Rondo Rodeo

Monika Muskała debuts with a road trip novel and, better yet, one that returns to the roots of the genre; it takes place in an American landscape of ghost towns and flyover states, those places that no one writes about or cares to visit. The road trip and flashbacks to the relationship’s past occur simultaneously, as the heroine’s gaze shifts between the two timeframes. New challenges bring to mind old problems. These conflicts finally come to a head in Kansas, when infidelity comes to light during a tussle with locals who don’t take kindly to outsiders.

Muskała imagines a heroine fully immersed in the world of high culture, something she deems more authentic than real life. Until, that is, a confrontation with a hostile, small town crowd forces her to face the facts. All the novel’s characters are brought to shame: their actions and the consequences of those actions can no longer be excused by tropes borrowed from art. So what now? How does the heroine’s elevated, aesthetic sense of self fall apart when bested by her husband’s tawdry affair?

Rodeo Roundabout describes a struggle with emptiness, a search for meaning, and an attempt to get closer to the real world. Like the works of Jelinek and Bernhardt (Muskała has translated both authors into Polish), it remains unclear if such efforts are warranted, if meaning really does exist somewhere, waiting to be uncovered. Selfnarration must be built piece by piece, Muskała seems to tell us. If we choose prefab models, a farce awaits.