The Rachel Condition, a new novel by English Professor Nicholas Rombes, is at once a political thriller, family saga, and a mind-bending love story set in the mysterious byways of Detroit.
Published in March by CLASH Books, Rombes’ explained that The Rachel Condition focuses on “two characters whose lives and destinies are shaped by the forces of ideology and politics that they have no real control over. I was curious as to how they could still love each other despite being on opposing sides.”
Rombes, a voracious reader of political theory, lays the groundwork for the novel in the darker moments of Detroit’s tumultuous political and social history.
In the novel, he main character, Antony, travels to Detroit in search of the last copy of a dangerous political novel, but his true purpose is to infiltrate a tight circle of political dissidents. Crossing the streets of Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard and Cass Avenue, Antony meets Rachel at Old Miami, a dive bar in Detroit, and falls in love in a society where no one can be trusted, and, as Rachel reminds Antony, everything is different in retrospect.
Describing his work on the novel and reasons for writing, Rombes says, “It was almost an organic part of my daily life, something I was compelled to do because it gave me joy to fall into the world I was creating.”
During the writing process, Rombes was tested by sometimes not knowing when to just let a sentence be, a challenge he has overcome in such passages as when describing the dress of punk band Yama, calling their fashion “unforgiving black as if their clothes has soaked up the night” signifying “a blackness behind the blackness.”
The Rachel Condition is also a story of tenderness and the power of art to create and destroy in the midst of violence and chaos. Rombes describes his new book as a “mash-up of genres (letters, reports, a novel-within-the-novel),” which contributes to the sometimes disturbing narrative.
“I felt the story needed to be told in this fractured way because the main characters are themselves wounded and fractured, and I wanted readers to feel this in the collage-like structure of the book,” Rombes said.
Critics and advanced readers seem to agree. Elizabeth Hand, author of A Haunting on the Hill, called The Rachel Condition “A dark, beautiful, noirish tale set in a Detroit that’s slightly sideways to our own; an unsettling foray into places and people we glimpse from the corners of our eyes, sometimes to our peril.”
Rombes has been a professor of English at UDM since 1995. He is also the author of Cinema in the Digital Age (Columbia University Press), A Cultural Dictionary of Punk (Bloomsbury) and the novel The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (Two Dollar Radio). His book, 10/40/70: Constraint as Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory, was translated into Turkish in 2021. He also directed a movie, the lo-fi, sci-fi love story The Removals.
For more about The Rachel Condition, visit www.clashbooks.com/-products-2/nicholas-rombes-the-rachel-condition-preorder.
