Regal House Publishing • Release Date: March 2024
I do not speak French. I will not pretend to. So when the narrator of Diane Josefowicz’s novella, L’Air du Temps (1985), speculates as to what the “odd French phrase” means, I accept “song of time” as fact, as truth. And yet, fact is a funny thing.
To consider fact today is to consider notions like fact-checking and fake news—and holding onto objective truth is slippery when individuals disagree on the basics, when AI blurs lines between what is real and what is not even further, and when it seems as though droves of people prefer an easy lie to the complicated, multi-faceted world we live in. Fortunately, Josefowicz’s novella is not for those people. Rather, this novella considers the complexities of truth, as well as the role language plays in signifying innumerable subjective perceptions and realities in a world where language has historically been used by those in power for the benefit of upholding dominating social, cultural, and political structures.
Fact is a funny thing, too, for Zinnia Zompa, the thirteen-year-old through who Josefowicz’s novella is told. Equal parts bildungsroman and mystery-thriller (more or less), L’Air du Temps (1985) begins with the shooting of Mr. Marfeo—an employee working at Zinnia’s father’s costume jewelry factory—and the ensuing disruption of Maple Bay, a quiet suburban neighborhood. Yet, however integral and grounding the inciting physical act of violence is, the story’s center more so seems to be the breakdown of the family unit itself—the breakdown of language, of meaning, of “truth,” of the containers, shapes, and structures that so often facilitate violence in the first place. “Point of fact” is a phrase uttered by Zinnia repeatedly, though less so as the novella progresses and the character’s awareness of the world’s intentional obfuscation and abuse of “truth” by those in power grows. In the end, Zinnia’s coming-of-age narrative is less linear, more meandering—a circling perhaps, around questions like: In the absence of truth, in a world where individuals’ subjective perceptions overlap and objective universalities are called into question, where, exactly, is meaning located? When meaning is not clear, who gets to assign meaning? And what becomes of language when meaning dissolves?
What, indeed, happens to language when language itself can be deconstructed and further reckoned with as just one container through which systemic harm and violence have been enacted, replicated, and upheld? Growing up, for Zinnia at least, is realizing violence is closer to home than once thought. The gender dynamics depicted in Zinnia’s parent’s relationship, for instance, become a compelling interrogation of capitalism’s vast reach and imminent replication. As Mr. Zompa deals with the fallout of an employee’s death and another employee’s suspected involvement, he struggles to accept his lack of control over the situation, and instead exercises control where and how he is able—largely, as a husband and father, over his wife and daughters, in quiet yet harmful ways. As narrator, Zinnia calls attention to how patriarchy replicates itself in her parent’s marriage:
[…] these things rattled around my mind like pebbles in a cup. Point of fact: They’re still there, still rattling. My parents’ marriage wasn’t happy but it was stable in the way a sapling is stable. Even in a hurricane it bends. Well, the mother bends. My mother put down roots in my father’s life, and then bent and swayed as he gusted all around her.
In a voice both blunt and heartbreaking, Zinnia considers how inescapable such structures and reproducing systems feel and are: “Point of fact: I have no idea how to get beyond this.”
As friction in the home increases, Josefowicz’s depictions of power and violence grow increasingly complex. Just as violence becomes passed down from top to bottom, Josefowicz also captures how power becomes passed amongst individuals on a more level playing field—in spaces where violence is not so much replicated or reproduced but translated or shifted onto another. Consider Zinnia’s relationship with her younger sister, Zenobia. Age is the main difference between the two, and even then, only a single year separates them. However, Zinnia uses what little difference does exist, what small power she is granted, and engages with Zenobia in mean-spirited attempts to reclaim what little power she has in the family unit—not unlike her father’s attempts to hold onto his perceived power in the larger capitalist society: “I stopped feeling much of anything. Now the only time I feel anything is when I’m being mean to Zenobia. Being mean to Zenobia makes me feel amazing. It fills me with icy joy.”
In a hierarchal system, joy is not a pleasurable sensation but rather another thing to accumulate. As Josefowicz depicts with clarity, pleasure then is derived not from joyous moments rooted in human emotion but is accrued by leveraging disparity to one’s own benefit. How does the individual within such a collective free themselves from hierarchal violence? Do those on the highest rungs of the ladder realize they remain suspended in the system just as those below? What keeps us clinging onto a broken system with such force? Even thirteen-year-old Zinnia knows to want to push back: “Think of the egg in its shell, or the brain in its case. Some days we were busting out. Others we could not break through fast enough.” Ultimately, the question of pushing back becomes a question of what other spaces we might be pushing into. The inside of the egg is known; the interiority of the system we exist within is familiar. But perhaps our fear is not rooted in simply letting go, falling off the ladder, or even harming oneself in the process of breaking through the shapes containing us now. Perhaps what is most frightening is the impossibility of knowing what, exactly, waits for us on the other side.
Maybe I’m just thinking of growing up. Or, as Josefowicz seems to connect for the reader, maybe the act of growing up isn’t too far a cry from the act of radical social change? At the very least, the novella approaches social critique through Zinnia’s coming-of-age—narrated through the teenager’s inherently limited perspective and particular social position. The choice to have Zinnia’s first-person narrative voice eb and flow between present and past, too, emphasizes how it feels to be in that liminal space between knowing and understanding. Zinnia’s rememberings exist alongside her lived experiences, and the tense shifts that occur—sometimes within a single paragraph—further nod to the past’s ongoing impact on the present and future. Through Zinnia’s interiority, readers are also admitted entrance into other kinds of interiors (and exteriors). Setting is effectively used to highlight the differences between spaces designated for those with power and those with less. In the end though, the places Josefowicz’s characters occupy—a suburban idyll, a neighborhood block, on the stand in a courtroom, standing in the car your mother is driving with your head sticking out of the moonroof—contain everyone just the same.
And so, what makes one container better than another? I’d venture an answer is found somewhere between Mr. Zompa’s costume jewelry, the language Josefowicz uses to describe Zinnia’s vividly detailed world, and the meanings we all attach to particular shapes, containers, exteriors—as people in the world, as characters in a story, as readers taking shapes on a page and coming to (hopefully) understand what the author meant to say. Just as language signifies meaning, so too do certain shapes, cultural images, exteriors, signify how much value we are supposed to place on any given thing. But, as I question earlier, what happens when we deconstruct these constructed meanings? How does Zinnia’s reality become destabilized once she realizes that the exterior of something is solely that—a designation rather than the thing itself?
Ultimately, L’Air du Temps (1985), a cultural container in its own right, forces readers to consider what shapes they occupy, what shapes they readily consume, what containers they find themselves in, what interiors they might need to break out of, and what exteriors they cling on to for dear life. In order to accomplish such a feat, Josefowicz adeptly places readers in Zinnia’s life—and, as with most stories, the character become a container herself. What becomes of Josefowicz’s readers, I’d argue, is a shifting—a change of location—as we are made to sit in that uncomfortable place between knowing and not knowing for the briefest slice of time. As for what happens after reading, I can only hope that we become more like Zinnia’s past self, better able to reflect on the present we find ourselves in now.
Hindsight is a funny thing—just like fact, I suppose—and the novella’s title, though explained earlier in the narrative, only becomes truly clear in the final scene: One mother and two daughters speed down the highway in the dead of night. Inside the car, a song plays, and voices sing along, and the moonroof is open too, don’t forget that part. Josefowicz does not tell us how long the song plays. The novella ends without clear resolution. But if l’air du temps means song of time, then L’Air du Temps (1985) is a beautiful truth about one girl’s coming-of-age story—and just a fragment of it, at that—but also a much-needed mirror held up to the reader’s face, held up to a world clinging onto structures very much in need of a coming-of-age themselves. Whether 1985—a telling year directly following 1984—or our current moment, Josefowicz makes clear the need to grapple further with the obfuscation of truth.
Point of fact: a song is an inherently limited container, composed of a set number of beats, notes, lyrics. Point of fact: a song is also a container more like a bounded infinity than not. Point of fact: a “song of time” seems, initially, to be oxymoronic. Point of fact? Because how can something so limited be of something so infinite? Point of fact: two things can be true at the same time. Point of fact: Josefowicz’s L’Air du Temps is proof.
About the Reviewer:
Court Ludwick is a writer, artist, and educator currently pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. She is the author of These Strange Bodies (ELJ Editions, 2024) and the founding editor-in-chief of Broken Antler Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in EPOCH, Denver Quarterly, West Trade Review, Oxford Magazine, Full House Literary, Archetype, and elsewhere. Find her on socials @courtludwick. Find more of her work on www.courtlud.com.
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