Your Dwell Time Betrays You: On Rachel Genn’s “What You Could Have Won”

TONY SOPRANO and Amy Winehouse — the alpha and omega of pop culture in the aughts. Tilt your head a certain way and you could almost see them as a couple. The mighty TV mob boss in his magnetic field of menace and grievance; the formidable yet defenseless torch singer who slowly immolated herself amid a circle of tabloid photographers.

These two deathly idols, opposing polestars, now preside over Rachel Genn’s novel What You Could Have Won, which she started writing more than a decade ago — before Winehouse’s passing in 2011 and the actor James Gandolfini’s in 2013. The book began as a short story about a relationship disintegrating over the course of a shared binge of The Sopranos and grew to novel length around the questions that bothered her. Could she ever love a man like Tony? And could she ever hope to understand Amy’s burning, drowning need for on-off partner and enabler Blake Fielder, who seemed to make her sicker while inspiring her best work?

Genn’s mode of inquiry takes the form of a he-said, she-said narrative, split between an ascendant pop singer named Astrid and her boyfriend Henry, a grasping psychiatrist who makes a surreptitious case study of her drug use. Henry’s voice is rendered in the first person, as befits a peevish, entitled, somewhat oblivious narcissist. “I am not the kind of man who gets in deep,” he assures us, his calculations clear enough from their first meeting, as he watches her perform in New York. “The more she revealed in these songs, the more I saw that I needn’t worry; her talents were so unallied to mine, the streams didn’t cross, I had nothing to fear from a woman like this.” Affecting to feel nothing but scientific interest, Henry supplies Astrid with pharmaceuticals and gathers the data for the book he hopes will make his name: How Cocaine Breaks Your Brain.

Astrid’s own chapters are addressed to “you,” in the ingratiating, destabilizing second person. So, you find yourself in the headspace of an innately gifted artist knotted up with doubt and dependency, never sure whether she has lived through this to tell the tale herself, in the way Winehouse did not. “You just wanted to be something Henry couldn’t wash his hands of,” she tells herself. “[He] must never know the healing power of his attention.”

The push and pull between these two makes for a willfully unbalanced and misshapen structure. The book’s odd geometry traces multiple angles and planes, with sudden dislocations in time and place — from Henry’s research lab in Manhattan, to Astrid’s rehab sessions in Paris, to some kind of apotheosis during a Greek island holiday mandated by her record label.

The Sopranos takes on a growing significance throughout, and fans will likely find this the most fascinating aspect of the book, while readers unfamiliar with the series may feel a bit left out. Much has been written about the psychology of that show — its central portrait of the sociopath in therapy, its acute observations of the anxiety and self-deceit of gangsters who can’t seem to get any more satisfaction than the average American consumer. Watching such a venomous work of art in such a deceptively digestible format might itself serve as an analytic exercise. What can we learn about ourselves from characters who appear by turns relatable, likable, even desirable, but then disgusting, frightening, alienating? How might men and women read their transgressions differently, especially when they do it together — a couple on the couch, looking up at critical moments from the screen to each other’s faces?

The way Astrid sees it, “The shared fiction ripped you apart and got between you, put mirrors behind the two of you to see life reflected and distorted through it.” She pays particular attention to the wives, girlfriends, and strippers in Tony’s domain, sensitive to “the agony of someone who is unloved when they think they’re loved.” Violence committed against these women brings her to the verge of panic attacks, and the murder of Adriana La Cerva hits her “like two basketballs to the face,” in a moment of clarity that resounds through the book. “When Tony wanted someone, to fuck them or kill them, you felt hunted and frantic for cover in your own apartment,” Astrid observes. “[Y]our thin soul lay taut, immobile, and desperate to be discovered. Who could you turn to but Tony? Because Henry was nothing like Tony. Was he.” Was he? Watching Henry watching Tony, she gets the sense that he would like to be one of the gang.

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The author is a former neuroscientist from the north of England. She conducted postdoctoral research into the pathology of addiction and “incentive relativity” — the distinction between “liking” and “wanting,” and the question of how each response may be affected by past experience. This work made Genn something of an expert on regret as a function of the brain, where it apparently resides between two neural pathways opened up by a particular course of action. One becomes the road taken, while the other remains a sort of ghost road to a parallel life, flicker-lit by our continued awareness of the different choice that is no longer available. The upshot is the idea that regret can be addictive in itself.

Genn’s subsequent career as an artist has marked out her own alternate trajectory, but that scientific idea seems to have carried over. In 2015, she mounted The National Facility for the Regulation of Regret (NFRR) at the Bank Street Arts Centre in her native Sheffield. It comprised video installations, virtual-reality simulations, and physical totems manifesting the regrets of imaginary inpatients — a prosthetic “arse-enlarger” with a mohair merkin, for example, stood in for a character addicted to cosmetic surgery.

The fictional therapist on call at the NFRR was the same Henry Sinclair now fleshed out in What You Could Have Won. His innovation here is Re-Think, a means of “re-engaging damaged minds by reprogramming eye movements.” Training a subject to literally look at things differently may also help them see their past in a healthier light. “Your dwell time betrays you,” he says, meaning the object and duration of your gaze, what you can’t help but fixate upon. Astrid’s megahit album Dwell Time is named in honor of this idea. She becomes Henry’s pet project only after his preening boss gazumps him on another prize subject they call BirdBoy, a patient who doesn’t move his eyes at all but takes in the world with tiny jerks and darts of his head.

This branch of psychotherapy is real and growing, though given a slightly fanciful flavor for Genn’s purposes, which seem in part to satirize the culture of the research lab. She has spoken of her disappointment at finding science as prone to sexism, sadism, and solipsism as any other sphere, and there’s a potent element of infection by celebritism here too. Clinical studies are parlayed into best-seller material, while the entertainment business feeds the mental health industry absurd figures like Hypno Ray — a disgraced painter in a cassock, transfigured by a sex scandal into a rehab merchant and art therapist to the stars. Astrid’s resistance to Hypno Ray and his apostles can be pretty funny at times. She winds up life-painting him nude as part of her recovery, while Ray mistakes her sardonic attention to his exposed balls for a rhapsodic breakthrough. Overall, though, the book’s sense of humor is deeply nervous, borderline hysterical in the classical/medical sense of the word.

Astrid is a lot to take, as she sheds her own clothes, surfs the crowd, and sets her hair alight while performing at Burning Man, but Genn’s sympathies, and yours, stay with her to the end. She’s the genuine article, so painfully attracted to this chancer on the promise of being understood, which may be her definition of love. Henry, for his part, is a piece of shit, though compelling enough as a mediocre mind who thinks himself some forensic-ascetic genius. His only real insights occur when he is undone by her stage presence: “The enchantment is in her unflinching way of telling how it was love we let shred us, and that’s exactly what we wanted.” He can’t bear her power, and his attempt to literally knock her off her pedestal in a hidden Greek cove has a mythic ring of truth to it.

Unlike the old storytellers of those islands, Genn sublimates nothing. All her post-Freudian thought processes are there on the page, where no glance or gesture goes unexamined by one character or the other. There is something of the BirdBoy in the gaze that shifts between them, a sense of restless agitation and cogitation. Genn does not seem to hold out hope for a scientific solution to our abiding neediness, our dependence on “the lovely sharpness of kicking ourselves.” But she outlines the problem with the kind of clinical rigor that can do a body good, if the patient is ready to accept it.

Tony Soprano would likely give this read a few pages before hurling it against a wall. Amy Winehouse was more of a reader, a fan of Bukowski, Dostoyevsky, Hilary Mantel. The acuity and intensity of What You Could Have Won may well have been to her taste, though to picture her with a copy (sitting backstage somewhere, touring an album that doesn’t exist) is to wish yet again that she hadn’t lost — a natural reaction to the book’s peculiar sting of regret-by-proxy.