Because we are at the whim and fancy of external stimuli, we often find ourselves in contradiction. Perhaps, then, at the heart of the complexities that we so assuredly claim as human, is contradiction. Vi Khi Nao consistently embodies this tension in her writing. Known for her surreal rendering of capitalist objects and pop culture, Nao’s work often utilizes strange, salacious metaphors to understand the spaces where things and bodies intertwine. Often engaged with the at-once personal and collective quandaries of human desire and consumption, Nao writes with an English that arrives on the page by way of Latin and Vietnamese. In her latest novel The Italy Letters, she depicts an individual’s battle with her passions and the eternal folds of conflict that arise from long-distance, queer love. Nao writes this novel with a fractured, defamiliarized epistolary form, continuing her quest in uncovering the slippages and perversions of late-capitalist existence.
Readable in a single sitting, The Italy Letters is a slim torrent of Nao’s dreamy and odic language that picks at the perpetual scab of passion—fleeting, illusory, and often self-contained. Documenting the rather unfictionalized narrator who shares much of the author’s biography and even her first name, Nao’s novel constellates the artist’s lived experience through conferences, readings, nominal fiscal awards, and poverty. Highlighting the emotional turbulence of unrequited love, she also critiques how material conditions exacerbate this turmoil. These trials are not only evident in the content of Nao’s novel but also in its gestalt.
Despite its title and all expectations posed, Italy Letters is not an epistolary novel. Broken into four sections based on the location of the narrator (Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and The Midwest), the accounts never take the common form of letters: Dear X, dated and signed. Instead, the novel is a fragmented, unsent missive written over an unmeasured expanse of time; the object of her correspondence is an unnamed, married writer living in London. Used as a container for her melancholy and resentment, the narrator challenges both herself and the reader to confront the dissonance between expressed and unexpressed emotions.
In contrast to the passion that drives the narrator’s writing, her daily life revolves around an overly intimate caregiving relationship with her sick and difficult mother. She spends her days preparing meals, convincing her mother (and herself) that life is worth living, and finding tabloids and internet factoids to distract them from debt, all while her mind remains intoxicated by its obsession with her correspondence with her London lover. In order to demonstrate the heterogeneity of her inner life, Nao chooses a perspective that is consciously detached from the expected mode of letter writing.
While primary letters between lovers, poets, and philosophers usually provide the reader with a particularly intimate lens that discloses the unique foibles and moods that can only emerge in the relationship between two beings, Italy Letters doesn’t write from the position of corresponder. Instead, the narrator places herself in a position similar to the reader, wherein she is titillated by her own writing to-and-fro. If this were a novel written by someone of the opposite gender, it might well be defined as “masturbatory.”
As a record of her reflections on an exchange, the narrator often provides the reader with quotes and details from her corresponder. These sections always take up the second person: “you said” and “you wrote,” along with an analysis of their interaction. Most ruminated-on communication takes place on a smaller scale than the hand-written letter. Often, this novel-length letter takes up DMs and texts as its matter. In elevating this trivial level of communication to a more profound and lasting form, Nao grapples with the tendency for passion to imbue banal existence with allure and meaning. Yet, by transforming the traditional love letter into a vessel for reserved and splintered thoughts, she also subverts the expectation of intimacy to expose the inherent disconnection between mind and body.
Instead of the novel as a pursuit of capturing memory, or a more diaristic quest of documentation, Nao’s preoccupation seems to be a search for narrative itself. The novelistic quality of Italy Letters—that is, its remove from reality, its fiction—is still questionable to me. Alternatively, the text feels more like a philosophical undertaking on the process of novelling. Midway through, the narrator explains that she had attempted to explain a quote from fellow Brown MFA graduate Ben Marcus while giving feedback on her London lover’s short story. Marcus’s quote reads:
“One basic meaning of narrative, then: to creative time where there was none. A fiction writer who tells stories is a maker of time. Not liking a story might be akin to not believing in its depiction of time.”
Perceiving time as fiction allows the narrator to reframe her desire for a future she can never fully grasp, making writing a means of untangling her passion by transforming yearning into narrative. In the context of late capitalism, her unfulfilled romance becomes a metaphor for the precariousness of her existence, where financial instability and artistic invisibility deepen her emotional discontent. This cycle of longing driven by the distance between want and reality suggests that the narrator’s only way to assert control is through the act of creating a story, turning her unfulfilled desire into a fictional resolution of an impossible contradiction.
Nao’s critiques of society come in many forms throughout her work, from an obsession with sports and online Scrabble to morbid headline news. In the Italy Letters, Nao focuses on the commodification of sex and desire, which she satirizes through her own masturbatory writing—not in the traditional sense of navel-gazingness, but in the literal autoeroticism of its act. She questions, “If sex turned into an assembly line, has the human body shifted from being a nurturer to a manufacturer? What kind of sex industrial revolution is this that leaves the human soul barren, alienated, subjected to perpetual impotence?” Her commentary on sex is a foundation upon which she arrives at a critique of writing. She condemns writing as an “overkill of overthinking of overanalyzing of over-connecting” that violates “the existence of self and others and one’s sense of volition over time.”
In the context of Nao’s narrative, overthinking can be seen as both a personal and socio-economic struggle—where the pressures of late capitalism not only stifle artistic expression but also complicate the ability to convey true emotion. The unsent letters, in this light, become emblematic of a desire to escape these pressures, to express what words can barely contain.
Writing is productive, reading is sensual, and in combination there results something a lot like procreation. Often, a term used when seeking to immerse oneself in an experience is to “let go.” Beyond the grammar, metaphors, and analysis—or rather, viewed intermittently between these formal elements—Nao asks us to let go of our biases, but also of the baggage our body brings. She seeks to engage us in the unspeakable, inviolable substance of experience by reproducing it on the page. But, being human, Nao must speak to let the unsaid be known. It is this uncanny, contradictory balance that the author chooses to grapple with as she matures.