A Flawed Novel Addresses a Failed Utopia
On Gabriel Bump's 'The New Naturals'
Tara Isabella Burton is one of these annoyingly polymathic people and one of very, very few who can make a theology degree seem glamorous. Tara, in the last year give or take, managed to publish two (!) books in completely different forms and subject matter — one a medieval fantasia set unexpectedly in Brooklyn; and the other a serious philosophical work that compellingly lays out why (although maybe this is simplifying it slightly) Americans are so overbearing and Europeans so useless. We’re at the end of the first week of The Metropolitan Review and have photos to prove it. Please consider making a $50 pledge to our magazine so we can launch a print issue in the spring.
-The Editors
We can never escape the world. Nor can we remake it. This truism underscores all great would-be utopian novels, from Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon — an anagram of “nowhere” — to dystopias proper like Brave New World and 1984, to failed-cult novels like Emma Cline’s The Girls. Any attempt to lift a few, quixotic human beings out of the psychosocial morass of human nature — be it in a monastery or on a compound, on a remote island or in a new world order — is doomed to fail, for one reason or another. Failure is as much part of generic expectation as a femme fatale in a noir, a wedding in a romance novel. Utopian novels, since the days of Thomas More himself, are rarely propagandistic tracts for imagined social change, nor pamphlets for cults we think we might like to join. Rather, they’re often preemptive apologia for collapsed regimes and imploded communes alike. The call, they imply, is coming from inside the house. Human nature, not late capitalism or big cities or poor reproductive technology, is the implicit villain.
What makes the (failed) utopia novel interesting, therefore, is not so much the if, but the how, and, more important still, the why? What is it, precisely, about human society that makes the characters in question hunger to leave or reform it? And wherein lies the seed of our new society’s original sin? — the interpersonal or political or sexual dynamics that remind us that, whatever our change in circumstance, we are still condemned to remain ourselves.
Gabriel Bump’s The New Naturals, a lyrical but overly mannered entrant into the annals of false utopias, seems reasonably confident in its assessment of the first question. Its characters — particularly the commune’s founders, Rio and Gibraltar—are exhausted by, as the popular meme would have it, *gestures broadly* all this. Police brutality, climate change, anarchic social media networks full of videos of “mudslides in Appalachia, explainers on elitist money laundering....urban housing crises….fringe conspiracy theories....who thought public schools were turning children into frog people.” The coronavirus pandemic and the Capitol riots are mentioned in passing — right alongside gentrification, with its proliferation of “farm-to-table appetizers,” and the sinking of refugee ships.
Bump takes it as self-evident that the world of contemporary America is dystopian enough that anyone in their right mind would want to get as far away from it as possible. Who wouldn’t dream of “smash[ing] their phones on rocks near the creek” and “using a landline”? Particularly if you are, like Rio and Gibraltar (and most of the book’s main characters), Black, both subject to constant microaggressions (Rio’s academic job is a litany of these) and vulnerable to major catastrophe. “Somewhere in New York City,” we watch Rio fret, “a young Black woman was abducted by police officers and sold into sex slavery. Somewhere in Atlanta a young Black Man was mistaken for a thief and shot by a grocery store owner.” Soon Rio is marking up maps with red X’s to designate “unsafe places”: a category that comes to comprise the world itself. In its most arresting moments, particularly in Rio and Gibraltar’s early exhaustion with social media, The New Naturals shows us just how easy it is to slip from joke doomerism into genuinely frightening despair.
Bump tells this story in evocative, half-enchanted prose — Rio, Gibraltar, and their eventual fellow-travelers, including a burned-out biracial journalist and a despairing former soccer star, are depicted as mythic figures: their lives playing out alongside global bombast. (“In Southern California, a forest fire ate through a suburb….In Boston, sea levels crept above levees. In their bed, Rio and Gibraltar held each other at night and Rio dictated her thoughts to Gibraltar. She’d talk about a perfect world until her powerful voice turned into a mumble.”) At its best, The New Naturals is breathless and beautiful.
More often than not, however, the relentlessness of Bump’s lyricism occludes the novel’s capacity to present Rio, Gibraltar, and the other New Naturals as actual people, rather than musical ciphers. We never get enough detail or depth to understand why Rio, specifically, or Sojourner, specifically, might be drawn to a secret community hidden beneath an abandoned Massachusetts restaurant.
Rather, Bump’s characters, hemmed in by the intensity of the prose, emerge only as the kind of stock characters you might find in a particularly moving folk song: driven by melody alone towards their ultimate destiny. Characters’ dialogue, in particular, is so surreally rendered as to border on the Beckettian: (“I don’t understand”/ “The surface doesn’t matter.”/ “I think we need sleep. Some rest.” / “We need to go underground.”) Character beats border on the cliché — of one alcoholic, we learn that “Soon, his children learned to avoid his liquored breath and slurred hugs.”
What we’re left with, in the end, is less a novel than a fable, or an epic poem: an emotionally resonant, mythic narrative about the vast swathe of American 2025-era despair played out among ciphers and shadows whose more intimate moments elude us.
This might work sufficiently well as a stylistic choice for a poetic novel of ideas — not every novel needs memorable, or even convincing, characters (though it certainly helps). But when it comes to Bump’s treatment of why the New Naturals fail, the novel’s vagueness surrounding character and plot alike become overwhelming. We know that the group is funded by a mysterious female billionaire the narrative terms “the Benefactor” — the only one of Bump’s characters not to get a name. Midway through the narrative, the Benefactor loses interest in the project, and the New Naturals have to try, unsuccessfully, to survive on their own. But the Benefactor is so removed from the New Naturals themselves — and so sketchily drawn as a character — that her decision has little emotional effect. We never get much of a sense of why, specifically, the New Naturals — and the people who comprise it — fail, beyond a generalized sense of chaos and disorganization.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we’re meant to read the Benefactor’s faithlessness as part of Bump’s greater commentary on structural failure: that we, like Rio and Gibraltar, are at the mercy of elemental and economic forces — market capital as Greek gods — who toy with the livelihoods of common people. But does that mean that a New Naturals that keeps its funding might have survived? We spend so little time on the compound, and learn so little about the workings of the actual commune, let alone the characters of its inhabitants, that we have no way of knowing.
To that end, The New Naturals is a compelling tragedy: a saga of benighted mankind against the backdrop of overwhelming forces. But its refusal to treat its characters — be it the Benefactor or the Naturals themselves — as human beings, renders it painfully alienating as a novel. Bump has less to say about human nature, temporal or eternal, than he does about, well, all this. In so doing, he renders The New Naturals, like the commune itself, too small in scope. It is a powerful story of contemporary America. That this America might be made up of people, rather than powers, lies beyond the horizon of the narrative.
Early on in the novel, Rio wonders if “the key to safety and happiness wasn’t bending your society but making your own community with your loved ones, caring for each other.” In its attempt to give the commune’s story too epic a scope, The New Naturals fails to give us a sense of the people behind that community.
Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the non-fiction works Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, and of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon.
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I might quibble a little bit with the suggestion that failure is as much a feature of a utopian novel as a marriage in a romance. Perhaps the most popular utopian novel of all time, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, ends with the utopia succeeding; so does Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, along with more obscure titles from the turn of the 19th century. The numerical majority of these novels were, in fact, propagandistic! Maybe that excludes them from the category of "great" utopian novels, as "The New Naturals" seems to be.
What is interesting, though, is that those propaganda novels used stock characters in service of demonstrating the validity of the author's ideology, whereas it seems like this novel uses them as an expression of despair. Why bother having an ideology at all if change is impossible? It seems like the ideological ferment of the Gilded Age has given way to simple exhaustion.
Very interesting; I might have to try and read this one. Perhaps the fault lies with thinking of the novel as a novel and not something else? Joseph Bottum claims, in The Decline of the Novel, that we as a society have "failed the novel" and have moved towards things like films and graphic narratives (which frequently feature archetypical characterizations); perhaps our current era is more attuned to stories of archetypes and clichés as a way to make sense of the easily stereotyped patterns we see around us. And: Gogol insisted that Dead Souls was a "poem" and not a novel; his book also seeks to portray a kind of deep underlying rottenness in the culture around him. I would humbly posit that, in regard to utopian / dystopian themes, the novel is played out and it is time for epic poems to take the center stage.