February in North America is known for celebrating love, with Valentine’s Day a significant part of it. I spent much of the month enchanted by an advanced reader copy of a book about what desire can teach us. Kate Brandt’s debut novel, Hope for the Worst (March, 2023) kept me spellbound throughout the cold, dark month. Although I finished reading it weeks ago, the interwoven and dynamic story lingered in my thoughts.
If you subscribe to the Buddhist Fiction Blog, then you most likely know Kate Brandt as a contributing editor. I so appreciate her reviews, her smooth prose, her fresh perspective. She is a graduate of the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, and her work has appeared in literary anthologies, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Literary Mama, Ginosko, and Redivider, among other publications. Her website describes how this first novel, Hope for the Worst, is “informed by her experiences with Tibetan Buddhism, magic, self-delusion, desire, despair, and healing, as well as her travels through Europe, Africa, and Asia.” The book is a compelling debut effort that drew me in and held me captive.
Through an evocative and intimate first-person narrative, Hope for the Worst explores the limits of love and devotion. Ellie, a 24-year-old introverted woman living in New York City in the mid-1980s with “Daddy issues,” is the protagonist. She finds solace in the wisdom of Calvin, a locally renowned Buddhist teacher, and falls deeply in love with him. Although there is a vast age difference and a manipulative connection that Ellie mistakes for Buddhist detachment, she clings to him. When Calvin abandons her, Ellie embarks on a journey of equal parts self-interrogation and self-healing. Through journaling about her past Ellie reconstructs the present. Then on a journey half-way across the world to Tibet, she yields to mortal danger for the slight hope of spiritual rescue.
The novel’s epigraph is from Dōgen Zenji, a 13th-century Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhist priest, writer, poet, and philosopher: “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.” The epigraph serves as a narrative arc for a story that artfully enfolds an agonizing study of the psyche into a harrowing forgetting of self, deftly crafting an origami lotus-of-a-tale.
The reader meets the protagonist Ellie in crisis, after Calvin has already abandoned her. Ellie’s thoughts make up the narrative of the novel, shared with the reader through notebook entries and a few letters. Ellie uses a Red Notebook to communicate with and write about Calvin. At first, she uses a Blue Notebook for self examination and reflection, gradually, painstakingly, chronicling how she came to this crisis point:
According to Calvin, most of us live in a state of delusion . . . “People think Buddhism is about getting away from it all,” [Calvin] said. Buddhism is about being awake. “WAKE UP PEOPLE,” he yelled at us. “WAKE UP TO YOUR LIFE.”
That was a year ago. I remember how exhilarated I was; how uplifted. Calvin had shown me the possibility of being more than I was.
Now I am less than I was. I stand in my apartment for hours and my mind is a high-speed movie that can’t stop cranking out the same scenes: I have undressed in front of Calvin, and he aches for me, reaches out an arm. I have asked a question that revealed a contradiction in what he says, in Buddhism itself; made him realize that I am not only young and beautiful, but also wise. I have written something so poetic and tragic that he is moved to tears (p. 13).
Calvin tormented Ellie by calling her a statue. Her self-examination is hindered by these incessant imaginary scenarios, spurred on by the echo of Calvin’s voice in her head: “The most important teaching is when the teacher is not even in the room” (p. 24). Her persistent daydreams about him read like attempts to revise the dehumanizing experience of being objectified, seen but not heard. Exhausted, despondent, depressed, and caught up in the constant mental samsara-production, Ellie describes herself as a restless ghost, a nobody; but isn’t a nobody closer to a bodhisattva than an egotistical somebody?
Ever so slowly, Ellie starts to use the blue notebook to re-construct the past: “If I go through it all chronologically, maybe things will fall into place” (p. 43). She begins to recall the advice of her memoir writing teacher, Sarah Hamsted, that memoir is like fiction because the narrator has to have a problem, and when writing, “go toward what glows.” At first, it is Calvin that glows and her writing is often influenced by his advice: “So you’re walking down the street and you just note things. Forget about the “I.” Just see what’s there” (p. 25). And so it is that in Ellie’s notebooks the reader is meta-gifted with Brandt’s starkly vivid prose from scene descriptions that just note: “A small, shaggy dog sniffing tree roots. A giant clock on the side of a building that had stopped, it’s silver hand frozen in place” (p. 71) to the conveyance of feelings through metropolitan pathetic fallacy: “At night we are a ghost ecosystem. Chalky orange dark over everything; a few lights blinking rhythmically in the windows of stores. In the doorways of the building below me, ghouls sit and talk companionably; hell is a leisurely place” (p. 112).
Throughout the novel, Brandt deftly builds in recurring motifs that help readers to make sense of how Ellie’s self-study collapses into forgetting herself, or at least who she used to be. In an effort to truly change the arc of her own story, Ellie makes a decision to do something very uncharacteristic. With encouragement from her longtime friend Cass to get far away from her life in New York, Ellie decides to travel to Nepal and Tibet. Thus begins a new notebook and an adventure that ties in all of the motifs of the previous chapters. And what is travel but an opportunity to lose yourself in a new place? To forget the self?
In this last part of the book, Brandt was mindful of the potential pitfalls of Orientalism and the atrocities of Tibetan genocide as she wrote descriptions of the landscapes and peoples. Ellie’s experiences in Nepal and Tibet oscillates between a Western gaze of wonder and depictions of a region stricken by poverty, ravaged by politics, and fraught with natural dangers. It is in this setting where Ellie experiences a kind of satori: to hope for the worst is to realize the more severe the experience, the more profound the lesson. And this is the magic of Brandt’s writing, that she can fold words of longing into descriptions of suffering to create moments of recognition and realization for her reader. This book is for anyone who has ever lost in love and found a part of themselves.
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