no opponents, and the rules of the game aren’t there or aren’t apparent, then the game loses its meaning. Why is this figure running up and down? If there’s no context, you see human life for what it is: just running up and down a field for no reason.
  MR: In your book then, is Athena just trying to figure out the rules? And is her frustration that she also finds them to be arbitrary?

  AC: Athena’s game is also absurd. It’s, “Oh, I have to get this degree and…” There’s always an and. “I have to do this and this and this, in order to obtain this.” But what’s the purpose of obtaining this ultimate thing?

  In 2010, it felt like capitalism had failed us as a structure. Its rules had led us off a cliff. In a sense we were all playing a badly designed game. And people were beginning to see that it was a daisy chain of “and then whats,” and were looking for ways out, and even investment bankers started committing suicide.

  So with Athena’s friend, the one who killed himself — he’s opted out of the game. This doesn’t seem right to her, I think, this idea that you can actually drop out of the game. She had looked up to him. He was a standout student when they were in school together, he seemed to have it together, he seemed to have a promising future. But he still opted out.

  MR: Is suicide the only way to opt out? That seems so bleak.

  AC: Figuring that out is part of Athena’s conflict. Is it okay to opt out? Is it okay to quit? Is it okay to stop running? What will ultimately happen? If you recognize that whatever game you’re playing — soccer, academia, investment banking — is a dumb one, or if you reject the game’s parameters, you don’t have to continue on with it. But then the question is, what can you do?

  There’s a section of the book where Athena’s talking about marathon runners who just stopped running. What happens to them? If you take away the metaphorical import of competition — the life and death stakes for medals and glory — competing doesn’t mean anything. Quitting just means you don’t want to run anymore. You can walk off the track. And life continues.

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  That’s why I like the story of Japanese runner Shizo Kanakuri, who dropped out midway through the marathon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. He just took a boat back home. He didn’t tell anyone and race officials assumed he’d died. Decades later, it was discovered he was actually alive and had raised a family and all that, and the Swedish National Olympic Committee invited him back to Sweden to finish the race. Which is to say, you can quit the race and nothing bad is going to happen.

  But it’s still hard to quit, and that’s definitely something Athena’s grappling with. Do I want to keep playing this game that I don’t necessarily buy into, or believe in? How do I stop? I think she’s trying to find alternatives to the game that she’s been forced to play. Does this game have to be so cutthroat? Does it have to be a contest that we’re all in? Does the game have to be a competition?

  Competition isn’t the only structure that play comes in. It doesn’t always have to be this win-lose binary. It can be imaginative in other ways. So trying to find another game or another structure to inhabit that isn’t antagonistic and isn’t based in competition — I think that’s what Athena’s after.

  MR: But she still finds she needs rules to get by. For instance, she comes up with a set of guidelines for attending academic conferences (“Sit as far away from another human being as possible”), and sets goals for how many people to mingle with at parties.

  AC: I think we all need some structure. She’s trying to find hers, if only to finish her thesis.

  Is it okay to opt out? Is it okay to quit? Is it okay to stop running? What will ultimately happen?
  MR: And do you think she’s successful?

  AC: Ha, well. The book ends before there’s a resolution. I don’t know if it’s a cynical book, or if it’s hopeful. It’s still trying to figure that out. I don’t know ultimately what Athena discovers.

  We never know if she finishes her thesis. The book ends with an image of ocean waves, which I liked because it’s so repetitive — this movement of waves crashing. There’s no beginning and no end, it just goes on and on. It’s really hypnotic. And it doesn’t stop.

• Anelise Chen Website - http://anelisechen.com/

  No bio

• School of the Arts, Columbia University Website - https://arts.columbia.edu/profiles/anelise-chen

  Anelise Chen

  ADJUNCT ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, UNDERGRADUATE CREATIVE WRITING

  Opens in a new window
  Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press 2017), an experimental novel that blends elements of sportswriting, memoir, and self help. She received a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Fiction from NYU. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR, BOMB Magazine, The New Republic, VICE, Village Voice and many other publications. She has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and she will be a 2019 Literature Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. She writes a column on mollusks for The Paris Review, and teaches at Columbia University and New School.

  Memory Maps: An Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Summer 2018
  In recent years, scientists have found that memory and imagination call upon the same “default network” in the brain, suggesting that the recreation of memory is not merely an act of retrieval, but also one of imaginative projection.

  INSTRUCTOR
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QUOTED: "Formally unique and inventive, this novel fluctuates in tone, reading at some times like an authentic ... private journal and at others like a deeply researched academic essay."
"ambitious."

So Many Olympic Exertions
Publishers Weekly. 264.23 (June 5, 2017): p26+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
So Many Olympic Exertions

Anelise Chen. Kaya (DAR dist.), $17.95 trade

paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-885030-35-1

The narrator of Chen's experimental, shape-shifting debut is Athena Chen, a doctoral student of sports scholarship in NYU's department of American studies. Having exceeded the seventh year of a doctoral program, Athena is confronting dilemmas regarding her academic pursuits when she learns about the suicide of an ex-boyfriend. Though it's been years since Athena's last contact with Paul, the news adds fuel to her growing internal strife. A former competitive swimmer, Athena makes it a mission to "keep going" with her goals, engaging in self-improvement drills and drawing on her knowledge of sports as a multipurpose metaphor for life's obstacles. The book becomes most consequential in its latter half, when Athena returns to her childhood home in California for the summer. The focus sharpens around the Chen family, and the protagonist comes to terms with the loss of her friend. The plot is enriched with a thread about immigration, concerning the narrator's Taiwanese heritage and the struggles it entails. The current of the narrator's thoughts and obsessions holds the fragmented, stop-and-start narrative together. Formally unique and inventive, this novel fluctuates in tone, reading at some times like an authentic and unfiltered private journal and at others like a deeply researched academic essay. Often it flows organically into meditative territory, while combining images in a manner reminiscent of the work of authors such as W.G. Sebald or Ben Lerner. This ambitious book is sure to appeal to fans of Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?--it similarly challenges the expectations regarding the rules a novel ought to follow. (Aug.)

Caption: Anelise Chen's debut, So Many Olympic Exertions, is a shape-shifting and thought-provoking novel (reviewed on this page).

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"So Many Olympic Exertions." Publishers Weekly, 5 June 2017, p. 26+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495538294/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5858f4d0. Accessed 16 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A495538294

• Brooklyn Rail
  https://brooklynrail.org/2017/12/books/Anelise-Chens-So-Many-Olympic-Exertions
  Word count: 2374

  QUOTED: "Chen’s book constitutes an argument for the value of stopping to think, or just spacing out and floating. It’s a pleasure to read this prose: precise, crafted, and a little bit anxious, like the lives it pictures, it still shows an easy grace. The narrator’s meditations on competition, keeping on, and giving up have the ring of wisdom, partly because they themselves are the product of both working and loafing, focusing and spacing out."

  Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions
  by James Duesterberg
  Anelise Chen
  So Many Olympic Exertions
  (Kaya Press, 2017)

  “My vocation,” writes the narrator of Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions, “has all the features of a vacation for most people.” The narrator is enrolled in an American Studies Ph.D. program at NYU, where she is given a small but livable salary, which enables her to devote herself to the pursuit of her intellectual interests. She’s working on her dissertation, and has few other responsibilities; when not writing, she reads, meets friends for coffee or drinks, works out, checks the internet. This does sound like a nice life; but, as it turns out, things are not going well for the narrator. As the novel opens, she is in the seventh year of her program, at the limit of “normative time” for completion. Her mantra—“continue on the current course. Continue to function”—is starting to feel desperate. Her dissertation is a mess: she’s “drowning in research, and none of it is adding up.” If she doesn’t finish soon, she will lose her fellowship and have to quit the program. And as her dream job evaporates, she learns that her friend, former roommate, and ex-boyfriend Paul has committed suicide.

  Chen’s novel takes place in an elite and very specific world that has lately become quite familiar. The young writer or artist chasing her dreams—or rather, anxiously stalking them on the internet—is the subject of much recent literary fiction (Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Tao Lin) as well as popular culture (the TV show Girls, for one). This indicates, among other things, that the bohemian fantasy has gone from an index of the desire to escape middle-class normality to an expression of the desire to achieve it. Chasing the American id led Hunter Thompson into a dark thicket of bikers and mescaline and guns; now drugs and yoga are techniques for lifehacking your way to clarity and wellness and a four-hour workweek. Here, as a purveyor of Brooklyn ayahuasca ceremonies put it, “consciousness is its own economy.” Countercultures are now subcultures, sources of untapped value rather than danger or resistance. And, as even Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, has noticed in a glowing review of Girls, the disappointments of these lives express problems that reach well beyond the privileged Brooklyns of the world.

  The narrator of So Many Olympic Exertions, whose name is Athena Chen, is writing a dissertation about the role competitive athletics plays in American life; like the world of professional sports, the academic microcosm Athena inhabits is supposedly “fun” and yet brutally competitive, set off from practical affairs and devoted to “useless” activities that thereby put your whole being in play. These fields are emphatically “not real life,” and yet we imagine that they are where you go to learn the meaning of life, in other words what you’re made of: so many secular devotions. A central irony of the book is that trying to get out of the game is itself the game’s goal; to “drop out” you have to tune in. Facing the prospect of the end of her academic career, the narrator does the only thing she knows, namely more research, and she turns up a quote from Lance Armstrong, “living embodiment of this rule”: “Pain is temporary. If I quit, it lasts forever.”

  Chen’s subtle, probing, and ambitious novel is about how this threat of loss and failure looms in the background of these all-consuming careers, and it works as a portrait of the strange, compelling, and competitive little worlds that build up around them. But it’s also about how these small worlds give us a window onto the larger one. It’s fitting that So Many Olympic Exertions comes out as sport and the academy have become again what they have always been at times of social and political upheaval, sites of protest: a reminder that deep questions about how we live together are at stake in these games. So Many Olympic Exertions makes competitive sports into an allegory for contemporary life: a kind of game in which the goal is simply to be your best self, but in which to lose is to find yourself asking, what if I don’t have a self at all? The novel follows the narrator as she tries to come to terms with the loss of the things that structured her life—her job, her friend. Can she make this loss the occasion for a new start?

  When she learns of her ex-boyfriend’s suicide, “the news shakes for days, re-shifting every mental continent,” but the surface of the novel remains more or less undisturbed. Instead of emotion we get a controlled account of Athena’s attempts to maintain control; rather than move forward, the narrative treads water. The writing is an account of her consciousness, but it is descriptive rather than confessional:

  We leave the café and join the throng of people rushing home. Looking toward Union Square, we can see a steady stream of people funneling down into the subway. I imagine grains of sand draining through a sieve. I decide to walk instead. The sky is a dome of lead. I walk slower than a saunter, slower than sightseeing, slower than indecision.

  We get snippets of her research, tableaus of her daily life; slim paragraphs with generous pauses in between them, punctuated by historical photographs of athletes, abandoned pools, archival documents. As the paragraphs accumulate they build up an almost incantatory resonance, somewhere between the humbleness of prose poetry and the aphoristic precision of Wittgensteinian language games. Retreating to her hotel room after fumbling a presentation at a conference, the narrator watches as Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn careens off-course:

  Win or lose, the spectacle is stirring. One can throw oneself confi­dently down a mountainside, willingly enduring years of training and monotony and hardship and unhappiness for the fulfillment of this one, deeply meaningful goal. If that’s where one has decided meaning lies.

  Or later, sandwiched between a reflection on the eeriness of empty stadiums and an account of a trip to buy groceries, we get this paragraph:

  I never wanted to be that kid way out in left field, blinking wildly into the sun. I wanted to play. I wanted to make believe.

  The narrator tries to shake herself out of her routine. She starts going to the gym again (in high school, she was a competitive swimmer); she drinks more wine, now with “the pills my psychiatrist warned me never to take with alcohol.” She decides to have a party; she is “absolutely certain I don’t want to have a party, but if such a thought has popped into my head, there must be some part of me that, however subconsciously, must want to have a party. Why not have some fun?” She is trying to work on her dissertation, but mostly she is distracted.

  This happens with increasing frequency: the more I need to get something done, the more I am compelled to check Facebook. I scroll with dread, as if I am prying my eyes open. We have aged with our statuses. Before, there were pictures of parties; now, there are recaps from TV shows, ailments, babies, jobs to quit, jobs to start. Political views to vent. Sciatica. Migraines. Here is the Eiffel Tower pinched between two fingers. Here is a coconut wearing sunglasses. Watch this panda riding a bicycle! … I scroll so long I am no longer reading the posts, just scrolling for the act of scrolling. I scroll, wait for the new posts to load, then scroll again, and this rhythmic pattern lulls me into a numb neurasthenia.

  Much of the narrative consists of descriptions of this sort, detached and yet vivid. More or less clinical self-monitoring (“this happens with increasing frequency”) opens into weary irony (“Watch this panda riding a bicycle!”) and increasing anxiety, ending in a flat diagnostic mode (“numb neurasthenia”), where it started. The few major events that do happen over the course of the novel’s 220 pages of spare and generously spaced prose—news of the suicide, loss of the fellowship, a move back to her parents’ house in California— function more as a kind of track around which Athena’s narrative consciousness runs. She “works out” (is that still sports?) not to relax but to insure against insanity; a party becomes an obligation, not exactly to others but to her own potential, her own “subconscious” and the “fun” that it demands. Even the attempt to do something pointless ends up in compulsive feats of accounting. Scrolling endlessly through Facebook may make you numb, but at least it gives a name, and thus a purpose, to your behavior.

  But So Many Olympic Exertions is not just pharmaceuticals and Facebook. Athena calls on athletics and academia, the good Greek forms of self-fashioning, and part of the pleasure of the book is that it offers its reader a pace borrowed from these latter, not as an escape from the real world but a different way of moving through it. The book is about quitting, but the narrative lingers, wandering through Athena’s wry and wide-ranging meditations on sports. Is this her dissertation or her life or something else? As she avoids work, drifting on the internet, we start to realize that something more than procrastinating is going on. Her friend’s suicide has shifted things into a new light:

  The event proves that it’s not hard to pass from one state to another state. You cross the finish line—it’s a simple demarcation—and you go from moving to done. It’s as easy as craning your neck for the photo finish. It’s as easy as stepping through a door.

  With loss, we expect depression; but for Athena it also feels like a release, or a possible one. “When I say ‘life,’ I mean the small wheel of routines I perform like a prayer.” News of Paul’s death cuts into this routine, introducing a “new thought into my repertoire: ‘I can’t keep up.’” “Pointless” devotions like endurance sports or academia depend on a cultish form of thought management: as soon as doubt enters, the whole rigorously constructed edifice starts to crumble. Or a door opens, a way out of the pointless rat race suddenly appears: the question is how to leave without giving up.

  Athena moves back to California: back where she went to college, and back in with her parents. This is where her relationship with Paul fell apart, where her dead-end academic career began, where her immigrant parents live in a crumbling house while working 16 hours a day in construction, cruising expensive real-estate listings at night. These are dreams that are no longer hers. But this is also the portion of the book where the controlled focus of the narrative, which seems to limit itself almost to counting Athena’s daily life—her research, her daily routine—starts to reveal the depth behind it. Awkward dinners with her parents, waking up for swim practice, skinny-dipping with her friends in college in a pool in the woods: these memories emerge like flashes, lighting up Athena’s character and the social panorama that gives it meaning. A whole plot is here, lurking as the precondition of the novel: an immigrant narrative, a love story, a coming-of-age tale, a sports novel. These elements of realist narrative are not hidden by the theoretical musings, free-indirect self-help, and wry irony that make up the bulk of the book. The words as if swim on the surface of this narrative, or float. I’m reminded of Benjamin in The Graduate, back from college, in the pool in his parents’ backyard in Pasadena. On the surface these characters are “drifting.” But Chen’s book constitutes an argument for the value of stopping to think, or just spacing out and floating. It’s a pleasure to read this prose: precise, crafted, and a little bit anxious, like the lives it pictures, it still shows an easy grace. The narrator’s meditations on competition, keeping on, and giving up have the ring of wisdom, partly because they themselves are the product of both working and loafing, focusing and spacing out.

  This is wisdom wrought from experience, but experience of a particular kind. If both sports and the academy have an either/or logic—win or lose, true or false—the narrator’s lingering within these exemplary modern worlds suggests a different way of inhabiting them. In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman “lean[s] and loaf[s]” in Brooklyn, imagining himself “both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.” It may be that only a fictional self, like Whitman’s omnipresent “I” or Chen’s Athena, loafing in a digital Brooklyn, can live in this limbo. Chen’s novel, joining a chorus of other recent ambitious art and literature, reveals contemporary life as a strange kind of game, one that makes real artificial worlds, from sports to academia to Facebook, grow drastically in importance even as their purpose dissolves. But the goal is more than simply to give us a picture of our world as it is. By working philosophy and sports, autobiography and fiction, history and reflection into a cohesive narrative form, writing like this tries to imagine something else, a space in that world for something like true diversion.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/swimming-confidently-towards-uncertain-success-anelise-chens-many-olympic-exertions/
  Word count: 969

  QUOTED: "Despite the heavy soul-searching and suicide and academic failures, So Many Olympic Exertions manages to be a very funny book."
  "Is thinking about life simply a way to procrastinate from living? Or is a philosophy of life necessary for self-actualization? Should we set challenging goals to motivate ourselves, or confidently take it easy? So Many Olympic Exertions doesn’t provide any concrete answers ... but provides much to ponder while swimming towards whatever we believe our goals to be."

  Swimming Confidently Towards Uncertain Success: Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions
  LITERATURE REVIEWS
  By Siel Ju
  08/14/2017
  Be yourself; fake it ‘til you make it. Never give up; quit while you’re ahead. Rise and grind; treat yo’ self. In world full of contradictory platitudes, how does one figure out what to do, how to excel, who to become? When should one push herself for once, and when learn to take it easy already?

  Anelise Chen’s semi-autobiographical debut novel, So Many Olympic Exertions, takes on these questions with sly aplomb through a cheeky hybrid form. On the plot level, the story’s fairly simple: Athena Chen, a once-competitive high school swimmer turned doctoral candidate in American Studies at New York University, starts swimming again for exercise and procrastination while struggling to write her dissertation. Athena struggles so much that the school cuts off her funding, forcing her to return to her parents’ home in Los Angeles, where she continues to swim and procrastinate.

  But this straightforward, nondescript life trajectory is complicated by the suicide of Athena’s ex-boyfriend from college. Though the event doesn’t change Athena’s life much on the outside, inwardly she is wracked by with guilt, wonder, and most of all, confusion. Athena starts to constantly ruminate about life and its meaning. This existential inquiry quickly blurs with Athena’s ruminations about her dissertation on sports, which tries to dissect the psychology of champions — the unrelenting drive, the humiliations of loss, the constant striving, the dire need for approval.

  In this way the novel is also a philosophical text, as well as a meta-self-help book. Athena constantly receives advice from the well-meaning people around her — for example, to take up swimming again to alleviate her anxiety — and tests their suggestions out on herself. Yet even a simple swim is never quite so simple. “When I’m in water, I can only think of the million other things I should be doing instead of floating,” Athena admits. And since she no longer has the goal of competition to prepare for, Athena’s unsure how to swim, exactly, though she tries to adjust:

  My new philosophy is that I am just going to be confident about taking it easy. However, as liberating as this feels, it also feels deeply unsatisfying. It simply feels like a waste of time swimming this way.

  Anyone who mostly drives herself through goal-setting — and relatedly, struggles to enjoy downtime even as she procrastinates — will be able to relate to Athena’s challenges. Finding some sort of magical truth that somehow balances achievement and success with contentment and happiness: this is the central struggle of this novel. In addition to pop psych mantras and high-minded philosophical texts, major moments in sports history are painstakingly dissected and examined as part of Athena’s dissertation-writing labors. This is an effort to get to some bigger truth about what it means to succeed as a human, and gives rise to the most thought-provoking passages in the book:

  Goals are relevant only if they manage to establish a proper distance between ability and desire, encouraging intrinsic motivation. Note that a goal is not the same as a want. Most children do not have goal when they start a task.

  Despite the heavy soul-searching and suicide and academic failures, So Many Olympic Exertions manages to be a very funny book, because there’s so much incisive humor in the novel’s observations. The mood, for the most part, is one of somber hilarity. “I would rather be unhappy than be the kind owf person who keeps an exercise journal,” Athena fumes silently while watching her journal-recommending friend drink tea. At other times, Athena half-mocks her own self-pity. “Eating, writing, sleeping, swimming. My vocation has all the features of vacation for most people,” Athena says of her all-but-dissertation graduate student lifestyle while puttering about in an anxious depression.

  Her awareness that her position is one of privilege is made especially acute in her interactions with her parents, first-generation immigrants inured to daily hard labor, poverty, and physical pain. Athena’s mother, who refuses to see a doctor for her debilitating back pain in an effort to save money, tries to put things into perspective when she tells Athena:

  Well, I always think when people need to fight so hard for food and shelter they don’t have spare time to think about meaning. Someone stuck in desert never ask, is there cancer in this blue color drink? Wondering about willpower is vacation already […] I think about people who wonder, what is the meaning of life? I think […] this person want to do perfect job for being philosopher. Or they are very smart at come up with excuses to not do any work.

  Is thinking about life simply a way to procrastinate from living? Or is a philosophy of life necessary for self-actualization? Should we set challenging goals to motivate ourselves, or confidently take it easy? So Many Olympic Exertions doesn’t provide any concrete answers — I’m not sure any novel can — but provides much to ponder while swimming towards whatever we believe our goals to be.

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