On Gabriel Blackwell’s “Doom Town”

In “The Invention of an Island,” from Gabriel Blackwell’s 2020 collection of short fiction, Babel, a man attempts to make the cramped, cluttered apartment in which he and his wife reside feel more capacious by installing a continual series of mirrors. Furniture is removed, as are family photos and wall art. The mirrors cover not only the walls, but the ceilings and floors, too. The mise-en-scène so intrinsic to domestic fiction—the familiar table-setting which legibilizes our characters’ tastes and desires, their failures and flaws—is evacuated entirely. The mirrors’ effect on our narrator (nameless here, as is the case with the majority of the characters that populate Blackwell’s recent fiction) is nauseating. He can do little more than whittle the hours away asleep on one of the floor-mirrors. After his wife leaves him, added to the agenda is sitting and staring at the smudge his sleeping body has left on the floor-mirror, trying to remember his wife’s name, his son’s name, and the plot to Casares’ half-obscure The Invention of Morel.