On a tip from a friend, I read Ayşegül Savaş’s new novel, The Anthropologists. Savaş is a Turkish writer, educated in the United States, who writes in English. She now lives in Paris. The Anthropologists is her third novel. I thought that, before writing about it, I would read the second novel, Walking on the Ceiling. 

The earlier book is about Nurunisa, or Nunu, a woman who, at the time of writing, is a sort of journalist for a Turkish magazine, working in an Istanbul that is no longer the place she grew up in — it is, of course, the Istanbul of Erdoğan; the Gezi Park riots are already an ugly memory — a place, she writes, that was “popular around the world” for a while. I was lucky enough to visit the Istanbul  in those days, and it was indeed a city vibrating with possibilities of a bright future. As it was also one of the oldest cities in the West, I found it to be immensely interesting, and I daresay it still is, despite everything. One thing that, according Walking on the Ceiling, hasn’t changed is that Istanbul remains a city tinctured by loneliness and melancholy. You don’t have to read Orhan Pamuk to sense this, even on a simple walk down İstiklal Avenue. Loneliness pervades the short chapters of Walking on the Ceiling, more than half of which are set in Paris.

Nunu has spent a year in Paris, more or less as a flâneuse. (Her finances are not discussed.) There, she meets an English writer, whom she calls “M.”; M. has been drawn to her vibrant native town and written several novels about it. He is now an old man, tall, stooped, and grey; he teaches writing at the Sorbonne (even though his French isn’t very good, according to Nunu). Nunu encounters him at a bookshop event, more or less picks him up afterward, and goes on the first of many long walks with him. That is the full extent of their relationship: they meet up, usually at the Luxembourg Metro stop, and go for walks. Sometimes, they stop at a café, and sometimes they have little picnics. They talk but are often silent. She tells him stories about her family and her life — or at least that’s what she says they are — and he professes to admire them greatly. They exchange emails; it is a studiously unthrilling attachment. Nunu wants to play a bigger part in M.’s life, but this appears to be unlikely to happen. Eventually, Nunu slips, and is later mortified to discover that her fabulist invention is detectable as such. Demoralized, she retreats to Istanbul, as if to prison.

Savaş is a suggestive writer; she knows how to present M. and Nunu as writers who share a literary friendship without actually telling us very much about their conversations. This air of unexplained implication sustains a mood of profound loneliness. We have no idea why M. would be lonely, but Nunu, we learn, has had a troubled childhood. Her father, a good man but a disturbed poet, killed himself when she was a little girl. Her mother, whom Nunu has just buried before her sojourn in Paris, also seems to have been somewhat disturbed — abstracted, anyway, and not cut out for motherhood. Both parents appear to have been cut off, for obscure reasons, from vital contact with their communities’ values. Nunu herself is clearly detached. For her magazine, she writes profiles of the world’s great cities that are intended to provide her readers with a bit of escape, the hope that there is a better life elsewhere.

But the combination of hints, vignettes, and evasions — in the early chapters, Savaş can be seen again and again to swerve away from a topic that she has just raised — combine to make the famously wispy Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon read like stark social realism. One hesitates to say that Walking on the Ceiling is insubstantial; its subject, after all, is loneliness, specifically the loneliness of the writer, even in, perhaps especially in, the company of writers. But it is a sad novel that left me with that now bygone foreign-movie sense of the free-floating sadness of life. It is not a novel that I would recommend to most American readers, at least to those who aren’t women under the age of thirty. I would also make an exception for Americans who have visited “popular” Istanbul. “Paris was a city full of people having meals,” Savaş writes, but she does not paint it as a city full of Parisians. She barely paints it at all. Seen mostly as a destination for outsiders, it might almost be a space station. Whether intentionally or not, Savaş’s Istanbul upstages the City of Light as an interesting, romantic spot, eminently fictionable.

The Anthropologists is quite a different book. It shares short chapters and a certain evasiveness with the earlier novel, but that’s all. The evasiveness is pretty much a matter of non-specification. The novel takes place in an unidentified European city, and the characters have unidentified backgrounds. All but one of them are foreign to the city, but we don’t know where they come from, either.  (The friend who recommended the book agreed with me that the city is not Paris.) I can imagine Savaş’s calculations, and her decision to keep her narrative uncluttered, at the risk of teasing readers. I would have concluded otherwise, because the novel also flirts with cuteness by presenting its chapters (even shorter than the ones in Walking on the Ceiling) as unnumbered sections with recurring, somewhat academic headings, as if to suggest notes taken toward the writing of an anthropology textbook. Once again, the novel is rather short. While I didn’t want Walking on the Ceiling to be any longer, I’d have been happier if The Anthropologists were twice as long, which I think is a compliment. I don’t want to imply that Savaş left out anything important.

Asya and Manu have been together for a while. They met at university and have lived in a few small towns before settling in the big city, where they rent an apartment. They have a small assortment of friends. (Their acquaintance are not discussed.) There is Ravi:

We recognized in him something we recognized in each other: the mix of openness and suspicion; a desire to establish rules by which to live, and only a vague idea about what those rules should be. (7)

This is a very important observation, and I shall come back to it. Lena is the couple’s one “native” friend — she comes from a suburb of the city. Asya meets her at a party given by people whom she and Manu “didn’t really like,” (Nothing is made of this dislike, however,  whenever the people reappear.)

We talked the entire picnic, relieved not to be socializing with the rest of the group, while trying to decipher people’s connections to one another. Lena said that she was embarrassed to have landed at the picnic of someone she didn’t even know — she had come along with one of the other guests, who’d abandoned her to join his close friends. But she said it so cheerfully, and I was intoxicated by her clarity. 13)

Clarity, alas, turns out not to be a hallmark of Lena’s character.

The arc of the novel begins in the couple’s decision to buy their own home. Money is no more a problem for Asya and Manu than it is for many young urban couples. They both make goodish livings, and childlessness, which appears to be a side-effect of other factors, not a decision, has enabled them to put together the makings of a down payment. Throughout the novel, they will look at several flats; the current owners’ reasons for selling, which have to do with changes in life rather than the properties’ drawbacks, will get more attention than descriptions of the amenities.

Upstairs from their current rental lives Asya and Manu’s neighbor Tereza, “old in body but not in mind.” Tereza’s place is rather fancier than what the young couple are used to.

But we soon relaxed. We pulled up our feet on the sofa, served ourselves from the kitchen. We realized that Tereza didn’t keep track of manners; what mattered to her was conversation. Manu and I had no spare sets of plates or matching glasses, but we had plenty of discussion in our lives for Teresa, ours was a true wealth. (24)

Tereza treats Asya and Manu as an old auntie would, and this is the third thing to bear in mind. All three of the “important” factors that I have enumerated, plus the search for a home to own, make it clear that Asya and Manu are at a peculiar, very tender phase in their lives. It is a very common phase but so quick and delicate that few people remember it, except when they look back and think about a time when their situation was so different. This phase is nothing less than the last moment of youth. By the end of The Anthropologists, a new apartment has been found, but the other everyday circumstances of life, except their jobs and their mutual affection, have  been damaged, without a discernible villain other than the settling of character in the passage of time.   From now on, openness, suspicion, and confusion about the rules of life will not be an attraction. I’ve seen it happen a million times.

Even if there were nothing more to The Anthropologists than what I’ve outlined, it would be an important book. But there’s plenty more. There’s the texture of give-and-take between Asya and Manu, and their sense of humor; and also their relationships to their parents. (Asya’s are divorced, giving the couple three sets of in-laws). There is Asya’s project as a documentarian, excerpts from which dot the book; they’re interesting but not distracting, and of course they give point to the title. The chance to see a fine talent develop from one novel to the next — from an elegant impressionist, Savaş has grown into an acute observer — is more than worth the time. But watching two young people negotiate the tricky rapids between youth and adulthood that no one ever sees coming and few ever recall is the most beguiling treat of all.