The Fifth Wall: A Novel

“Art, grief, and technology churn in this excellent and raw novel about a conceptual artist’s recovery from witnessing her mother’s suicide.” —Publishers Weekly

In this debut novel, conceptual artist Sheila B. Ackerman heeds a mysterious urge to return to her estranged family home and arrives at the exact moment of her mother’s suicide. In an attempt to cope with and understand her own self-destructive tendencies, Sheila plants a camera on the lawn outside the house to film 24/7 while workers deconstruct the physical object that encases so many of her memories. Meanwhile, as she begins to experience frequent blackouts, she finds herself hunting a robot drone through the San Francisco MOMA with a baseball bat, part of a provocative, technological show, The Last Art, and resuming a violent affair with her college professor. With a backdrop of post-9/11 San Francisco, Sheila navigates the social-media-obsessed, draught-ridden landscape of her life, exploring the frail line between the human impulse to control everything that takes place around us and the futility of excessive effort to do so. Combining the emotional depth of Eileen Myles with a plot worthy of a David Lynch film, this readable, literary, and thought-provoking work is for anyone who questions the status quo.

Praise for The Fifth Wall

“Through her vivid depiction of Sheila’s emotional tailspin, Nagelberg’s novel profoundly explores the way we live with technology and how it informs our understanding of reality.” —Publishers Weekly

“A close artistic cousin to Joni Murphy’s Double Teenage and Natasha Stagg’s Surveys. . . . Nagelberg’s engrossing narration is littered with stunning perception: We look into the distance to be able to see what’s right in front of us. She writes without affect, and with unselfconscious acuity. That is, she writes really well.” —Chris Kraus, author of Where Art Belongs

© 2017 Black Sparrow Press (Ebook): 9781574232325

Release date

Ebook: May 15, 2017