Rankine's Conversation With Collapse

By Andy — 2026-08-20 — Literary News

A narrator and a theorist meet in college in the 1980s. They start falling to the ground every time they see each other.

It sounds absurd, maybe. But Rankine's new book Triage treats this ritual of collapse as something worth watching—and reckoning with—for decades.

The book was published in August, and what strikes me is how deliberately unresolved it is. Rankine's been writing about what Americans refuse to see for years now—the machinery of racism, the daily exhaustion of visibility. But this time, she's not asking readers to bear witness to the outside world. She's asking them to sit with two people who can't decide what to do about it.

The collapse means different things to each of them.

For the narrator, it's something like translation. A way to say: I look fine, but inside I'm drowning. For the theorist, collapse is meant to lead somewhere—to action, to visible refusal. The theorist wants to rise up. The narrator wants to rest. Actually, that's not quite right. The narrator resents the theorist for wanting to rise. There's anger underneath it.

Rankine structures the book as four conversations between these two women, who meet decades later when both are in their sixties. By then, Gaza is happening. The second Trump administration is happening. The letter the narrator writes to the theorist lists the no's: no to trans people, no to choice, no to refugees. Then she reaches for Sophocles and finds something that fits: "Shouldn't our response at least echo what's already been said? Be whatever you want, and I will bury you."

It sounds radical.

But the narrator isn't the one who does it. That's the trick of the book. The narrator expects action from the theorist while defending her own right to quietness, to routines, to not being available. There's no resolution here. And Rankine tells us she rewrote the ending because the first one was too clean. Her publisher loved it. She sent it back and said no, actually—this is messier, more human, more fallible.

What I think she's doing is refusing the usual shapes. Her visual art—images of couches, broken and uncomfortable—becomes a way to think about exhaustion without solving it. The couch is where you fall. It's also where you can't stand. These things might be the same thing.

The book doesn't tell you what to do. It performs a conversation between two people who love each other and want different things, and neither of them knows how to square that circle.

That's what people are actually doing in friendships and families right now—stopping talking, seeing silence as an action. Rankine says: maybe look at what it means to just keep going in the conversation anyway.