The Indigo Hours

Overview

The Indigo Hours is an ambient novella and elliptical love story, relayed through lyrical vignettes of work, music and the intimacy of strange encounters. Triangulated by memories of rural childhood, hospitality jobs and present adventures in Berlin, The Indigo Hours maps the pleasure and pains of its central limerence across tenses, friendship and epistolary slippages. Its narrative chronology is painterly and simultaneous: conversational fragments collage with speculative digressions, fan essays, cherished gestures and thick, atmospheric, ekphrastic description.


Synopsis

The narrator, Marlene, begins by addressing the beloved ‘you’ through a series of digressions on pleasure, the Romantics and the existential function of hospitality work. Our sense of her character and relationship to the unnamed beloved is built up through fragments of childhood memory, significant rock shows and a mysterious prairie where she was raised among will-o’-the-wisps and men who watch porn on their phones, out on the marshes. The narrative goes on to paint a picture of Marlene’s relationship with the unnamed beloved: documenting moments of their time as coworkers (moments which also fold into memories of insects, nature, text messages), from the restaurant floor to the stoner hours before shifts. Moments of emotional intensity are marked by bodily stigmata, a particular song, a timestamp, a remembered meal.

The narrative goes on to focus on Marlene’s time in Berlin with her friend Liv, observing a backyard swimming pool and exploring the broken erotics of an art gallery, or the ‘personal dictionary’ of unknown words discovered in novels. We learn that Marlene has been asked by her beloved to keep the affair secret, for reasons unspecified, and Marlene must learn to be content with the ambient presence of their half-fulfilled love. She takes drugs, adopts a stray kitten, counts her steps, has her tarot read, goes to afterparties and falls off her bike.

Throughout, there is the motif of indigo as a quality of personal aura, the pale skin around her lover’s eyes, pool water, an unknowable quality of the dawn hours belonging to no one. The Indigo Hours is composed by associative rather than chronological logics of place, art and memory. The narrative is ‘cut up’ into moments and essaying attention to the paralanguage of the everyday which feeds our most desperate and gorgeous obsessions. We learn about Marlene’s friends Liv and Ruthie, her family, her guardian angel, an ex-boyfriend Cam, a loyal friend Charlie. The intersecting narrative vignettes and accretive motifs depict an abstract, improvised and expressionist architecture of impossible love. The novella ends with another rock show, a thunderstorm, a homecoming.