This Sort of Thing: On Heather Lewis's Notice

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• This Sort of Thing:On Heather Lewis’s Notice
• Hannah Bonner (bio)

For a couple of months in my early thirties, I engaged in an online flirtation with a married couple on the kink app Feeld. They were white, indeterminately wealthy, and looked like a Tommy Hilfiger inlay. In the beginning, I communicated solely with the Wife. She was peppy, energetic, and effusive in her interactions. Our texts were the best part of the entire episode. We flirted openly and enthusiastically. She was forward, pointed, athleisure-wear svelte. Initially, she handled the logistics of our hypothetical ménage à trois. She and her Husband had a private plane and could fly to dine with me anywhere; she was allergic to latex condoms and therefore I’d need to test and submit my paperwork for STDs; she was shaved: perhaps I could be too.

The Husband was different. He told me about the acts in which the Wife and I would engage, the positions he’d put us in. He sent black-and-white pictures of the Wife: openmouthed, on her knees; her legs spread, post-fuck. The pictures were always porny with a twinge of pain. I was simultaneously turned on by his directives [End Page 310] while also chary. I felt something twisting in me like a corkscrew. The taste of it was tannic.

I never met the Husband or the Wife in person. I have courted risk many times over, but in more immediate, tangible ways. When the texts pivoted from dialogue to demands, that’s when I extricated myself, cool as vapor. And, like everything in my life I have walked out on, I walked out without fully knowing why: why I never asked after the Wife, who sparked my engagement in the first place, why I chose to follow the Husband’s instructions for as long as I did. His particular style of sexuality was specific and humorless. There was no promise of pleasure or play for me.

Pleasure and malice are bedfellows in Heather Lewis’s third posthumously published novel Notice (2004). In it, protagonist Nina also ensnares herself with a married couple, though to much more devastating ends. The sadistic Husband and his wife, Ingrid, use teenage Nina to play the part of their deceased sixteen-year-old daughter: sleeping in her bed, wearing her clothes, enduring the Husband’s sexual predilections without scruples. When Nina finally leaves, the Husband locks her up in a psychiatric facility. Stuck in solitary confinement, Nina develops another maternalistic, albeit sexual, relationship with Beth, a counselor in the facility, whose affections roil a “baying thing” within the deepest recesses of Nina’s soul. Though it may seem as though Nina is through the worst of it, the Husband hasn’t finished with her, and his anger’s denouement is so cruel that Lewis’s words practically curdle on the page.

Part queer love story, part suburban horror, Notice is a book written long before content warnings, #MeToo, or identity as a commodity, not a political or personal stance. It is a text where you will not find words like “feminism” or “power,” au courant in the marketing of books by women writers today. Indeed, Lewis’s books were not marketable, nor lauded, during her all-too-brief life. As a [End Page 311] reviewer in The New York Times wrote of her debut House Rules, the protagonist is “so determinedly blank that there seems little about her to work with, and less to care about.” Thus, in resurrecting Notice for reissue, Semiotext(e) reconstructs the narrative framework in which readers have historically understood Lewis and her work. No longer will we think of Lewis’s plots and prose as “grating,” just because they do not play (or read) nice. Rather, the niche subgenre of queer trauma becomes worthy of canonization, as does Lewis’s unsparing, personal prose.

It was Melissa Febos, my MFA workshop instructor at the University of Iowa, who first told me about Heather Lewis. Every few weeks Melissa arrived at class abuzz with updates on her research, freshly enamored with Lewis’s style and voice, just as I was (and am) with hers. When I...