Carl Shuker. The Royal Free: A Novel. Counterpoint Press, 2025.

Félix González-Torres. “Untitled” (America). Recurring art installation, 1994–present.

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America: America has always been an unattainable dream, a place to always dream about. It is an imperfect state. As a child I remember the America I imagined, that I constructed from different sources. That particular America was full of lights. Of shiny reflections, of images. Paradise.

—————————————————-— —Félix Gonzáles-Torres

A child’s trachea is tiny, the size of a child’s own littlest finger. Like a straw, an electrical wire.

    ————————————————-——The Royal Free, Carl Shuker

1.

IN ANOTHER TIME, Carl Shuker’s wild and bracing novel The Royal Free might have read like science fiction: In an apocalyptic London, a goddess determines what is printed in a once-respected medical journal that has become irrelevant in a world of deliberate misdirection. Like bees, a hive of dispassionate editors busily catalog the monetization of the care of bodies, living and dead. Predictions and calculations are made; value is determined by a metric that staffers must learn quickly or become disposable. The eye of the novel is roving, relentless, strange.

James, the hero, copyedits medical articles while grieving the loss of his wife and raising his infant daughter (whose point of view we also enter). Though expert in the technical language of his field, he is adrift as a father in a city on the edge of collapse, where violence threatens from the disused London Underground, with nobody to document it in any journal. Is this science fiction? It no longer seems wild to imagine that our bodies are variables over which we have almost no control. They have in many ways always been lawless. James knows this acutely, having just lost his wife—though for most of the novel the reader doesn’t know exactly how.

James’s environment has become lawless too. This often feels true when one is grieving, but in this fictional universe, the threats are real: Roving gangs emerge from the tunnels of the Underground. James struggles to find his literal footing on the city streets. He is plagued by worry, visions, dreams. The Royal Free is a work of ontological dizziness, both by design and by accident. The novel’s many voices seem disconnected at times, reflecting the chaos of their world. The reader isn’t always sure who is speaking, whether what they are saying is true, whether their context is real or imagined. Who patrols the line between reality and fantasy? When an editor edits, what is discarded somehow remains. Not everything—or everybody—will make the final cut. Determining what is true requires the development of a unique and unrepeatable epistemological compass. This is the challenge of the novel, just as it is the challenge of editing, of art, of life, of faith. As I read this book, trying to form my own compass and make sense of the story, I found that the novel kept expanding outward, mixing with my own memories and experiences. Some art is like that.

2.

The worlds created by artist Félix González-Torres are all labeled “Untitled” (in quotation marks). They share many qualities: immersive, lit up, designed to challenge belief in both the permanent and the impermanent. Gonzáles-Torres, who died in 1996, believed in shapeshifting, in the impermanence of worlds and walls, and he maintained this adherence to ephemerality even after his death, through instructions that accompany his installations. Take, for example, his 1994 work “Untitled”
(America), which my daughter and I saw in the fall of 2025 at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Each time the lights of “Untitled” (America) are installed, the curator is different, and although there are rules, they are flexible. The materials must consist of twelve strings of incandescent lightbulbs, totally clear or softly tinted; the bulbs must be hung on strings, not custom fixtures. Nothing is precious or bespoke, but a core principle must be followed. Curators may arrange the strings in any way they choose. Twelve identical strings of lights cross different spaces, arranged by different hands, for different audiences. Curated, attended to, subject to a devotional practice of deliberate rearrangement, which is to say, carefully disarranged.

On the day we visit, my daughter stands above a string of lights that drop from the ceiling to pool on the floor like the hem of a woman’s ballgown, not unlike a princess gown she once wore with tiny flickering lights stitched inside the fabric. Light reflects off her freckled face, which here on the receding edge of childhood is being rearranged, all previous versions collapsing into the current version. So many fingerprints on those bulbs, brushed over, reprinted, returning but never the same.

Six months from now, she will light a candle for the dead brother she never knew in seventh-century Malmesbury Abbey, guests of the parents of my best friend, Quakers who introduced me to the power of silence, people who knew me before I knew either of my children. The abbey is now a gathering place for pensioners. In flickering shadows cast by votive candles, there is laughter and the clatter of teacups set down on saucers by hands that shake a bit. We buy a magnet in the shape of a monk and stick it to our refrigerator in California. The whole business of life, death, and the spaces in between is a long process of disarticulation, of moving one light from here to there, a bone to a socket, a hand to a mouth.

3.

Gonzáles-Torres and Shuker both see the world as fragmented, which is to say, made in and for community. Which is to say, made in and through embodied experiences. Which is to say that to be a person is to be sick at times, well at others, and that both these experiences stretch beyond their containers. A work of art may stretch in the same way—become a part of memory, of childhood, of personal folklore. An art exhibit shifts perspectives and attitudes. Can I take the art away with me? Can I hold what is precious for a while, knowing it will never last? All these conundrums are felt in the body, the body being the lens through which we see the world. These moral and existential dilemmas are challenging to articulate, and Shuker knows this, so the world he creates is challenging for the reader. A man editing a medical journal wants order and clarity on the page, but he knows real life is not so simple. Nothing is ever static. We carry away pieces of everything we love, touch, hate, receive, or reject. It lives in us, and we live in the world we know until we change, pass through the veil, and remain in another.

4.

Like grief itself, Shuker’s book is a haze of polyvocal madness, with storylines that cross, unexpectedly and sometimes violently, and never quite cohere. Though it has a plot, this isn’t a book to make sense of so much as to feel. Readers must move the scenes into the worlds of their own bodies and experiences, just as González-Torres’s exhibitions are meant to be moved into viewer’s own worlds. In “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), the Easter pink and blue candy piled on the floor or against the walls is meant to be slipped into a pocket, eaten, tossed out, or given to someone else, who will make their own choices about what to do with it. The story begins and ends when the candy leaves the gallery, moves beyond circumscribed space, which is to say, time, beyond the artist’s aesthetic choices or moral preoccupations. Every piece by Gonzáles-Torres is untitled, open to interpretation, to nuance and even misunderstanding. In this, he and Shuker are inheritors of one another’s visions, as if they share an echo chamber of style and light, sound and orientation.

5.

Are bodies and their symptoms open to interpretation, to nuance and misunder-standing? Shuker’s novel suggests that they are, and that while the health professionals who determine which diseases are valuable, treatable, and worthy of attention are meticulous and conscientious, they are also undeniably human and capable of error. The staff of the medical journal are overseen by “the Goddess,” their compassionate but distant editor in chief. Her devotees are busy with nothing at all and everything at once as they finalize their last-ever print issue (the journal is going digital) in a world that is unsafe and unpredictable. They live in an electric, unified, and exasperating blur. For James, having lost his wife feels “like being in love in Paris on four espressos.”

For me, having lost a child feels like being in love and sitting in a dark room at a training for people who care for the dying, tiny dust motes spinning in the air, listening to the click of slides in the carousel and the voice of the Zen master. Some of the faces are at peace, as you can see, and others are in mid-struggle. I sit on the cushions and feel a wild rush of emotions like a wind that reshuffles the neatly stacked handouts. Is it fear or grief or rage or emptiness or all at once? I struggle to catch my breath in the silent room. Click. Click. Click. The projector whirs, and I remember making shadow puppets with my dad when I refused to go to sleep, his stories of brave dogs who saved their owners. The marginalia of the illuminated text of our life is always just outside the main frame. In every world, we are related to everything and nothing at all.

6.

When a bulb goes out in “Untitled” (America), it is replaced. One by one, the large sheets of blank paper that make up “Untitled” (Passport) are pulled away and tucked under arms and taken into the street. They bear no seals of country or origin. What would someone think if they found a blank sheet of thick, hand-cut paper in the house of someone who had died?

In The Royal Free, a young Lithuanian woman works as a nanny for James’s daughter. My best friend, the one with the Quaker parents, when she moved to Peckham in London in 2000, had a Czech nanny whom I came to know quite well. I once climbed the stairs of their terraced house to the nanny’s room at the top to tell her dinner was ready, but she wasn’t there. The window was open, papers shuffling across the desk in the breeze, some almost airborne. What if they were important? What if her passport flew out the window and landed in the back garden? I crossed the room to close it and saw sticky notes lined up on her wardrobe, translations from English to Czech in block letters. They moved in the breeze, like words shaking out their true meanings.

I once heard a story about a woman who survived some Fascist regime somewhere; after she died, her children found hundreds of thousands of dollars tucked into the walls of her house. A friend who once worked at the Holocaust Museum in DC told me about how, after she accepted a journal someone brought in, more journals began to arrive on her desk, eyewitness accounts rediscovered, re-remembered. The plot of history is installed in whatever way the installer sees fit.

Some medical reports cannot be shredded. Some truths are partial even if not redacted. In the novel, the medical journal prints its final physical issue and ships it off. It is unclear whether anybody will be interested in reading it. “A fifth of the issue was an unreadable scroll of finger-oil and anxious sweat.” In death and in copyediting, the body and its gallery of stories offer a tangible but unreliable record of the history of the world.

7.

In Peckham Rye, in November 2000, a ten-year-old boy from Nigeria, Damilola Taylor, was murdered. Thirteen years later, my son died of an illness that became common among descendants of Jews from Poland and Russia over centuries of intermarriage. When the illness was first identified and studied in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was treated as an exclusively Jewish condition and presented as evidence of genetic inferiority. Before he died, my son weighed eleven pounds and took food through a tube in his nose, no longer able to swallow.

After his death, I went to visit my friend in Peckham Rye. One day, running through the park, I saw a little boy stumble into the road, looking as if he’d lost a ball. He said “Mama?” as if he knew me. And then I blinked and he was gone. I searched through the bushes, across the rugby pitch. I walked the entire circumference of the park but didn’t see him again. If the veils between this world and whatever it is not had thinned, then surely he was not really gone. Maybe he was just, as Shuker suggests, “another heart beating forward in time.” Perhaps I could rip the veil with the strength of my desire for my son to not be dead. Perhaps it would ribbon apart and leave a space he could walk through. Perhaps I had awakened him, or God. I returned to the park the next day at the same time, but there was no boy.

Grief has a long, star-studded tail that crosses galaxies and cities and time zones, the comet of connection and gloom. Death is decidedly democratic, James realizes, which is to stay, utterly random. It takes all prisoners. “There’s no one else to know there’s such a word as ‘daughter’ in his world, and he’s forgotten her and left her somewhere, out there in the buggy in the tall grass where the dark night rides and the darkness begins to fall.” At the training for those who work with the dying in Santa Fe, I recognized the face of God in the slides of people who had recently died. I saw the face of God in my son. I saw it in a boy who may have been a figment of my grieving imagination.

8.

Another character in The Royal Free is cautiously optimistic, even amid a health care system designed to minimize required effort and optimize results. “I have had four surgeries to repair the extensive damage done to my body. I trust my surgeon and I feel good when I think about him…but I know that it is a complicated case and there are many different things to consider.”

I trusted the surgeon who splintered my foot from my ankle when I was four, who fitted the false wing of my hip a year later, who fused the bone so it would move in one piece, like a lever, the following year. The body is seamed and weary and in an imperfect state. In a dream I am being burned at the stake along with other grieving mothers, heretics, redheads. Then I am running, first on my original wooden leg, and then with no legs at all. I am holding both of my children by the throat, the boy and the girl, and crawling. Behind us, the fire of all the stakes has become one big flame that is quickly gaining ground. Suddenly, wind sweeps like a bird’s wing, like the breath of Bael, a million arrows of sea-drenched air that fizzle the light of the fire. Now the world is utterly green in the softening shadows, and I am surrounded by everyone I’ve ever loved, and we are heading over a green hill to the sea. I walk with one child on each side, one small hand in each of my hands.

In the opening room of the Smithsonian exhibit of Gonzáles-Torres’s work, a small television with a blue screen promises, in 1980s computer font, Always to Return. Before it are two white chairs where people can sit in pairs or alone. I sit with my daughter, who unwraps a piece of candy and hands it to me, sticky in my sweating palm. I sit next to my brother, then his husband. I tell my brother we need to check our passports, make sure they’re valid, with at least three years left before expiry. The four of us—brother, brother-in-law, niece, mother, sister, daughter—stand together, watching our mirrored reflection in the body of the television with a message that makes a promise. On this day, in this America, in this reflected image, in this singular moment, we are the unattainable dream in the place we never stop dreaming about.

 

 

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Emily Rapp Black is the author of five books of nonfiction and a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her most recent, I Would Die if I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth-Telling, is forthcoming from Counterpoint.