I discovered the writing of Amie Barrodale in my college English class while reading an old Los Angeles Review of Books interview with Ottessa Moshfegh, whose short story collection, Homesick for Another World, I’d just read. As my professor lectured to braindead twentysomethings about a medieval Persian poet, I scrolled to the bottom of the page where the interviewer asks Moshfegh if there’s a writer she looks up to, and Moshfegh responds with a recommendation of her friend Amie Barrodale’s story collection, You Are Having a Good Time.
A few months later, I’m reading Barrodale’s story “William Wei” for the first time and relating to the main character, who becomes romantically involved with an evil and drug-addled woman, seemingly out of boredom. I’m trying to connect why Moshfegh likes Barrodale — concluding that their writing is similarly bleak and cool, but also that Moshfegh’s stories appear more plotted than Barrodale’s. If comparing the two, Barrodale’s writing seems like a leveled and vaguely spiritual cousin to Moshfegh’s pointed and atheistic prose. This takeaway wasn’t just the result of the stories’ structure — Moshfegh’s usually reaching a disguised “climax,” while Barrodale’s meander into nothingness — but because of the contents of the stories. Moshfegh’s “The Locked Room” is a teenage-anime version of Beckett’s Endgame, and the last (and my favorite) in her collection, “A Better Place,” imagines children as demonic and alien-like, remixing concepts of good and evil.
You Are Having a Good Time dissolves principles, I thought, underlining this line from “William Wei” as I read it for the first time: “But the thing about a dark truth is it is indistinguishable from doubt. And so—since I couldn’t just go home—I kept approaching the dark area.”
Barrodale’s final story in the collection is titled “Rinpoche” — a term given to master teachers of Buddhism. It follows a mother and daughter who house a guru in Seattle while he visits a dying friend of theirs. Like the rest of Barrodale’s stories, its ending is anticlimactic and eerie: the woman dies and Rinpoche lights a pile of vegetables on fire. The daughter learns politeness and opens a car door.
Since releasing her collection in 2016, Barrodale has been quiet and offline. She doesn’t have public social media or a Substack newsletter (although she is subscribed to “It’s Ottessa, bitch.”). So, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux released her debut novel, Trip, this September, I was excited to see what Barrodale had been up to. The publisher advertises Trip as “featuring Buddhist deities” and bringing readers “the deeper meaning of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.” On the outside, it seemed, during the near-decade period between book releases, that Barrodale, who was raised Buddhist in the American Southwest, had only cultivated a stronger relationship with her spirituality.
In Trip, Barrodale is more dogmatic than in her story collection — presenting Buddhism not only as a motif of her novel, but also as its map. The novel’s setting is primarily the hallucinatory state between life and death of the newly dead protagonist, Sandra, or, more accurately, between her death and rebirth. Within this state, she is able to view, but not communicate with, her autistic son as he escapes a childcare center and hitchhikes with a strange, alcoholic man to Florida on the eve of a hurricane. Her consciousness, and thus the novel’s setting, is in constant transit as Sandra can exist in any moment, past or present, and watches her unstable ex-husband grieve their missing child, relives past family memories during early stages of Trip’s diagnosis, and observes the scene of her own lifeless body. Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa’s translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead contains a great description of this state of being:
Bar means “in between,” and do means “island” or “mark”; a sort of landmark which stands between two things. It is rather like an island in the midst of a lake. The concept of bardo is based on the period between sanity and insanity, or the period between confusion and the confusion just about to be transformed into wisdom; and of course it could be said of the experience which stands between death and birth. The past situation has just occurred and the future situation has not yet manifested itself so there is a gap between the two. This is basically the bardo experience.
Trip is an illustrative lengthening of this concept — coloring in The Tibetan Book of the Dead’s described multi-day bardo process but with narrative and characters who live in contemporary America.
Buddhism and a literal belief in the bardo is infused everywhere in Trip. As Sandra dies at a death conference in Nepal, her colleague Donald essentially rewords a passage from The Tibetan Book of the Dead to her:
When the time of separation between your body and the mind comes, everything will become different. Everything will be vivid. Therefore, everything may appear to be abnormal, not normal. Probably you will experience extreme light, extreme sound, or many other uncertain, myriad versions of beings, of environments, such as a cliff, such as typhoons, such as thunder. No matter what, just remember that this is all a projection of your mind.
The bardo experience holds many milestones for the traveling spirit: milestone visions of animals, ghosts, and jealous gods, each coded with different esoteric meanings. Correspondingly, near the novel’s end, when Sandra has been dead for a longer period of time, she interacts with a number of half-human, half-animal beings who belong to her bardo dimension, with whom she is able to speak and who are presumably either other spirits in limbo or deities. According to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a spirit near the end of bardo will also experience “projections of men and women making love,” an attempt to invade other bodies, and become indifferent toward their past emotions and life entirely. The former two are accurately reflected in Sandra’s kinky visions of Donald and her brief takeover of his body near the end, and the latter in Trip’s last paragraph:
And I was happy to have been shaken out of it a little bit by my son, to have been made to feel disrupted, shameful, ungainly, awkward, and unsure. To have been made to stir for a moment in the everlasting sleep that had been my life. Sandra Vernon’s life. Or whatever. Whatever. Whatever it was.
Trip, which shares a name with Sandra’s son, also presents an argument that being autistic may position one closer to being Buddha-like. Throughout the novel, Sandra’s son is peculiarly unemotional and unbothered as his situation becomes more precarious, and the novel ends with him guiding a sinking ship back to land by locating constellations. The other characters — Anthony, Vic, and various conference members — are prone to anxious blunders and bicker nonsensically with the people in their lives throughout, while Trip is the only character who experiences any net movement and “adventure.” In addition, Trip matches the profile of how one should act if seeking to achieve dharma: immaterialistic, unsentimental, and dissuaded by temptation. This last point is exaggerated by Anthony, the man whom he’s an acting accomplice to, who functions as Trip’s foil.
When readers meet Anthony, he is a recovering alcoholic but nonetheless impulsive; he picks up Trip on a whim and brings him on an ill-planned road trip to check on his various properties. By the time that Anthony and Trip arrive in Florida, Anthony has fallen off of the wagon and proceeds to steal a boat. Anthony fully relinquishes himself to the temptations of drugs and fear when he becomes drunk to the point of uselessness as he and Trip are lost at sea at the novel’s end. In contrast, Trip remains stoic and his thoughts (or meditations) are constant throughout the entire novel, lingering on astrology and his family. He doesn’t at any point fight the disastrous circumstances of his and Anthony’s journey, nor does he accelerate them. His purpose in the novel is not as an actor but a misunderstood yogi figure.
If readers are coming to Trip for the damaged drummer-writer relationships portrayed in You Are Having a Good Time, they will be disappointed. If they are coming to Trip looking for typical plot structure and a palpable climax, they will also be disappointed. Barrodale’s debut novel is not a “fun” read or even, despite its contents, a tragic one. Trip is a very literal imagining of contemporary Buddhism, and how those who may follow its moral framework are treated in America as strange, antisocial outsiders. Trip is a combination of narrative and dogma, ultimately playing out to a conclusion of indifference in the face of self-destruction.
Emma Foley lives in New York. Her writing has appeared in Hobart and ExPat Press, among others.
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