To Bend the Warped World: An Appreciation of Alexandra Andrews’ “Who Is Maud Dixon?”
To tell a good story, one that is true in the literal sense, requires only a few widely available and easily likeable human traits: wit, warmth, and courtesy to the listener. To invent a good story, one that is true as a matter of fictional art, demands what may seem like empathy’s inverse qualities: detachment, relentless precision, even at times ruthlessness. Empathy is supposed to be the fiction writer’s characteristic virtue, but perhaps we would do better to say empathy is the reader’s characteristic virtue. An excess of empathy in the fiction writer can quickly lead to a craft-destroying overprotectiveness, an inability to leave characters free to strive, struggle, and suffer — as they will, as they must. Perhaps this dovetails with what essayist Patricia Snow has noticed about empathy: Feeling someone else’s feelings is a far cry from practicing the deeply humane yet clear-eyed, even-handed love Christians most authentically mean by charity, the love that at once accepts others as they are and offers them the chance to rise in freedom toward what they could best become.
Of charity, fiction writer Flannery O’Connor famously said that it is hard, and that it endures. The fiction writer, to succeed, must be charitable — to wit: hard and enduring. Empathy carries the fabulist only so far before she must begin to make uncomfortable decisions. Who will struggle, who will suffer, who will emerge wounded; how long must pain precede resolution? Who will lose; who will win? Still more: What do winning and losing, what do justice and fairness, mean across a spectrum of contexts—world, country, society; the internal logic of your narrative; the immediate circles in which you work, live, believe, love? What should you make of the ironic distances and disproportions among these contexts? (Might there not be a kind of “winning” that is worse, far costlier and less gainful, than any loss?)
In past centuries novelists approached this set of questions with trepidation, even fear and trembling. To anyone brought up in a Puritan-inflected society (that includes all Americans), taking up the fictionist’s mantle could easily seem like the self-arrogation of a godlike if minuscule power: an attempt to make oneself into a small-time, bargain-bin providence. Even the word authority implies the action of an author on events. Hence, one suspects, the much-exaggerated “death of the author” noised about in mid-twentieth-century literary criticism: Along with a cultural loss of belief in higher powers, and a growing distrust in both human and divine authorities, came a corresponding loss of belief in factors beyond interpersonal power in human relations. No wonder many writers today either defer to this fraught situation with abandon, or else retreat into genre: shying away from the demands and implications of realism, uncertain of their own power to bend the warped world to their own purposes.
Alexandra Andrews’ debut novel Who Is Maud Dixon? instead meets the contemporary challenge with courage by turning these dynamics of authorial identity and responsibility inside out, in high dramatic style. The story’s wildly entertaining twists insist, not on authorial abdication, but instead on the inescapable responsibility and agency inherent in any act of narration.
The point-of-view centers on Florence Darrow, pitch-perfect portrait of a millennial adrift. An editorial assistant and aspiring novelist who doesn’t dare own her towering ambitions, Florence allows her middling fortunes to buffet her about the New York publishing world until a practical indiscretion on her part (related to an affair she’s had, but not itself a sexual act) results in her banishment via restraining order from her previous employer’s orbit.
Her margin for future error having grown vanishingly thin, Florence marvels at her apparent good fortune in being chosen as the new assistant to A-list author Maud Dixon, alias Helen Wilcox. Maud-or-Helen’s publishing career is white-hot in the wake of her bestselling, quasi-autobiographical, moderately scandalous debut novel. In a world of winners and losers, Helen has won — and in a key exchange between the two women early in the novel, Florence reveals that unless she too can attain to similar status, she will feel that she herself has “lost” at life. Florence feels that she cannot be the writer she wants to be without first becoming a different kind of self than she already is. She wants “everyone” to know her name — but not, in a more meaningful sense, her identity.
Helen parallels or mirrors this desire: Known only by her pseudonym in all professional interactions, she refuses to be known as she is in real life. This could evoke, maybe, J.D. Salinger or the reclusive Italian writer Elena Ferrante, living their ordinary lives in obscurity: but instead Helen’s hideaway, far from ordinary, is more reminiscent of Bruce Wayne’s mansion in its secluded luxury and the intensity with which Helen guards the identity of her alter ego. So Florence is sworn to secrecy about her new job and then swept away, first to the countryside and then to Morocco. In the whirl, Florence begins more quickly to pick up coherent pieces of “a disguise, an answer, a life” — an identity she can finally feel good about instantiating. But when a traumatic accident disrupts the women’s trip, an opportunity to rise to much-desired “greatness,” and a choice of real moral import, is finally offered to Florence. Questions of who controls the telling of the story, and whose version inspires credulity, soon become matters of life and death.
Since the novel flirts with genre tropes and conventions, pre-release reviews of Who Is Maud Dixon? tended to ensnare themselves in the sinuousness of the plot’s meandering, missing entirely the moral force of Andrews’ deadly serious playfulness, its performative exposure of deeper questions implicit in each human act of storytelling. Most unbelievably, the Washington Post called the book “light on character development.” I find this a startlingly wrongheaded description for a novel whose resolution turns entirely upon the gradual erosion of masks, fronts, and veneers to uncover traits that were previously muted, but always implicitly or potentially present, in key characters.
Some of these misreadings may have come about because those early reviews also demonstrated an over-reliance on siloed notions of fictional genre. Is Maud as a novel “literary,” a “thriller,” a “mystery”? No one seemed quite able to decide. In truth it is all of those and more — including lit-world satire, deliciously subversive parody of multiple genres (including the ingenue-in-New-York sub-subgenre), Bechdel-test-passing crime caper, narrative about narratives, and “religiously inflected disruption of secular constructions of the real,” to borrow a phrase from critic John McClure.
For Maud is, if not a religious, then a religiously inflected novel in a fine postsecular tradition: While Florence is, rather spectacularly, not a believer, her actions are driven by an outsized self-concept derived from a more or less unconscious distortion of her mother Vera’s devout faith in God’s Providence and in His unwavering commitment to a non-ironic, capital-P Plan for Florence’s life. Alert readers should not miss the significance of Vera’s name: The second half of the novel entertains shifting perceptions of subjective truth and conflicting accounts of major events, not coyly to deny us the possibility of knowing the story as it objectively took place, but knowingly to sharpen our appetite for just that story and no other.
This “reality hunger,” too, may help explain why Florence’s comic machinations and seductions among the expatriate community in the second half chilled some readers’ ardor. These complications do slow the progression of the plot, in ways that sometimes sacrifice narrative tautness to verisimilitude. Though Andrews eventually makes workmanlike use of them to help establish relevant facts, they initially appear to pull us off course in our journey toward the acutely desired resolution. Yet soon enough, the novel takes a sharp turn back toward its own central concerns. In a sudden focal shift, it becomes clear exactly who has been shaping the story and to what ends. The final authorial move wipes away any residual irritation about the characters’ manipulation of us and each other, leaving only marvel over Andrews’ skill at stage-managing their final tableaux.
Questions of dual and duplicitous identity in the novel end by being both resolved and not: The plot proves that Florence really can be, in the wistful half-lie so trustingly and well-intentionedly sold to millennials, “anything she wants to be.” The more truthful corollary of this lie, a corollary that tends to be left unspoken, is that becoming whatever you want to be almost always means sacrificing, putting to death, whatever you were before. Andrews brings that sacrifice front and center in a conclusion reminiscent, but not derivative, of themes and wild twists in Tara Isabella Burton’s 2018 debut Social Creature. Andrews’ Florence, like Burton’s Louise, willingly lays her former self — bright, talented, and capable, but also inexperienced, pliant, and trusting enough to be easily manipulated — on the altar for the knife and fire to consume. What rises from the ashes can only be called monstrous, in the word’s original sense of a warning. It is also a resounding reductio ad absurdum to the cultural myth of the art monster, which would posit that the only truly good artist is one willing to sacrifice anything and everything else to the good of the work.
I've suggested here that Andrews is a moral writer. This does not mean a moralist in the sense of a sermonizer driving home a lesson. A moral fiction writer is, instead and primarily, an acutely perceptive observer noticing and naming the movements of the human heart. Who Is Maud Dixon? is a deeply moral novel to the extent that it reveals the narcissistic harm that envy and jealousy can do when these vices masquerade as aspiration. Andrews’ characters attract our keenest interest, as products of art and as human souls, when they rely on deceptive artifice instead of engaging the difficult work of genuine self-acceptance. At the root of much of the arguably needless suffering Florence both undergoes and imposes, we find a denial of her ordinary origins: an only child raised by a churchgoing Floridian mother employed at a P.F. Chang’s franchise. What kind of future, Florence asks herself, is possible for a person who began so ordinarily? Truly any kind she chooses, Andrews implies, any kind at all: though the panoply of choices, the possible content of that “any kind,” may be both more dazzling and more damaging than we like to acknowledge.
Though Florence’s story ends on a darkly comic note, the comedy is of a vanishingly rare nature, set in the infernal mode. In the final pages we are left to weigh the dubious value of what Florence has won against the undeniable immensity of what it has cost her, and to ask again: just why could a plain girl from Florida not also be a brilliant author, where an apparently unrepentant criminal so easily can?
As a whole, Who Is Maud Dixon? also suggests an answer to a question asked by novelist Christopher Beha (who so happens to be Andrews’ spouse — she thanks him warmly in the acknowledgments for his insight and encouragement). In a 2012 interview with William Giraldi in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Beha says of his fiction, “I’m constantly asking myself what the novel is for, what it ought to be doing.” Clearly, Andrews is asking the same question — and giving it, in practice, her own elegant solutions. One thing the novel is for, one thing it can still do in the face of proliferating forms of diversion and distraction, is to tell a good story: one that compels both instant attention and enduring reflection. Who Is Maud Dixon? accomplishes that end and then some.
Katy Carl is the editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine and the author of As Earth Without Water, a novel (Wiseblood Books, 2021), Praying the Great O Antiphons: My Soul Magnifies the Lord (Catholic Truth Society, 2021), and Fragile Objects, stories (Wiseblood, 2023, forthcoming). She is a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society located at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of St. Thomas—Houston.