WRIT 3500 Revision Assignment

How do any of us go about processing the biggest changes of our lives? Most certainly not in any one way, but is that for the best? Is there one right way to process change, or perhaps just some ways that are more helpful than others?

Anna Moschovakis’ 2024 novel An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth seems to make an attempt at this question, with its unnamed narrator continually processing the changes happening in her life in her own, perhaps largely unhealthy way, that leads to the novel’s narration being continuously unreliable. The long, attention-grabbing title of this work refers to the most notable aspect of its plot, that the narrator lives in a world constantly beset by destructive earthquakes. Yet, every character in the book continues to go about their lives without regard for them at all, raising the question of whether the plot aspect that gives the book its title is simply an invention of the narrator too, just a reflection of the internal tumult she feels.

The Los Angeles raised Moschovakis seems to set the book in a surrealist version of that city, the book’s narrator chronicling the bridges, bungalow houses and downtown streetscapes in such detail that we simultaneously know that this is not the world we live in, not the Los Angeles we know, and yet could be nowhere else either. She grew up in a large Greek-American family, bringing up another question of whether the narrator’s loneliness, as for most of the book we only see her by herself, is intentionally different than Moschovakis’s own family life as a child.

What too are the actual life changes that the narrator has been processing? What drives her to casually admit, at the very start of the novel, that she is planning to kill her much younger roommate Talia? Like the constant earthquakes that don’t seem to change anybody’s life, they are seemingly both everything around her and nothing at all. There are some hints here and there: a recount of her life as a struggling actress, her most recent performance in a play ending with her reflecting on how she “kept vomiting, and the world kept happening around me, separate from me, though more tenuously so;” her existential worries over aging, a particularly touching moment reflecting on “Twelve boxes of tampons, representing the last year of the lifetime supply that had been an extra perk from my most lucrative commercial. (A year since I’ve used them, a year since I wondered, ‘Is a lifetime over when one no longer has a use for tampons?’ But did nothing to cancel the supply;” a single moment of deep reality, something that couldn’t be ignored even by someone not in their right mind.

The small paper cards that continuously show up at the narrator’s door from an unknown company, their only identifying information being a seemingly nonexistent address, add another layer to both the book’s overall strange setting and its larger, truly heartfelt message. These cards bear life advice like “There is no solid self,” “No way to make sense,” and sometimes single words like “Ungrounded” and “Home.” Likely a tool that Moschovakis uses for direct reflection of the narrator’s mental struggles, as her initial acceptance of the cards, and eventual quest to track down where they are coming from, seem to go along perfectly with how her understanding of them grows as the novel progresses. A few singular, subtle word choices by Moschovakis all but confirm this, although it would take an especially discerning reader to see them, speaking to the ultra specific depths that Moschovakis is willing to go in her writing at times.

But this, too, speaks to An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth more broadly. One can most certainly read it and take it as simply as a surreal tale of a middle aged woman’s mental breakdown and the world that she has created for herself amidst it. An Earthquake is the type of novel that one can go to to see a version of the world at once both recognizable and bizarre. But the surrealism of its setting, in the ultimate paradox of that trope, is perhaps that which can be used to reflect our own real world lives and emotions. The deeper reflections on what it means to participate in society are subtle, perhaps too subtle at times, but they are most certainly there to give a discerning reader a great deal of added depth. I have a feeling that Moschovakis likes it that way, and is perfectly satisfied with offering a deeply strange but quite accessibly fun story that, like an earthquake, has a ground that will shift as much as a reader pushes down on it.