The Moon Papers. By Emmalea Russo. New York: Arcade, 2026. 336 pp. $29.99.
This is a curious novel with a lot of moving parts which are coordinated well. Like Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, it uses a scheme of East versus West and is concerned with—to use the most helpfully vague terms—the way that art and politics are related. It follows on from Russo’s previous novel Vivienne (published by Arcade in 2024), and places at its center Vivienne’s granddaughter Vesta, who is also an artist. She may be at the center, in her home in rural Pennsylvania, but that is not where the reader spends most of his or her time: the novel starts with Dean Konig, a member of an art collective in the Mojave Desert with whom Vesta videochats, and then switches to Vesta’s artist mother, Velour, who discovers a colony of bats in her attic. Also to be introduced are Radko the bat expert and his therapist wife Chloe, another couple, Lisa and Mac Wallace, who live not far from Velour, Vesta’s neighbor Ziggy, an artist of sorts who used to arrange window displays for a department store, and Vesta’s husband Lars, who runs a New York gallery showing her family’s work, and whose online activity Dean is made aware of on the other side of the country. Dean’s collective, the Center for Constant Creation, is working toward the launch of a new project, an artificial second moon called Moon2, and Lars is among those cranks who see it as a threat to human welfare. Dean listens in CCC meetings to transcripts of the chat room “ANTI-MOON2”, in which Lars speculates that the CCC is funded by a corporation called Voortelle, which hopes to change “creation”, both of life and art, by taking “intuition and chance and fate out of the equation”. What we do know, seeing it through Dean’s perspective, is that they have a program in which resident “artists” can be kept comatose while carrying pregnancies, making parturition into artistic practice. Some backstory already connects the CCC with the Pennsylvanians: Vivienne, brain-damaged from being struck by a brick thrown through a gallery window, was herself kept unconscious in the CCC facilities. No doubt having read Vivienne will answer certain questions raised by The Moon Papers, but it can be enjoyed by itself.
Tricks of a sort are being played: The Moon Papers feels large, stretching three thousand miles across the country and several decades back to the time of Vivienne, and complicated too, with textual layers including the chat room transcript, texts, first person narrative sections, and reproduced magazine coverage of both Vesta and Lars; but it is at the same time small and simple, putting a few characters into orbit around Vesta out in the country, developing its plot slowly without any major detours or twists as it approaches the show at Lars’ gallery that will open on the day of Moon2’s launch. In Pennsylvania, everyone knows everyone, and knows everyone’s business too, starting with high school gossip. The CCC is small and isolated, and though Dean and Vesta are already secretly communicating, the scene in which someone from the CCC shows up elsewhere is a momentous one. The tone of the novel is quiet and a little melancholic, then suddenly, as we enter the chat room with its all caps usernames (ZENDIAGRAM, ABSTREKT2001), or follow Lars and hear his brash, paranoid style of thought, we are jarred by the noise. Russo is an artful and bemused arranger, not just of multiple characters’ perspectives, but of their voices, too. This work of contrasts risks disorder but achieves its vision.
The generic apparatus is handled with an ease that is almost blasé: to judge from the trial run early in the story, Moon2 seems to be little more than a balloon stored in a metal can, ready to be inflated to spectacular size. It will have some effect on human and animal life, surely, but it is very hard to predict what that might be. Russo is not especially interested in how it all works, how high it rises, even exactly what it looks like, and she is right not to be, because Moon2 is more intriguing when we can only just about see its outlines. In the ravings of the Anti-Moon2 crowd, particularly those of Lars, readers might recognize an analogue to the confused anti-AI sentiment that rages against what it does not understand, the same apocalypticism and dismissal of apocalypse’s agents as mediocrities. A great deal depends on a distinction between fake and real that has not been carefully considered: “The Moon2 makers wanted to make us all less human, to make everything fake, and to make a fake version of everything.” This most vociferous stuff comes not from an artist or maker, but from a gallerist, part of a pattern in which the boldest claims made for Art and What Art Does usually come from those adjacent to it, not directly involved. The Moon2 project does sound stupid and shoddy, but Lars in his novelistic role as spokesperson for the opposition can hardly earn them any credit.
The novel’s attitude towards the spooky and speculative, much as it enjoys and trades in it, is finally ambivalent, and comically so. There are novels of ideas and then there are novels of characters with ideas, and the displacement in the second arrangement gives the author and reader a probably healthy distance, necessary when the novel’s counterfactual or science fictional thought experiment is so extravagant. One does not know how seriously to take, for instance, Dean’s thoughts on the grand national theme of East versus West:
Just as the night was older than the day, and the moon more ancient than the sun, the East Coast was America’s night and the West Coast, its day. Though he wasn’t from the East Coast, wasn’t really from anywhere, the words soothed him. Back east. Back east. To Dean, Vesta’s presence back east proved its primariness. At the origin of the world and the word: a trance-inducing, bloody violence.
Russo’s narrative construction, with its multiple views, makes it possible to dismiss this at first, then revisit it and see if he might be on to something.
All the ambivalence has a contemporary feeling, but the mood of the present casts a new light back on the past, too. Then again, not everyone lives in the present mood. The other oppositional pairing the novel plays with is of the moon landing versus the Moon2 launching, which suggests a change, probably a diminishment, in human ambitions. Lars unsurprisingly believes that the 1969 landing was faked, part of the same story in which “they” keep lying to “us”, but he is compromised, and others must be consulted. Ziggy, Vesta’s old and eccentric neighbor, doesn’t remember whose TV he watched it on, but he’s sure that it happened the way they say it did. He tells us this himself: “The astronaut said something that sounded smart but was actually stupid. Like, no shit the moon is desolate and magnificent. But I was proud to be an American.” Even if Lars is right that the footage was shot in Area 51, the old man’s memory has its own reality. And anyway, Nevada, where America’s flag is definitely planted, is pretty desolate and magnificent, too.