Self-Flagellation, Not Self-Discovery

Carolina Abbott Galvão Reviews Clara Drummond’s “Role Play,” translated by Daniel Hahn.

By Carolina Abbott GalvãoOctober 3, 2024

• Fiction

“THERE ARE FEW things uglier than a bar when the lights come on after the last customer’s been kicked out,” says the narrator of Clara Drummond’s novel Role Play (newly translated into English from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn). “The décor wasn’t made for white light, the upholstery’s covered in stains, the smell of cigarettes is nauseating, there’s probably a body behind the sofa, asleep, covered in their own vomit, abandoned by their friends.” 

The narrator, Vivian, is an art curator in her twenties who spends her time navigating the upper echelons of Brazilian society, attending parties with acquaintances she knows but doesn’t like; sleeping with a blond, curly-haired surfer; and holidaying at her parents’ beach house when she needs a break from it all. 

On the surface, the people are always beautiful, the view is always scenic, and the parties are always fun. But the longer Vivian stays in those settings, the more they become shrouded in that same unflattering, fluorescent white light as the bar. And they’re just as dirty too: in Drummond’s Rio de Janeiro, the sex is bloody, the drinking almost certainly leads to puking, and when the maid isn’t there, plates of food are left out to rot. 

This premise is hardly a new phenomenon. The ugliness of rich women’s lives is a well-trodden theme. Role Play, in particular, is ultimately concerned with how they hide it. Vivian prides herself in being the kind of rich person who shuns “traditional symbols of ostentation.” She votes left-wing. She despises right-wing politicians and their evangelical political base. She knows about photography and brags about it to anyone who will listen: “Did you know I write for the Frieze site?”

According to Vivian’s parents, their family is middle-class, not “private-plane rich.” Vivian’s mother likes to pretend to worry about the bills and tell her they are not as comfortable as they used to be, but she balks at the prospect of putting the beach house on Airbnb: “We’re middle class, but not that middle class.”

But the money is almost beside the point. Vivian already knows how to think, act, and move like a rich person—and that is what really matters. She also knows how to pretend she doesn’t know any of it at all, which, in her circles, almost matters more. “Every day I learn to stop coming across as a rich girl,” she says. “I’ve got friends of all kinds and colors, I can move around every corner of the city, self-assured, always natural, never arrogant.” 

Role Play takes place in a milieu some foreign readers wouldn’t immediately associate with Brazil: dimly lit apartments furnished with designer armchairs, houses flanked by manicured lawns and big turquoise pools—places that, in Rio de Janeiro, exist only a few miles away from favelas lacking a reliable water supply. The irony of it all isn’t always lost on Vivian, but her musings on inequality often come off more like lines she’s memorized than real political convictions. 

Things change after she witnesses a violent incident at an outdoor party. Darlene, a street vendor who regularly sells Vivian beers at such events, is out selling caipirinhas when the police arrive and start attacking her. A few onlookers try to help, but Vivian does nothing. By the time the police are done, she has already run back inside, toward the Italo disco beats and away from the scene. Vivian realizes that, while she sees Darlene most days, she never bothered to learn anything about her at all. “I hadn’t even noticed that on Saturdays she was somewhere else,” she recalls, “she was someone else.”  Like the narrator of Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. (1964), another wealthy Brazilian woman, who realizes only two days after her maid’s departure that she can’t remember what she looked like, Vivian knows virtually nothing about Darlene. 

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In an interview, Drummond once said that she sometimes wishes she could have been an anthropologist. Vivian, her narrator, also sees herself as an ethnographer of sorts, surveying the world around her and dutifully reporting back on it. At their best, these observations shed light on the vain preoccupations of Rio de Janeiro’s metropolitan elites to great comic effect: the disdain for new money and people who “dream of living in Miami,” the Jacquemus purses, the need to have “gay friends” because they “have more market value than the influencer heiress” these days. 

Drummond is fascinated with these signifiers because she is primarily interested in the ways social and cultural capital matter more than material wealth: in some circles, acting rich is more important than being rich, but who teaches people how to do it? The book is at its most compelling when it is trying to answer that question, describing how the wealthy learn these performances and embody these scripts. “The girl used to say she didn’t have any cash on her, always with this big smile on her face,” she writes of one of Vivian’s wealthy friends who, at school, had no qualms taking free candy from a poor street vendor. “[T]hat total self-confidence of someone who’s never been rejected, and a convincing affectation that mixed persuasion with theater, like she was practicing to take on her daddy’s firm.”

Other times, when she is less specific, and less successful, Drummond’s narrator flirts with clichés (“I might not be the best art curator, but I know for sure I’m the best curator of people”) as well as textbook explanations of social ills (“Upward mobility works like a board game full of arbitrary rules that should provide entertainment but produce only boredom”). Though they are not necessarily always effective, it is clear that Vivian is drawn to these diagnostic catchalls because she is fascinated with dysfunction and its causes. This, her friend Marina Falcão tells her, has something to do with her being “pathologized” from an early age. 

Pills have been a part of Vivian’s life ever since she contracted a parasitic disease as a baby. Then came the depression, which was even harder to treat: some medications worked, others didn’t, but her family never stopped trying to find the one that could cure her for good. And so they could create a new version of her, “just one pill away, until they’d gotten rid of all the sadness, the disgust, the distress, the hunger, the judgments of the neighbors, of the fellow members of the golf club and the Búzios set.”

Vivian’s long list of medications—imipramine hydrochloride, cortisone, venlafaxine, Topamax, Zyprexa—at times reminded me of another unreliable, heavily medicated narrator: the protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestseller My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), who puts herself into a self-administered “hibernation” using an elaborate pill cocktail. 

There are other parallels too. Moshfegh once said that readers liked her books because they were like “seeing Kate Moss take a shit”; while Drummond’s penchant for the grotesque is less obvious than Moshfegh’s, it’s clear that she is also interested in unpacking the notion of disgust: when we feel it, how we feel it, and what it can teach us about ourselves and each other. 

Vivian, for one, is often disgusted at herself. She hates the “flab” of her stomach, the way she talks to people, the way her medications made her throw up in the school bathroom when she was younger. Disgust is what eventually leads her to contemplate suicide one day, but her mom finds out and she ends up in a psychiatric clinic instead. “First thing I thought when I saw my room was that this must be what prisons are like in Norway,” she recalls. “Eight square meters, a neatly made single bed, a comfortable quilt, a table and a chair for reading.” Despite only being on the second floor, the window is barred. What Drummond seems to be suggesting through Vivian’s anomie is that the perverse power structures at the heart of Brazilian society don’t just harm poor people. They also trap and negatively affect the rich. It is impossible to be healthy under a system that is, in itself, dysfunctional.

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When Role Play was first published in 2022, Brazil’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro was still in power and much of the initial press about the book revolved around its parallels with the political situation in the country: Why had so many seemingly liberal people voted for the Far Right? And what did they stand to gain from it? Though Drummond, who left Brazil for Portugal after Bolsonaro rose to power in 2018, never mentions him by name, it is implied that the book takes place around the time when politics started to “get weird.”

Vivian’s mom warns her not to discuss the subject with her “hugely fat,” right-wing, “monarchist” cousin, but Vivian knows when to sound progressive too. When an American curator asks her about politics at a party, she impresses him “with the numbers [she] know[s] by heart relating to the exponential increase in police violence in the country.” She doesn’t think of Darlene.

While Drummond has said in interviews that she is against “moralistic” works of literature, she has created a world where right and wrong clearly exist. Vivian is white and rich, and we know her and we like her in spite of it. Darlene is Black, and poor, and we know that despite not hearing a word out of her mouth. This all helps with the greater point Drummond is trying to make about the moral shortcomings of Brazil’s upper classes—it also explains why so many Brazilians were interested in the book when it was first published in 2022—but it can also, at times, deprive her characters of complexity.

We don’t get another opportunity to hear more about Darlene. By the time Vivian realizes what happened to her, it is too late. “She died. At home, head trauma,” another street vendor tells Vivian one night when she is out buying beer. Drummond gets the awkward, clipped pauses just right here. Vivian doesn’t know what to say: “What was I supposed to feel: grief, guilt, indifference, sadness?”

In the end, it’s remorse that Vivian feels most of all, though she maintains that “it’s only there for the purposes of self-congratulation.” One night, she does what she always does when she needs to distract herself: calls her usual guy over, but this time it doesn’t work. Instead of helping her escape, the rough sex makes her feel even worse, and she is reminded of other times she has felt guilty. We are flooded with images of Darlene, Vivian’s old Catholic school uniform skirt, the day her mother caught her masturbating, a group of boys laughing at her.  “Sex,” Vivian says, “fulfills the same function as dreaming, it reveals who we are through encrypted language.”

But it’s self-flagellation, not self-discovery, that Vivian wants to engage in. Could she have saved Darlene if she had run back into the party? Could she have been a better daughter? Could she feel remorse in a more authentic way if she wasn’t rich?  Before she can start answering any of those questions, something starts to feel off. In the half-light, Vivian “can see something dark[:] [her] hand, the sheet, everything’s covered in blood.” 

This is Vivian’s worst nightmare. She has feared hemorrhaging after sex ever since she read about it happening to Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963). The man she is with, on the other hand, is less concerned. “Oh, you’re on your period? I didn’t know you were on your period,” he asks, “serene.” The implication is that she isn’t. He hurt her, but, like most of the book’s characters, he is choosing to look past what he doesn’t want to see. 

Here, it feels like we are back at the bar again, with its white, unflattering light, nauseating cigarette smell, and upholstery covered in stains. Dim environments make for better ambience because of their ability to conceal, but there’s only so much pretending people can do. By the time the book ends, we know three things: there is blood everywhere, Vivian feels guilty, and we can see it because Drummond has turned the lights on.