"Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones)" (1906-08), Edvard Munch

How to Feel Alone

Can we ever truly know someone else, or ourselves? Esther Yi has her doubts. Her latest fiction collection, To God, is ruthless in its excavation of modern intimacy and its contradictions. Sex, work, religion, art-making—across the eleven collected stories, Yi renders alienation as an active search for meaning, for rituals that “give [us] something to do for the whole of what [we] call a life.”

The scope of To God is vast. Each story centers on a different character, from struggling artists to single fathers, as we observe them managing various unfortunate circumstances. Obstacles intrude from all sides, at various extremities: “No Right Hand” begins with a narrator who, fittingly, has lost the titular appendage, while “White Anton” describes a boxer whose father has recently passed away. In picking these characters apart, Yi strives to expose the absurd beliefs that undergird our quotidian routines.

A certain degree of anonymity glues the collection together. Though fairly different in terms of plot and character, the stories of To God are all written from a first person point of view. Yi chooses, as she did with Y/N, to withhold the names of every narrator. Maintaining this choice across all the stories does homogenize the collection quite a bit tone-wise, though, for the most part, Yi’s unpredictable sentence-play keeps the reading experience fresh. She does not shy away from bringing readers into the characters’ agonizing headspaces: we are exposed to straightforward confessions, off-putting rhetorical questions, and page-long detours where characters ruminate on their deepest metaphysical anxieties and fears.

Yi’s voice is distinct for its poetic bluntness. It’s what drew me in to Y/N, her 2023 debut novel about a woman who becomes obsessed with a Korean pop idol. Her unique style shines through in To God as well. Through stilted dialogue and inner monologues, Yi focuses on articulating the ineffable loneliness that plagues our existences, such as being “[suddenly] disgusted by how it’s only ever my mind and no other mind thinking, how it’s only ever my body and no other body surviving.” To God fluctuates between existential pessimism and doubtful optimism for our very experience of life itself, a dynamism that saturates each narrative with surreal and psychological effects.

Person-to-person intimacy is explored as a hopeful yet baffling (im)possibility. Some characters’ affections only last so long as the person is in the room; others fall in love as soon as they leave it. To Yi, love seems only able to manifest as a fantastical force, a term I employ in many senses of the word. We fantasize about loving and being loved by others. At the same time, our very abilities and urges to love also depend upon fantasies of being able to understand, or know, someone wholly and truthfully. Sex adds an entirely new dimension to this dilemma. In “Sumo’s Picture,” we meet a laid-off entomologist seeking a job at the construction site of a satirical corporation called Human Touchville. While interviewing for a position, our narrator is asked, seemingly as part of a test, to touch a mysterious steel box. Hesitating at first, she obliges; while holding onto the box, she finds herself reminded of her ex-lover and reflects on her sexual experiences. She complains to a god that isn’t listening, declaring internally that sex can be real “only when it’s been transfigured away from what it is, and for that it must be an act of love.” The body, for Yi, becomes yet another physical blockade from accessing the depths of another’s soul. By figuring intimacy as a productive but evasive motivator in our lives, Yi invites us to question our social perceptions of love and sex as modes of connecting with others.

For Yi, ours is a godless world, but not one without religion, or faith. To God is chock-full of skeptics and believers alike. In “No Right Hand,” we encounter a dialogue between our hand-less narrator and Ana, a novice nun. Ana explains how she converted to Christianity because she “hated her life for failing to give her something to die for.” The narrator proceeds to describe the novel they had been working on before their accident: it’s about a city whose residents believe in the existence of a mysterious crying boy, one who would be able to explain your life’s meaning to you. But, of course, “[no] one knows the crying boy’s address… [though] everybody’s looking for him.” The mysterious crying boy can be read as a potent allegory for the modern world’s relationship to religious faith. Yi suggests how, in the absence of existential purpose, we will strive for motives and ideals to center our lives around, even illusory ones, to varying degrees of success. Religion in To God’s terms is less about worshipping a deity and more about performing rituals of prayer—about making do with our left hand, when we’re stranded without our right.

“Mutter,” my personal favorite of the collection, opens a tender space in the otherwise often sardonic stories. It follows a daughter whose mother is visiting from abroad. They visit a zoo, examining each animal, and afterwards the mother reveals she has been diagnosed with dementia. Yi writes this conversation, and the overall mother-daughter dynamic, with great care but also devastation: “the older I get, the more I love you,” our narrator tells her mother. “Does that mean my love is more dead than alive?” The sincere tone of vulnerability that Yi employs here provides a nice contrast to her more aloof candor in other stories.

The specter of late-stage capitalism haunts To God, manifesting in characters’ job hunts and employment anxieties. The narrator of “Dent,” an office worker at a company creating sensory simulations, explains how going to her job every week was “more enjoyable than asking [herself] what [she] might enjoy more than it.” Yi spares no affinities for the 9-5 corporate lifestyle, but she certainly doesn’t dismiss it either, recognizing it as a means of contemporary, and especially urban, survival. This defeatist sentiment surrounding the workplace thrums throughout the stories. Moreover, with this working-man’s context in mind, Yi generates a productive tension between the strategies of art-making versus money-making. In the collection’s first story, “Author Biography (No Picture),” we meet a nameless narrator who describes herself “not [as] a writer,” but an “unemployed puppet,” demonstrating abrasive self-judgement of her artistic employment. Comparing herself to a puppet denotes the common negative stereotypes about art as a career today, and how being able to work and earn money as an artist is a privilege that many will never have a chance of reaching. Thus, the question of the artist permeates in the collection’s capitalist cityscape, as does the question of how much of ourselves we can (or should) emotionally invest in our jobs.

By investigating alienation from various angles—disconnection at the emotional and spiritual level, holding down jobs we couldn’t give two craps about—Yi portrays our urban livelihoods as states of perpetual decay. While reading this collection, Lauren Berlant’s theorization of slow death kept surfacing in my mind. Berlant, a scholar best known for her work in affect theory, posed the term “slow death” as a suitable way of describing the affective experience of contemporary life: the slow deterioration and physical wearing out of populations subject to capitalist structures and forces. Yi seems to be chipping away at a similar agenda, albeit in the fictive form rather than theoretical. Each story calls us to contemplate, as the narrator of “Manfred” puts it, the “slow yet continuous decay of oneself and the world.”

At its erratic core, To God is a collection about the surrealism of survival. In constructing parallels between work and puppetry, sex and simulation, and purpose and function, Yi invites readers to imagine the shapes that spiritual purpose can take in our contemporary age. If we strip away our material forms, our jobs and our belongings and our very bodies themselves, we are left with only the flickering certainty of forward motion, a future as open as it is unknowable.