Excavating the Character in "Role Play"

By Megin Jimenez on June 24, 2024

I expected the often pleasant disorientation of plunging into another culture when picking up Clara Drummond's Role Play (translated by Daniel Hahn), a novella from Brazil originally published in 2021, but was instead struck by how much of it spoke to conversations in the air today in the U.S.: the performative nature of social media, nepo babies, gentrification, the intersection of the art world and money, queerness as a signifier of cool, and the capitalist entrenchment of class systems.

The narrator, Vivian Noronha, comes from wealth (though she is not private-jet rich, a major distinction, she stresses). Early in the book, she witnesses an act of police violence. While waiting to get into a rave, there's a raid on the street vendors selling drinks to the crowd, and a woman Vivian is friendly with, who sells beers on her block, is beaten. The moneyed class of party people, including Vivian, dash into the venue to escape the chaos, leaving the working people to their fate. "In theory it was a free event," she says, "and there was no reason they should have stayed outside… But there was a mutual understanding, silent and unanimous, that they did not belong in that setting, and that was all."

What follows is Vivian's internal excavation of her milieu, her family, her childhood, sexual history, relationships, and aspirations, perhaps in an attempt to understand what kept her safe and others exposed to harm. She is in her early thirties, direct, sharp-witted, and often outrageous. She's striving to say all the quiet parts out loud. She unabashedly notes that she ensures her friends are attractive, that her plum gigs curating art shows can be traced to her family's connections, and that she consciously posts more photos of herself with her three Black friends for the social points it will score her. Vivian is matter-of-fact about the corruption that goes hand-in-hand with the wealth that surrounds her: "The trajectories of money are always slightly shady, like in alchemy. What's left is the matter, the result, the visible, it is the word that is made flesh and lives among us." She even questions the authenticity of familial ties, noting her lack of emotion when her grandmother died, and speculating that her parents perhaps regretted her own existence for the worries she caused them growing up, despite their claims of love.

There's part of Vivian that's striving for more meaning and is disgusted with the hypocrisy of the stratum she inhabits. She has some measure of self-awareness, perhaps because of her own physical and mental health struggles, and the many ways her friends and lifestyle don't fit into her family's worldview. Drummond deftly manages this delicate dance, allowing glimpses of Vivian's sense of empathy and vulnerability just as you want to write her off. Her ruthless scrutiny extends fully to herself, at times to an unhealthy degree, where she is watching herself watching herself: "I'm too insecure not to be superficial."

As is probably clear by now, it's a voice-driven novel, and it was the voice I could never quite catch hold of. There's a beautiful specificity to Vivian's experience—her verdicts on various Rio de Janeiro neighborhoods, the artists and museums she name-checks, her rundowns of the status signifiers that distinguish the rich from the very rich—but her voice surprisingly doesn't come through with the same precision. There's a stiffness to the turns of phrase, an unevenness to the register (distinct from Vivian's code switching) that's at odds with her savvy perspective. The translation is the most likely culprit for the absence of an easy, idiomatic flow, though it would take deep knowledge of the source language and text, or another English version to compare it to in order to say this definitively.

Vivian and her world are drawn in such fine detail, it's a shock when the internal monologue comes to an abrupt end. At just over 100 pages, the book almost feels like just the beginning of a longer novel of social mores, a fictional rendering of our reality skating on the edge of satire à la Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen. Taken on its own terms, however, the brevity of Role Play serves as a statement in itself. This is not a work about consciousness-raising or the transformation of a dubious character into a better self. Vivian's discourse is a spiral, not a line, and her ambivalence is at the center: "Whenever I develop some plan to escape from this moral inertia, I think: What's the point? The structures are still intact, it's all just rearranging the deck chairs, liberal activism, change through consumption, it's basically just a couple of steps from there to the logic of charity." Drummond withholds a conclusion with her ending. It's up to the reader not to take the confessional tone and outrageous anecdotes at simple face value; there is more substance and insight in Vivian's self-reckoning than is contained in much longer works.