In Mattie Lubchansky’s comic strip Please Listen To Me, she straddles the line between being a political cartoonist and a cartoonist of absurdity—which, some days, are the same thing. Simplicity represents a departure from her previous work. Set in 2081, it tells the story of an ethnographer named Lucius who leaves New York City for the wilds of the Catskill mountains and a small 1970s commune named Simplicity that has managed to survive for more than a century.

What follows is a story about identity and political engagement, wrestling with questions that have been—and continue to be—central to the American experiment. It’s a lot of weight for a book involving a monster and ecstatic visions, a cult whose “mutual rite” is an orgy, and oligarchs so cartoonishly evil they appear to have stepped out of the news. This is Lubchansky’s most ambitious project to date, and it is as fun and wild as it is thought-provoking. It’s also a hard book to describe easily, but Lubchansky and I talked recently about the book, separatism, museums, Upstate New York, and what the Shakers did right.

Alex Dueben: Mattie, Simplicity is, I think it’s fair to say, a bigger book than you’ve ever done before. On every level.

Mattie Lubchansky: It’s the most complicated work I’ve ever done, both writing and visually. It’s the longest book I’ve done. I think I just had a lot more to say. The whole time I was making it, about a year and a half, I was really nervous because it was such a departure in terms of what readers expect from me and what I’ve done in the past in my published work.

I think it aligns with the work that I’ve always been trying to do, which was genre fiction with a lot of ideas. Boy’s Weekend was lightly autobiographical. It was this thing that happened to me in search of what a story could be around that. So much of the work on that one was spinning out the world and characters and motivations from this plot that I already had. This book was much more of a journey, writing-wise. I had this character, and I had where he came from. I had these ecstatic visions. And every other thing was not settled until it was on the page. The plot of this book changed like twelve times while I was writing. The characters changed a lot. The settings changed. This was a much more complicated process of writing. I did research, which I don’t normally do. There was a lot more that went into it, and it’s a lot less straightforward in its ideas and its plot and its execution. 

AD: I was curious about how much of that ambition was you consciously trying to do something bigger and different and how much was telling the story in a way that needed to be told.

ML: It was a little of both. I knew that I wanted to do something different. I knew that this was going to be a little dreamier, a little weirder. The beginning of it was literally Lucius’s first encounter with the big monster. That was the thing I started with. It just came to me—almost like one of the visions in the book. I don’t normally work like that. I normally have an idea, and I’m like, how do I go about doing it? [laughs] I had this idea that someone was visiting a cult in the countryside. I was talking to my friend about it, and he recommended a book about 19th century pre-Marxist socialist communes all over the Northeast and into the Midwest right around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Paradise Now by Chris Jennings. Then I started thinking really heavily about political separatism and utopian communes and it turned into a different book.

AD: The group has its origin in the back to the land movement and really touches on all those groups and that history. The town of Simplicity began when a guy bought a summer camp in the Catskills in the 1970s.

ML: The Spiritual Association of Peers, as I call them in the book, are basically a mashup between some of those groups from the seventies and two groups from the 19th century. One is the Shakers. The thing everyone knows about the Shakers is that they didn’t have sex, and they built chairs and brooms and stuff, right? But the thing that people kind of forget about them is that they used to go crazy and take off their clothes and run around screaming naked in the woods.

The other group started as settlers in the late 1800s, following a French thinker Etienne Cavet, who had written a book about this guy traveling in a utopia called Voyages in Icaria, which is the worst written book ever. It’s awful because it’s written like a travelogue, but it’s a guy turning to the camera, and basically saying “here’s how I think society should be arranged.” It’s a really stolid book. But all these people tried to create that one guy’s utopia in America, first in Louisiana and then Texas and then Ohio and then Illinois. They were trying to create Icaria for real. Which included stuff like people being conveyed around by small packs of dogs, things of this nature.

AD: So the Mutual Rite in the book came from the Shakers—and making it a very un-Shaker-like ritual?

ML: I think the Shakers would have worked out had they simply allowed people to have sex. They had it all figured out. There were people coming to live there just because it was a solid place to live and not have your life completely demolished by the Industrial Revolution. So many of the ideas in the book are me thinking about why separatism would flourish and during what times in human history. It’s always during these great turnovers of society. 

Upstate New York was called the Burned-Over District. Somewhat derogatorily because it was so lit with religious fervor that was spreading like wildfire. That was the birth of modern capitalism. People’s lives were getting upended in a really serious way. They were getting moved around. The US went from being mostly agrarian to being industrialized. People are moving into cities to work in these horrible factories. Labor conditions only got worse because basically modern capitalism was being invented around them.

All of a sudden people were going to live with the Shakers. They called them Bread and Butter Shakers because they would go there because they knew they would get three square meals a day. There was no crime because everyone got along. There was a lot of communication. There was a mission. The Shakers failed for a lot of reasons. All these groups failed for different reasons. What’s interesting to me is, what if one succeeded? What would happen? In this book, these guys have been there for a hundred years. None of these communities have ever lasted a hundred years. Not really. Not hewing so close to their original mission. If one worked, does that do anything? What’s the efficacy of that?

AD: I’m curious how you describe the main character of the book, Lucius. Especially knowing the book started with an image of him.

ML: It was this guy having an ecstatic vision. He was always a trans guy. It just always came to me that way. One, I just think trans people are more interesting. Because we are. There is a way in which as a trans person, you will always feel alienated from society in some way that is interesting to me as an author. I would describe him as organized to a fault. You could call it a little OCD, but in a way that is truly deleterious to his own mental health. Sexually closed off and mentally closed off from his own body in a way that I think can be a common experience amongst trans people generally. But a lot of people have this issue where they’d rather be a brain in a jar. 

He wants control over everything around him. He lives in a world where everything is controlled, but not by him. He refuses to engage with a structural understanding of the world around him. He knows things are not great, but refuses to see why. In a way that I think once you’ve glimpsed the superstructure, it is easy to remember how things were before, where you are alienated and you just don’t understand where you are. 

AD: Lucius is a part of this tradition of academic characters who don’t know or understand the rest of the world much.

ML: The funny thing about Lucius to me is, as I was working on it, I realized he’s not even that good at what he does. He’s bad at being an anthropologist or an ethnographer. I was like, should I stop and go talk to a bunch of ethnographers, read a bunch of academic books, maybe take a class? But I realized that Lucius was not good at what he did, and I think that works better because he’s way out of his element in almost every regard. It works in the story for why the people that hired him would hire a guy that doesn’t know what he’s doing.

I think [there’s] an interesting parallel in the way that a lot of these utopians would function. It was all about theoretical understanding of things and less about practical understanding of things. Which is never to say that I’m politically a pragmatist. I think it’s insulting to dismiss radical movements that way. But in this exact instance, these communities would seal themselves off and only see that stuff as theoretical. A very common thing that people in all these groups in the 1800s would do is call society “the world”, and they thought they lived outside of it. That’s simply not true. You live in the world. We live in society.

AD: There are groups that still do that in different ways, but at the heart of the book is this question of separatism and this realization that there is no such thing as leaving the world.

ML: So much of this book was me struggling in the intellectual sense of why would somebody think that this is the answer? It is an impulse I understand. I think we all know—I’m talking about myself and my friends—we all know people that have gone upstate to start a farm and sort of hide out because things are bad. Or people that flee the country. I’m always like, where? Because you and your friends could go start a farm upstate, but global warming will render it useless in forty years. I just don’t know what the end game of that is.

The idea of building the shining city on the hill is such an American idea. It was right there at the inception of settler state America. That idea—that we will build a society and everyone will see how cool we are and they’ll want to imitate it—is, I think, a poor understanding of power and how it functions. People don’t just change their minds that way when they see how cool it is in other places. We can’t even get rapid bus service implemented because we saw it was cool somewhere else. And I think that kind of rhetoric could easily be co-opted for more nefarious means.

AD: The book touches on the cyclical nature of things. Upstate New York was the Burned-Over District, but the eruption of Tambora destroyed agriculture and the economy of the Northeast in the early 19th Century, which really helped to inspire the Second Great Awakening, Western expansion, and industrialization. Then starting in the 1970s through today, upstate New York has become a region of rebirth and change. And eventually that’s going to change.

ML: And that was only because it was the closest wooded area to New York City. That’s why people went there. I think the Hudson Valley is beautiful, but it’s not unique among the world for its beauty. People went there because it was easy to get to from New York City. It’s on the train. It’s on the bus. That stuff matters. To not think of yourself as subject to history that way, I think, is irresponsible.

AD: It’s a very American idea, though. 

ML: It is a very American idea. I’m coming at it from the perspective of: This country is cursed. It was born soaked in blood and it will always remain that way. I think the state as it is currently conceived, no good will come of it. 

AD: The title page of the book reads: “In the land of Simplicity, a novel, an account of the unusual peoples of the former United States and a sojourn through the exurb suburbs and other unsecured territories by an intrepid explorer for the Coalition of Secured City States.” Which I loved and kind of goes back to those 19th century ideas you were talking about.

ML: Every book from the late 1800s has the longest subtitle in the world. I was really enamored with it. That mode of travelogue storytelling is very interesting to me.

AD: I thought of Washington Irving’s A History of New York. I don’t know if you’ve read that. It’s a fictional history of New York written in the 19th Century. I think he used some actual details, but it was also a satire of what was happening at the time.

ML: It’s funny that you say that because one of the other forty ideas I tried to cram into the book was, who is in charge of history? Who writes it? Who reads it? Who’s it for? Who’s doing the telling? Who’s it being told to? I wanted to present it like it was a true story, despite it taking place in the future, and it being not real.

AD: You touched on that in using the museum visit as the framing. Which is different than an account, but it’s a constructed narrative.

ML: The museum framing came to me—have you ever seen Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow? The first scene of the movie is Alia Shawkat and she’s on the beach and she finds two skeletons. And then the story is about the two skeletons. It just puts you in this mindset that these guys are going to get buried by history. And it looms over the whole movie in this way that I think is so effective and cool. I just loved that idea: This is just one thing that happened and it is not the end of the world. It’s not the beginning of anything. It is on a continuum of our understanding of history. 

I was at the Natural History Museum in New York. I don’t know if you’ve been recently?

AD: Not recently. 

ML: If you’ve been, you know, it’s all dioramas, and they’ve been redoing a lot of the historical ones. Specifically around Native Americans and Native cultures around the world. They’re making an effort. Whether or not it’s perfect is not up to me to decide, but they are trying to change up what was there. 

One diorama they’ve had up forever, The sale of Manhattan by the Lenni Lenape. Dutch settlers on one side, Native Americans on one side, and they’re trading the string of wampum for Manhattan, right? Famous founding of New York story. Instead of getting rid of the diorama, the diorama is now covered in stickers that say what we got wrong. It’s like a pop-up video with little dots and lines pointing to different things saying like, this is wrong. This is wrong. This person wouldn’t have dressed like that. The landscape wouldn’t look like this. This is not actually what happened. It’s apocryphal. The Native American understanding of ownership is very different.

And now the diorama is part of history. It’s all this one big, balled-up thing that’s getting impossible to understand as one cohesive thing. I started thinking a lot about museums and how they disseminate information. The framing of the book was maybe the last thing that came to me and put the POV of the reader in a place that works pretty well, I think.

AD: I think it works, too. Also the museum was originally this Imperial project which sets up perfectly how you use it. Similar to visiting a museum, we’re talking about individual elements of the book, but the experience of visiting it and walking around is very different. Simplicity is hard to describe, but it is such a rich journey. 

ML: Thank you. I’m having a hell of a time with the elevator pitch for people. I hope that describing the ideas of the book and what happens in the book is different than the reading of the thing.

AD: Even spoiling the book, it’s hard to describe in a short pithy way.

ML: This setup of the book is pretty inspired by The Wicker Man. You watch that as a teenager, and you’re like, damn, they killed that guy. How evil of them. You watch it as an adult, and you’re like, this guy sucks ass, actually. They were kind of correct to kill his ass.

The twist is that the cult is fine. They’re not evil. They’re not stupid. But they’re also not perfect. They’re not smart. They figured out something that works for them. But it doesn’t work for anybody else. I wanted to play with the reader’s expectations a little bit.