In the almost-here future of Nini Berndt’s debut novel, There Are Reasons for This, everyone is looking for a distraction from the reality of their lives. AI has taken most jobs; catastrophic storms build, destroy, and dissipate over and over again, yet get less and less attention; and everyone is lonely, either remembering someone they lost or longing for something they can’t define, and unsure of what to do with themselves. Amid so much malaise, two strangers mourning the same person try to make sense of what they have lost and what they might find in each other.
Four years before the start of the book, Mikey took off for Denver abruptly, leaving his seventeen-year-old sister, Lucy, with their bitter, disappointed mother and ineffectual father, and the promise that she could join him once he was settled. Mikey is a young artist with big, deep questions for the world and a face so beautiful it’s a curse; even his mother can’t look at him without making his beauty a dark and twisted temptation. The day of his escape, she tries to block his way, desperate not to lose him:
“Move, Ma,” he said coolly. The coolness of his voice only upset her more. She wanted him to scream something at her so she could hit him. She’d wanted that a long time, to hit him. To redden his cheek. To kiss it after it was done, over and over in the place she’d hurt him. She’d thought about it so many times. Too many times, rubbing his hairless cheek. (p. 25)
Later we learn that Mikey’s first sexual encounter was with an art teacher who talked about his brilliance as she undressed him. With so many predatory eyes following him, it’s no wonder he felt the need to flee. Alas, his respite is brief. Three years after moving to Denver, Mikey’s check-in calls home suddenly stop, and a few weeks after that the reason for his silence reaches his family: Mikey is dead.
The details of his death are sparse and unsatisfying to Lucy, who follows his trail to Denver and rents an apartment across the hallway from the only person he talked about: a woman named Helen. Lucy opens the novel looking out into the hallway through her door’s peephole, waiting for Helen to return home. She’d assumed they were lovers, though he’d only ever called Helen his friend. How could they not be, with Mikey being so beautiful and sounding so happy to spend all of his time with her? Lucy pictured Helen beautiful, like Mikey, artsy and well-read, but the woman she finds isn’t anything like she expected:
Now that she saw her, Helen wasn’t the way Lucy had imagined at all. She wasn’t long or gorgeous and didn’t wear lipstick or glasses. She didn’t seem particularly interested in art and wasn’t particularly beautiful. She was loud and cluttered and brash and walked like a suitcase, like she was being pulled from room to room. (p.4)
Adding to the mystery of Mikey’s relationship with her, Helen only ever brings home women, never men. Lucy, who shared her first kiss with a girl the day her brother left, ends the first chapter puzzling over this woman’s connection with her brother—and practicing how to introduce herself as Mikey’s sister.
Helen, whose narrative begins before she meets Mikey, is a professional cuddler, almost exclusively for men. It’s one of the few jobs that hasn’t been replaced by machines, and Helen—who runs through women while avoiding love—is surprisingly good at it. There is so much need for professional comfort and companionship for the lonely population, there are even scholarships for her services; enter Mikey.
The two meet at the Hotel Chester, where Mikey works, for his scholarship-funded cuddle session. They become fast friends, intimate enough to fall asleep against each other, although, even nine months after his death, Helen struggles to make sense of what he meant to her. Mostly, it boils down to them being able to be themselves with each other.
When they were together she felt like a boy, not like a man, not like a dyke, just a boy, two boys, shooting the shit, doing whatever they wanted, making poor use of their talents while the city fell apart. It was how she’d felt as a kid and it was a feeling she wanted to keep. Sometimes she wished she could take off her shirt when Mikey took off his shirt while they sat beside the pool at the Hotel Chester. Just a couple of boys. Brothers, almost, that’s what it felt like, but better. (p. 66)
Mikey seems to see and embrace Helen as she feels on the inside, which we are told is not trans but rather envious of manhood, and in turn Helen has no desire for Mikey’s beauty. She wants nothing from him but his companionship. Other than his sister, she may be one of the only people he has encountered who doesn’t see his looks as something to be consumed or destroyed.
Though the narrative slips into Mikey’s and his mother’s point of view a couple of times, it largely alternates between Helen’s and Lucy’s. Even so, as a character, Lucy is less well-defined than either Helen or Mikey, precisely because she doesn’t know herself all that well yet.
Rarely was she clear on the things she wanted. What do you want to eat? Mikey asked, and Lucy couldn’t say. Do you like this song? Lucy wasn’t sure. How’s this? Mikey asked about a painting he was doing, and Lucy turned her head from one side to the other but the change in angle made no difference. Sometimes the things she did want frightened her. Things like for Julie [her first kiss] to be closer, to slide her hand into Lucy’s hand and spread the fingers apart so wide the skin split. She wanted to watch her mother fall from the stairs and crack open her head and for her brother to sleep beside her at night. (p. 30)
A day out from her twenty-first birthday at the novel’s start, Lucy is young and inexperienced. Her only connection to a world larger than the small conservative Christian town where she was raised has died without reason or warning. She was weird at home and she is weird in Denver, where she is finally free to say and do the unusual things that pop into her head, and to figure out what she wants.
Berndt’s characters, from the main three to the minor, are specific, inhabited, and compelling. Part of her fantastic characterization is rooted in the dark physicality of her writing. Consider the passages I’ve quoted above: Helen walks like a pulled suitcase, Mikey’s mother longs to slap his cheeks red so that she can kiss them over and over again, Lucy wants to spread apart her and Julie's entwined fingers until they split. Berndt’s writing is so evocative that one can feel the heat of a stinging cheek against desperate lips, the confusing agony of wanting to be so close to the object of your affection that bodily boundaries are undone. She sees her characters for what they are: raw and needy nervous systems in a time of isolation, disaster, and sensory overwhelm.
Berndt’s powerful voice and characterization are reason enough to dive into this book. But for those in need of more plot, we do eventually learn what happened to Mikey, and about Helen’s role in it; and we see Helen and Lucy fall for each other while Lucy tries to find a way to fess up about being Mikey’s sister. Throughout this, Lucy takes a job providing companionship to the old woman living in the apartment above her, which makes for some of the most memorable scenes of the book, and Helen eventually figures out the Mikey/Lucy connection.
Meanwhile, the hot and humid city is enthralled by nightly news stories about an impossibly tall man who sneaks into people’s houses to watch them sleep, only to jump out windows whenever he is spotted:
Surely there was other news, but that news didn’t have the same appeal as the Jumper. The encroaching fires, an elementary school down the street that was completely inhabited by refugees, a war that had been going on for the better part of ten years in a part of the world that never seemed at peace. The Jumper gave a thrill, a sort of fluttery jump of the heart. (p. 77)
The citizens of Berndt’s world are so burned out on terrible events, and their own (real or imagined) powerlessness to change anything, that no one pays much mind to the many warnings of the impending storm that will eventually flood their streets, their homes. It is a familiar feeling these days.
Despite taking place in the future—there are mustachioed robot taxi drivers, an AI air monitor in a suit which appears, unbidden, on cell and TV screens to deliver weather alerts, designer drugs to correct or enhance emotions with more specificity than currently available—There Are Reasons for This is unmistakably a novel of our times. While that might sound depressing, thanks to Berndt’s vivid, unexpected writing and fully imagined misfits, her portrayal of what it’s like to have to keep on getting on with life while the world is ending is unexpectedly cathartic. Setting her story in such bleak circumstances—and focusing not on the circumstances but on the grief, lust, and longing of her characters—Berndt validates desire and connection as deeply human and worthwhile concerns.
Yes, this is how it feels when you know there are reasons for how things are falling apart, but not what to do about it or what comes next. Through Lucy and Helen, Berndt seems to say: Sometimes all we can do is move towards each other and hold on until the rain stops.