Readers of In Case of Emergency, Courtney Moreno’s first novel, will have to be patient with Piper Gallagher, the protagonist and narrator of the book. Piper is a poor communicator, a bit of a misanthrope, and yet, as she explains early in her story, “There’s nothing so painful as desire: wanting something only reminds you of your shortcomings.” The central conflict between Piper’s inchoateness and her desire manifests early in, and it is centered around the character Ayla, whom Piper first sees from afar while shopping at the grocery store Sustainable Living⎯Ayla works there, stocking shelves. The action of the novel follows their relationship, as Piper works up the guts to ask Ayla out, as she awkwardly enters their friendship and later their romance, as she breaks up with Ayla during a stressful period at her job, and as she decides whether or not breaking up with Ayla was perhaps too hasty, perhaps a defense mechanism that allowed her revert back to the hermeticism with which she’s most comfortable.
Of course if you’ve read or heard any of the press surrounding In Case of Emergency, you know I’ve left out the fact that Piper Gallagher is also an EMT. The stressful period at her job comes to a head when she is called to the scene of a bus accident⎯Ayla always rides the bus⎯and she finds among the injured and the dead a woman who looks like Ayla: “I start screaming [. . .] My scream trails off and everyone is frozen in place [. . .] I want to call for help. Someone should call 911.” This incident deeply affects Piper (“What does it matter, anyway? Fuck it. What does any of it matter?”; “I pretend to work; I pretend to work shift after shift after shift [. . .] I avoid people”), but it is also perhaps the only point in the novel where the narratives of becoming a professional EMT and dating Ayla overlap. There are resonances, of course, among Piper’s trauma (her mother left when she and her brother were young), Ayla’s trauma (she’s an Iraq War veteran with PTSD) and the various vignettes of emergency scenes that are laced throughout the book. But the separateness of Piper’s lives (and the separateness of the characters she interacts with in those lives) point to another way in which readers of In Case of Emergency will have to be patient with the book.
Pacing. In Case of Emergency is written in very short sections divided among three larger sections. The book fits neatly into the mold of the three-act hero-narrative, where the hero, Piper, ultimately overcomes obstacles through a transformation. But each of the three acts cycles through a different stylistic mode. In one mode, Piper narrates her life outside of work. We see her interact with Ayla, visit her father with her brother Ryan, go on a hiking trip in Monterey, but she is increasingly nagged by the dread that comes from sharing her life with Ayla (“Restless and irritable, annoyed that no one is around to witness my restless irritability, I decide to take a shower”; “How to live in the world, and to live with me in it”). This mode is characterized by is a relatively distant, first-person point of view. The second mode follows Piper on calls while she is at work. We often arrive on-scene, as if dropped out of helicopter, and Piper sorts through the business of sending people off to a hospital (“The woman sits on a park bench humming”; “His wife leads us to him; she was on the phone with the 911 operator”). In this mode, Piper functions as a sort of cipher, describing the details of her surroundings. Finally, there is a poetic mode. In these sections, without reference to plot, character, or scene, Piper (presumably) talks through the inner working of eyes, ears, and other organs (“Your eyes absorb light in cone-shaped fields of vision, the center point sharpest, the concentric edges increasingly indistinct”; “If they were removed from your body, your lungs”). Transitions are either absent or somewhat arbitrary (“When the call comes in”; “People say”; “About two weeks go by”). The form of In Case of Emergency makes the reader feel like he or she is continually starting over, waking up, beginning from scratch. And of course this is what Piper, who fears attachment, vulnerability, and love, is always trying to do.
There will be readers who turn away from this book because they become frustrated with Piper, who even describes herself once as “monotone hollowness.” Moreno delivers this hollowness, deadeningly, again and again (“I am frightened all the time now and I can’t tell anyone and I don’t know why”; “This is where I lost my mind” ;“I’m ready to come back to work”). Others will feel deeply for the character. For those readers, the balance of the tone and the form, the low, detached hollowness, and the rhythm of the quickly cycling modes, will sound fittingly like an alarm that rings and rings no matter how one tries to silence it. Or like the beating of heart.
