The School of Lish
The Resourceful Accumulation of Sentences
If currently there is a writer whose work represents the cutting edge in advancing the art of fiction beyond prevailing conventions and stale assumptions, in my view that writer is Gary (now Garielle) Lutz. Lutz’s short stories indeed question the presumption that the inherent goals of fiction are to tell stories and communicate “themes” by establishing instead that the core element of fiction is the sentence and that the art of fiction consists of the resourceful accumulation of sentences--in Lutz’s case the accumulation of singular, surprising, and painstakingly constructed sentences. These innovative sentences in turn give rise to the larger discursive and aesthetic order that can indeed be found in Lutz’s stories, but Lutz first attends to the aesthetic integrity of his fiction at this more fundamental level, such that “content” and “form” become inextricable.
Lutz has himself described the method by which he builds his sentences in some detail, most notably in the essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” but also in numerous interviews he has given over the years since Stories in the Worst Way, his first book, was published in 1996. Most of his stories, he explains, are conceived as sentences, or the gradual development of sentences, without relation to character or a plot. He describes his interest as being almost exclusively in placing these sentences together in the most resonant way he can devise, resonant literally in how words reinforce and echo one another and how the sonic and grammatical relationship between those sentences maintains and magnifies such echoes. Assonance, consonance, and alliteration play an important role in this process, as does manipulations of grammar, odd juxtapositions, unusual word choice, word combinations and neologisms. We don’t have to get very far into the first story in Divorcer, the title story, to find a passage that immediately illustrates many of the typical features of Lutz’s prose:
The afternoon welcomed me into its swelters. An hour went by, then cleared the way for another. I had found a bench near the store and stood in quiet beside it. Others came and sat: unfinished-looking men, a pair of proudly ungabby girls I took for lovers done for now with their love, a woman graphically sad in ambitious pinpoints of jewelry. Then a man so moodless, I could see all the different grades and genres of zilch behind his eyes. The city flattered these people who in the country would have been flattened fast for all to see all the same.
The reader is immediately invited to pause and consider the first sentence as a self-contained linguistic unit. Why this unorthodox figure—“welcomed me into its swelters”—with its verb made into a noun? The second sentence also draws attention to itself, this time through the strange and arresting use of personification, reinforcing the conclusion that Lutz wants us focused in at the sentence level. Indeed, to fully appreciate Lutz’s singular sentences, we must be willing to restrain the impulse regard them as links in a discursive chain, to in effect merge them into a kind of verbal stream that carries us headlong not only from sentence to sentence, but through all the story’s verbal formulations and devices, regarding them all as simply the transparent means to the ultimate goal of narrative development and resolution. In a Gary Lutz story we must on the contrary pause to contemplate what “unfinished-looking men” might actually look like, to judge the fitness of the phrases “proudly ungabby girls” and “a man so moodless” in leaving an impression of these briefly mentioned figures. We must note not simply the wordplay of “flattered” and flattened” but also that each word separately produces its own distinct connotations, while in this syntactical pairing the two also work together to give the whole passage additional meaning uniting the particular details, as does the following repetition of “for all to see all the same.”
For readers willing to accept Lutz’s redirection of our aesthetic interest, it is perhaps tempting to conclude that Lutz’s art is indeed an art of the sentence, considered in isolation from narrative, character, or setting. Thus almost all reviewers and interviewers who express admiration for his fiction concentrate their attention on Lutz as a unique stylist, ignoring the way his stories do in fact retain these other elements. The formal patterns that emerge are both a result of and a natural aesthetic complement to the singular sentences that constitute his work. If individual sentences in a sense leave us suspended in their word twists and serpentine syntax, the stories in which they appear do something similar, accumulating these sentences to create a kind of layering effect that gradually expands our sense of character and situation without making them secondary, mere vehicles for advancing a conventionally developed plot. The stories work by linking sentences to paragraphs to episodes, establishing a relationship of mutual resonance and reinforcement, creating from character and situation an impression of depth and breadth that might seem static, but that finally works as an aesthetically coherent alternative to the notion that “story” entails movement forward.
“Divorcer” introduces us not only to this alternative strategy, but also to the theme that pervades the work and allows Lutz to expand his technique beyond the bounds of what would be possible in an individual story. Like all of the other pieces in Divorcer, it is composed of marked fragments, each one adding a layer to the narrator’s account of his short-lived marriage. The sections move freely around the narrator’s recollections of the marriage, each of them capturing a moment or arriving at an insight that illuminates the circumstances of the marriage and its ultimate failure, but by no means suggesting that human relationships can be explained by representing them in a “story.” As one would suspect, the reality of failed marriage is most memorably evoked in the most bracing sentences:
Marriage had not worked out to be a doubling of each other’s life, though there were duplicate juicers and sources of music.
My penis might have had reach, maybe, but it never increased itself for her.
My wife: she was the active one in the marriage, mixing other men into it.
Both through sentences like these and through a formal arrangement that reproduces for the story as a whole the poetic suspension in which such sentences are designed to hold the reader, “Divorcer” allows us, in effect, to inhabit the experience of divorce rather than simply read about it.
The other stories in the book expand and enhance this effect, approaching the experience from different angles, augmenting it through depth of treatment, their characters compelling precisely because they seem to blend into each other, their shared predicament conveying a powerful sense of pain, confusion, and loss, as well as, frequently enough, self-hatred. In “The Driving Dress,” the narrator loses weight in order to begin wearing the clothes left behind by his ex-wife, coming to terms with his (second) divorce by fleeing his own identity. In “Fathering” and “Middleton,” no actual divorce is involved, but each introduces us to a marriage at a point when its failure is implicit. In the former, a father focuses his attention on helping his daughter through school, after which his job as a father will be mostly done. Meanwhile, he arranges trysts with other men for his wife, as if acknowledging that the marriage itself is now past its usefulness. In the latter, a husband’s wife has died, and as the husband briefly relates to us the events of the funeral, it becomes clear the marriage had become perfunctory: “There had in fact been talk of divorce, but we talked about it the way other people talked about getting a pool or maybe just a pool table, even just the miniature kind that rests atop a regular table, even a card table.” That the marriage was inadequate to the husband’s needs is confirmed when shortly after the funeral he begins a sexual relationship with a man.
Two additional stories, “To Whom Might I Have Concerned?” and “I Have to Be Halved,” widen the focus to include same-sex relationships as well, although they are portrayed as just as subject to disillusionment and dysfunction as their heterosexual counterparts. Thus sexuality in Divorcer is not shown to make a significant difference in tempering the fragility of intimate human relationships. All human beings are prone to the same blindness, indifference, and casual cruelty, all human love accompanied by an expiration date. As the narrator of “Womanesque” explains his failures, “It’s just that I was born, grew some, started differing, didn’t stop.”
These are certainly not original insights. What is original in Gary Lutz’s fiction is the especially powerful way in which these insights are expressed, emotionally affecting without resorting to traditional narrative devices. He does not narrow the possibilities of “literary” language to the usual sort of figurative flourishes that too often serve mostly as linguistic decoration, nor does he rely on typical notions of plot or of “well-rounded” characters or any of the other established elements of fiction that draw attention away from language. If much experimental fiction is primarily experiment with form, Lutz’s innovation is in paring back form in order to reconceive the purpose of the sentence as the truly essential element of prose fiction. In the way they reinvigorate the English sentence, Lutz’s stories in Divorcer ought to inspire other writers to consider how close attention to the shapes and sonorities of sentences can in turn bring a satisfyingly new kind of organization to fiction.
A Dreamy Look
If flash fiction potentially appeals to a new, attenuated attention span among some readers, Diane Williams’s stories reward expanded attention and encourage rereading. One could spend as much time lingering over her brief fictions as reading much longer stories by more conventional writers, too many of which require too little of the reader’s close attention.
“My Defects,” the first story in Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, might serve not just as an introduction to this book but also to Williams’s work as a whole:
I’m happy at least to do without a sexual relation and I have this fabulous reputation and how did I get that in the first place? I am proud enough of this reputation and it stands to reason there’s a lot that’s secret that I don’t tell anyone.
I want to end this at the flabber, although I am flabbergasted.
I opened the cupboard, where the treats are stored, and helped myself and made a big mess, by the lakeshore, of the food, of the rest of my life, eventually.
Michelle, the doctor’s nurse, showed me a photograph of her cats. The smart cat opens the cupboard, Michelle says, where the treats are stored, and she can help herself, and she makes a big mess!
I crossed the street to survey the lake and I heard crepitations–three little girls bouncing their ball. I used to see them in perspective–my children–young people, one clearly unsuitable. She can’t help herself–she makes a big mess.
With my insight and skill–what do I search for at the shore?–the repose of the lake But sadly, although it does have a dreamy look, it is so prone to covering familiar ground.
On first encountering Diane Williams’s fiction, readers are likely to puzzle over the classification of such a condensed and often enigmatic work (“My Defects” is quoted here in full, and it is typical Williams in its length) as a short story. Short, yes, but story? Prose poem, maybe? Prose fragment? Surreal reverie? Williams’s stories have characters, but they hardly “develop” in any conventionally recognizable way. Sometimes a story seems to be advancing a plot only to abandon it or veer off in an apparently new direction. Most of the stories are too brief to evoke many details of setting, and while Williams does return to particular themes– especially sex–the stories are generally too elusive for the reader to conclude they are attempting to “say something.”
In “My Defects,” we are introduced to a character whose identity seems continuous enough but who is never really developed beyond her initial assertion that “I am happy at least to do without a sexual relation” and her accompanying puzzlement that “I have this fabulous reputation and how did I get that in the first place?” It could be said that the story is essentially an illustration of the narrator’s declaration of her circumstances in the first paragraph. To adequately discern the nature of the story’s portrayal of the narrator’s situation, however, we must understand the extent to which her initial words are both completely truthful and disingenuous. She doesn’t tell us why she is without a sexual relationship or why she is happy about this, nor what precisely her “reputation” is. (Perhaps she speaks for the author, who certainly does have a “fabulous reputation” among her admirers?) Yet at the same time, the narrator expresses in the first paragraph what surely does seem to her a literally accurate account of her life’s circumstances, however elliptical the reader might find it.
In a sense, the narrator tries to clarify what she means by this initial statement in the following paragraphs, which at least appear to present a semblance of plot and action. As is usual in a Williams story, the transition is abrupt, the connection at first obscure, facilitated only by some characteristic Williams wordplay. We might all along think that the narrator is speaking from her kitchen, except for the abrupt shift to the doctor’s office, which suggests that these scene changes may just be arbitrary. However, the parallel invocation of “a big mess” encourage us to find continuity after all, naturally enough inviting us to wonder what the mess might be. (Are all references to the “mess” just versions of the narrator’s?)
That the next paragraph finds the narrator watching children at the lake, imagining her children, “one clearly unsuitable,” along with a general air of regret perhaps unavoidably leads us to suspect that the narrator’s visit to the doctor might have been to seek an abortion, although the visit could be simply an implication that she is pregnant. The syntax and transitions are opaque enough that perhaps neither of these scenarios apply, however, and we are probably best advised not to try pinning down the story to its particulars at all. The unanswerable questions persist in the final paragraph. Is the narrator being ironic or sarcastic in referring to her “insight” and “skill,” since she ultimately gives us little reason to think she believes herself to possess much of either? Does the “dreamy look” of the lake coincide with the “repose” she seeks there, and wouldn’t “familiar ground” actually contribute to repose? And we should again be attentive to the wordplay: a lake by its nature covers unfamiliar ground, although it could also be just a continuation of the ground the narrator currently finds frustratingly familiar.
A story like “My Defects” seems designed–and both its radical compression and its oblique structural devices certainly appear to be products of design–to unavoidably provoke the reader into looking for coherence and continuity while also frustrating any attempts to collapse the story into a too-facile coherence or to find continuity too readily. Like many of Diane Williams’s stories, it suspends the reader in its own dreamlike shifts and playful language such that the most satisfying response may be to relax the demand that the story yield up its meaning immediately, to perhaps be willing to tolerate indeterminacy. This would not really mean conceding the story is meaningless, a conclusion reached by too many readers when encountering “difficult” fiction, but rather accepting that its meaning (even at the level of “following” the plot) is suggestive rather than certain, including even the possibility of overlapping, multiple meanings.
Not all of Williams’s stories are as compressed as “My Defects” (although some are even briefer and more compressed). The title story provides a character study of sorts of Vicky Swanky, who, “years ago,” was a beauty. Now, “her breasts were flat. Her hips were flat. She looked older than her forty years.” The first part of the story offers a reasonably cohesive portrait of Vicky Swanky, whom the male narrator announces as an “old friend” who is “going through a divorce” and who invites the narrator over to her house. What the two do together is suggested in typical Williams ambiguity: “In connection with sex, we lightened up a little then and we dumped some of it off the edge at a minimum.” The second half of the story introduces elements that seem to develop the situation: the narrator brings over a dog; it snows; Vicky Swanky serves food. The narrator expresses his own uncertainties about the situation: “It was getting busy concerning the basic meaning, the degree, and the quality.” In the story’s final paragraph, a plumber arrives and indicates that he will need “to remove everything from the nipple in the wall to the toilet.”
“Vicky Swanky,” although still very short, is nevertheless characteristic of Williams’s more extended fictions. Such stories appear to progress by accumulating incidents, but these incidents lead the reader on paths that inexorably wander in uncharted directions, sometimes changing tack altogether. This is especially true in the novellas Williams has written, such as On Sexual Strength and Romance Erector. In these longest stories, something like a narrative does develop, but the reader should not expect its episodes to be related through their logical coherence, even if they do unfold in what seems a kind of progression. The narrative is built up out of the same sort of accumulation of smaller units of exposition and “action” we find in the briefer fictions, but if anything the effect over the course of the story is even more digressive than in the flash fictions, as the narrative oddities have more space in which to proliferate.
Thus Romance Erector tells the kind of story, about love and sex, the confusions in the former caused by the latter, one would expect from the title, but while it does feature recognizable characters experiencing those confusions, their actions are sufficiently ambiguous, at times almost arbitrary, that the reader might share their confusions. But the practiced reader of Williams’s signature short pieces will surely note the metafictional implications of the narrator’s words in Chapter 7, which opens with the narrator telling us “The real story begins on Thursday—pungent, warming—the translucent tale.” At the end she admits, however, that “I have storyish ideas but no story in me. This is the row of empty marks. These are the signs of what is next.” This of course applies to all of Diane Williams’s fictions—they embody “storyish ideas” but relate stories only in the sense that things seem to happen, even if we don’t quite know how or why.
In both her longest and shortest fictions, Williams fashions a kind of “story” that proceeds entirely from the “empty marks”—words—that are made into the “signs” that determine “what is next,” the sentences that in the intricate process of their unfolding work to shape narrative and character development. The result is indeed “translucent” prose compositions with enough of the familiar features of a “tale” to be recognized as a story but also cloaked in enough shadow and distortion as to remain mysterious.
Sentencing
Although the influence of Gordon Lish as editor and teacher has extended to a wide range of seemingly disparate writers, one group seems to be especially sensitive to Lish’s influence. Writers such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and Noy Holland palpably employ, in somewhat different but observable ways, the strategy Lish calls “consecution,” the focus on constructing and linking sentences by considering sound and rhythm as well as sense. Indeed, these writers no doubt take the strategy farther than Lish himself even envisioned, at least in their intensive focus on the sonic qualities of language, resulting in short stories (all but Schutt work almost exclusively in the short story, but her best work may also be her short fiction) using an alternative mode of composition through which “character” and “story” are not abandoned but emerge as the afterthought of the movement of language, the characters and plots subordinated to the autonomy of that movement.
From this shared commitment to more fully exploring the linguistic resources of the sentence as a literary device, each of these writers draws on those resources in their own way, with different stylistic signatures that also create divergent larger-scale formal effects. Although all four writers work in narrative fragments, Williams’s stories are both the most highly compressed and the most elliptical. Her brief fictions especially require very close attention to the materiality of their sentences (including their sound), each one of which might be an episode in itself, the interval between them a leap in time or place. The same is true of Lutz’s early work, although more recently his stories have gotten longer, even if Lutz’s sentences are more notable for their utterly singular wordplay than for advancing clearly discernible plots. Lutz is perhaps the writer among this group who has most assiduously developed the strategy of consecution taken from Lish, while Christine Schutt might be described as the most “lyrical” prose stylist (although her prose is ultimately not so conventional in its carefully cadenced lyricism, which in its way is as sensitive to the intricacies of sound and syntax as Lutz’s more unpredictable sentences). Schutt’s novels in particular come closest to fulfilling traditional expectations of plot and character, but the reader who approaches her fiction simply for its narrative interest and who fails to appreciate what Lutz, in his essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” calls the “page hugging” appeal of Schutt’s writing will surely miss out on a significant element of its achievement and effect.
The stories in Noy Holland’s, Swim for the Little One First, are not as brief as Williams’s pieces, although they do have something of their enigmatic quality; they are not as verbally adventurous as Lutz’s stories, which does not mean they are less scrupulous in their attention to language; they do not develop plot and character as transparently as Schutt’s fiction does, but Holland incorporates linear narrative more than either Williams or Lutz. While such short pieces as “Blood Country” and “The Last Doll Never Opens” could be described as closer to surreal fables (or even prose poems), the most evocative and most compelling of the stories in Swim for the Little One First are the longer ones, generally both more extended in time and more specific to place. In these stories, a cogent narrative generally does emerge, unfolding as well in a recognizable setting, often the American West. However, because they are developed through extremely truncated fragments (sometimes only a single sentence), containing little in the way of direct exposition, the stories can seem impressionistic and elusive. With some, it is only after coming to the end of the story that one realizes Holland’s individually arresting sentences have told us a story after all.
The book’s first story, “Pachysandra,” works in this way. We track the narrator as she returns to her girlhood desert home to care for Rose (presumably her sister, although the relationship remains somewhat oblique). While there, she begins a sexual relationship with Rudy—“the help”—by whom she becomes pregnant, but subsequently she terminates the pregnancy (“I went to the hospital and had them scrape what Rudy gave me out”), even though at the beginning of the story she had been trying to become pregnant with her boyfriend, Tonto. We are not likely to forget this introductory episode, since the narrator’s activity is presented to us in an especially memorable formulation:
Rose called.
I said, “Hello, Rose.”
“You sound funny.”
I was lying on my back with my legs in the air trying to make a baby with my mister. I had his seed in there. My poor egg had stepped out to meet it.
By the end, the narrator has changed her mind about this effort:
I would not have been much of a mother. I went for shitbags. I liked to sleep late. I liked people who could work their own spoon.
While sentences like these do not exhibit the breaks in logic or continuity that frequently make Williams’s sentences so startling, or lead to the radical linguistic transformations that make us stop and linger over Lutz’s, they are surely not submerged into the ordinary flow of expository discourse characterizing most conventional narratives. They indeed ask us to pause and appreciate the way they avoid familiar phrasing and routine idioms in favor of a directness of expression both trenchant (“I liked people who could work their own spoon”) and almost ingenuous (“I had his seed in there”) but that also encompass unorthodox but quite satisfying figurative turns (“My poor egg had stepped out to meet it”). Because it does seem the expected sort of invisible prose has been deliberately avoided, passages such as these can seem odd or eccentric, but upon reflection they are in fact quite precise and evocative, fully coherent, if self-enclosed, in their fidelity to the isolated moments they attempt to invoke.
Since they provide us with more such moments, the longer stories afford us greater opportunity to appreciate what such passages are up to, as well as the way Holland assembles them into narratives in which much of the story occurs in the gaps between these articulated moments but are if anything more powerful because of that. “Luckies Like Us” ultimately relates the story of a family that has suffered devastating misfortune, focusing on the aftermath of an automobile accident that has left a son in a vegetative state. The story alternates between moments centered on the perspectives of the mother (who feels responsible for the accident), the father, and a daughter. The overlapping of perspectives allows us to integrate the characters’ ongoing attempt to cope with their situation with the “backstory” that has produced it, a strategy that, along with Holland’s stark and pointed language, makes what could be a potentially sentimentalized, emotionally facile story resonate through an emotional restraint that is ultimately all the more effective in conveying the family’s desperate plight. Indeed, Holland’s stories do not indulge in easy emotions, even if the bleak emotional atmosphere in many of them can be chilling. The characters face difficult circumstances and often suffer grim fates, but they neither struggle heroically to overcome their difficulties and thus inspire our admiration nor merely succumb to them passively and provoke mere pity. They do what they can, which more than anything else also makes them seem intensely human.
“Merengue” presents a decidedly non-sentimental portrait of a senior citizen community in Florida whose residents once led vital lives, but
Now they went about on tricycles and wheelchairs, the want to drift still in them. The old women played bridge and bickered by day and by nightfall slept with the louvers pinched shut. The old toms howled on the beach at night. The old men fished with kittens.
The area itself has seen better days as well. Once “starlets arrived in gold lame with their hair heaped up on their heads,” but then “the young went elsewhere. The sea ate the beach. Hotels were looted, emptied out but for squatters with their shopping carts and rags.” Two wandering lovers, Jack and Mary, arrive “from the land of head-high corn.” Mary is pregnant, about which Jack is, to say the least, ambivalent. Jack eventually becomes impatient with his new surroundings as well, which seem to him “like a nursing home without nurses,” but Mary is taken up by the old men, on whom she does seem to have a softening effect. Mary is subsequently gang-raped by local teenagers, and not only loses her baby but is told she will no longer be able to have children (her fate inviting a contrast with that of the narrator of “Pachysandra”). The story is the longest in the book, and it shows how Holland’s sentence-based fragments can very effectively expand over a larger canvas, creating an ultimate depth of character and situation that, in this case, makes the story’s somber conclusion affecting without descending into melodrama. “Merengue” has the length of a short story, but some of the scope and density of a novel.
The best story in the book, the title story, has a similar scope and density, although it is about half as long. It is also the most formally interesting work in this collection. At first we are tempted to think the narrator is addressing us in the story’s first few lines:
How nice you could come to visit. See our home, how we live, how the leaves sweep down. The fields green still.
We turned out clocks back. I brought squash in, tossed a sheet across the withering vines. We’re to expect a frost once the wind quits, wind from the north, flurries. A chance.
We’ll move the rabbits in the morning, light the stove. Chicory in your coffee, honey how you like. On the radio the news.
It becomes apparent, however, that the narrator is addressing her father, who has come to live with her. The story continues to be told as a direct address to the father, during which his frayed relations with his family are revealed to us, including a troubled relationship with his only son, the narrator’s brother, which culminated in the son’s suicide. In the compressed time of its telling, as the father is moving in, we nevertheless learn much about the family history and especially about the brother’s suicide, the details of which seem irrepressibly to emerge as the narrator speaks on, showing the father around the house. The family’s life is nicely captured in the story’s final lines:
If there is anything you want — someone will get it for you.
My daughter will. Your wife will, or I will. Somebody always has.
Even as the narrator summons up the past and evokes the present, her words come to us shaped by Holland’s attention to the rhythms her sentences set up both within and among themselves (and to which she clearly pays great attention), as well as to such auditory qualities as alliteration (“Chicory in your coffee, honey how you’d like”) and to rhetorical devices such as repetition. Swim for the Little One First confirms Noy Holland to be a writer who can start with this sensitivity to language and use it to build formally intricate fictions that are also a great pleasure to read.
Silences
Dawn Raffel is now probably best known for her 2012 book, The Secret Life of Objects, an unorthodox memoir in which the author invokes her past through reflections prompted by various objects she still possesses. While this book succeeds on its own terms, offering a concise but affecting account of the writer's relationships with family and friends, it would be an injustice if its relative success came to overshadow the accomplishments of her fiction, which are numerous and distinctive.
If Raffel's fiction is in danger of being overlooked, this admittedly might be due to its rather infrequent appearance. Her first book, the story collection In the Year of Long Division, came out in 1995, her first novel, Carrying the Body, was published in 2002, while a second collection of stories, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, appeared in 2010. The long intervals between books apparently comes not from wavering ambition but an overabundance of care, as Raffel has spoken in interviews of taking up to a year on one of her stories, most of which are seldom more than a half-dozen pages long.
Although Raffel is a former student of Gordon Lish, and thus could loosely be grouped among those current writers influenced by his notion of "consecution" (writers such as Gary Lutz and Christine Schutt), the care that she takes is as much with the intervals and silences between sentences as it is in the construction and linking of sentences, the strategies for which have been adopted by most of Lish's acolytes. Certainly Raffel takes pains over the rhythms and tonalities of her sentences, as we can plainly see in the very first story of In the Year of Long Division:
Fishing was the only sport in our town. How it was. Pick. Any house in our town was any house in our town. Any wind in our town was the wind in our town. Down was down. Queasy was a way of life. Bored to crackers, snap, kerplunk. ("We Were Our Age")
If some readers might find Raffel's prose "difficult," its difficulty arises first of all from primacy of sound over sense. The stop-and-start rhythm, the strategic repetition, the assonance modifying into outright rhyme (our-house-town-down)--these are the most immediate qualities of a passage such as this, and whatever narrative or descriptive work they also do must accommodate itself to the intonations of Raffel's language. That language does indeed perform this other work, however, in its own unorthodox but ultimately compelling way. "Any house in our town was any house in our town" tells us almost all we need to know about this town, making any further sensory description superfluous. "Down was down," in addition to providing Raffel's signature wordplay, also clues us in on the type of wind pervading the town, the kind ensuring that "Queasy was a way of life."
But Raffel's attention to the lacunae between and among these sentences, to what needn't or perhaps even can't be said, is just as painstaking. So ruthless is she in eliminating the unnecessary, in fact, trusting in the reader to bridge the gaps and to acknowledge the unstated, that some readers might feel disoriented from the lack of expository directions and situational detail. This feature of Raffel's fiction is perhaps what has encouraged the view that it is a version of "minimalism" (for example, in John Domini's review of Restless Universe reprinted in his book The Sea-God's Herb), but while Raffel's work does to some extent recall the similarly reduced fictions of Mary Robison, her stories rely even less on narrative than most minimalist fiction, in which conventional "drama" is often missing but things happen nevertheless. Raffel's stories convey something closer to a literary impressionism, a blurry but distinguishable evocation of a scene or episode, often, as in "We Were Our Age," an exercise in memory more than storytelling.
A more conventionally recognizable feature of Raffel's fiction is her extensive use of dialogue, which is in fact the dominant mode in some stories. (Perhaps reflecting the influence of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, whom Raffel has identified as among her earliest inspirations.) One of the stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, "The Myth of Drowning," is entirely a dialogue set-piece, and its development is typical, as a man and a woman before sleep talk about a story the woman had told:
"How was it that she drowned?"
"Who knows," she said. "She couldn't swim. Or cramps. Maybe undertow. The undertow was wicked"
"You know what I mean."
"No, what do you mean?"
"I mean people were there," he said. "That's how you told it. A crowd on the shore."
"That's what the myth is: Drowning is noisy. It isn't," she said.
"It isn't," she said.
"I heard you the first time."
"Tired, I said."
"Broad daylight," he said.
"And shallow," he said. "No one could see her?"
Although by the end of this brief exchange (around two pages long) we can piece together what must be the context of the conversation (the couple have had a tense evening, the man believes the woman sees herself as the drowning woman), the absence of authorial assistance is made even more acute by the abbreviated, discontinuous nature of the dialogue itself. But that comes not from a distortion of human speech patterns but an affirmation of it, an attempt to capture the way we actually talk to each other with fidelity. As David Winters says of Raffel's dialogue, "This is speech as it is spoken in life, not in literature: shorn of explanatory apparatus, driven more by conflicting agendas than by semantics, and, in its resultant asymmetry, rife with abrupt about-faces and non sequiturs."
Consistent with the strategies of her prose style more generally, Raffel's dialogue calls on the reader's capacity to infer the not-said from the said, the encompassing context from the fleeting clues we do get. In asking us to read closely and carefully, she also suggests that reading fiction is not merely the registering of the words on the page but also remaining alert to their subtler intimations, the discursive and aesthetic reverberations created by the tension between what those words signify and what they leave unexpressed. The reader's experience will be incomplete without this sort of attentiveness, but this doesn't make her work truly difficult or inaccessible. Only readers who close themselves off to the possibility of a more expansive reading experience, expansive in the sense that reading is more than gliding along the surface of words but can be provisional and recursive, will find Raffel's fiction perplexing. Patient readers will find it enlivening.
It might seem that Raffel's aesthetic strategy would work best in short fiction (and some of her stories are short enough to be called "flash fiction"), but her only novel, Carrying the Body, is also quite good as well. It shares with Raffel's stories a focus on family relations, although where many of the stories focus on relationships between parents and children, Carrying the Body portrays family drama more broadly, beginning with a pair of estranged sisters, one of whom left home young to experience life more fully, while the older sister remained in the home to care for their debilitated father. The younger sister returns to the home with her young son and eventually leaves again, abandoning the child, who becomes increasingly ill, to the ministrations of the older sister, a job for which she is clearly not prepared. The novel traces the development of the relationship between the older sister (referred to throughout as "the aunt") and the child, using the same elliptical methods as in the stories, which prove to work very well in evoking the hesitant, tentative growth of the aunt's concern for the child, as well as her increasing desperation about her own inadequacy in dealing with the situation she finds herself confronting.
Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (2010) is the most recent fiction (in book form) Raffel has published, and while the stories in this collection are generally similar in approach to those in her first book, a few of them, such as "The Air and Its Relatives," although still fragmented and conducted largely in dialogue, are arguably somewhat more conventional. The focus is even more resolutely on parent-children relationships. "The Air and Its Relatives" is a memory story about the narrator and her father, framed by a series of scenes in which the father is teaching the daughter how to drive. The fragmentation of the story serves to emphasize the episodic quality of memory, so that the story coheres in a readily perceptible way. The story's elegiac tone is consistent with many of the other stories in the book as well, and the book is further unified by a motif provided by the book's title, itself a reference to Max Born's The Restless Universe, which is explicitly identified in "The Air and Its Relatives" as a book the daughter and the father would read aloud together. We live in a "restless" universe of change and ineffable mystery, not least in the human experience of love and loss this book explores.
Further Adventures in The Restless Universe begins with an epigraph from Born that not only applies to this book but could also serve metaphorically as an apt description of Raffel's fiction as a whole: "Visible light covers only about one octave, speaking in musical terms." It is certainly appropriate to think of Raffel's work "in musical terms," even if it is a music, like that of, say, John Cage or Morton Feldman, that keenly exploits absence and quiet as part of its musical scheme. And if visible light is only one part of the spectrum, and not the largest, so too does Raffel's fiction make explicitly visible only a sampling of the world in which its characters act, talk, and subsist. With the reader's help, it manages to strongly illuminate, nonetheless.
"How It Came to Me to Say": Gordon Lish"
(This essay originally appeared in The Quarterly Conversation.)
If, as Jonathan Sturgeon has suggested, we have entered an era dominated by “autofiction,” in which “the life of the author is now the novel’s organizing principle,” then in the search for progenitors of this literary phenomenon we might consider the fiction of Gordon Lish. Indeed, a common reaction to Lish’s books, at least since Peru (which may be his last work of fiction to predominantly feature a main character who can, to some degree at least, be separated from “Gordon Lish”) is to question whether Lish is writing fiction at all rather than some sort of free-form (some would say self-indulgent) autobiography. However, the wary reader would be just as mistaken to trust Lish’s writing to provide reliable accounts of the author’s actual experiences as to expect his “stories” to bear much resemblance to the traditional well-made short story.
That Lish’s fiction is not at all the sort of thing we would expect to emerge from most creative writing workshops, or most conventional short fiction anthologies, is perhaps surprising to readers, given Lish’s prominence as a creative writing teacher and as an editor of writers known for their short stories (most prominently, of course, Raymond Carver). It may in fact be the case that this gap between pre-established expectation and Lish’s own actual practice is wide enough to partly explain his relatively small audience, small even for avant-garde writers. Lish has published eight novels and seven collections of short fiction, in addition to his Collected Fictions (published in 2010 at a hefty 546 pages), but it is likely most readers are familiar only with Dear Mr. Capote (1983), his first novel, and Peru (1986), although occasionally reviewers have taken note of one or another of his subsequent books, mostly to remark upon their oddities, revisit the Ray Carver editing controversy, or rehearse gossip about Lish as a teacher and publishing figure. What this focus on Lish’s public persona obscures is that over the last 30 years few writers have as consistently challenged both the formal and stylistic assumptions that still govern American literary fiction.
Happily, for readers curious to at least sample Lish the experimental writer, his most recent book, White Plains, is one of his best and most adventurous collections of short fiction. Although Lish identifies the selections in the book as “pieces and witherlings,” taken together they are substantial fictions that now make the Collected Fictions seriously incomplete. Since 2014 Lish has in fact published, in addition to White Plains, two other books, the story collection Goings and Cess: A Spokening (a mostly indescribable hybrid of novel and a kind of verbal puzzle) that would seem to represent a late renaissance in Lish’s attention to and inspiration for writing fiction. They could certainly be identified as “late” in their concern with the hardships and limitations of old age, but they exhibit no diminution at all in the boldness of Lish’s repudiation of conventional form or the consistency with which he pursues his fundamental stylistic strategy, the strategy for which he has become well-known through its influence on many of his students, some of whom, such as Gary Lutz and Christine Schutt, have themselves become among the most accomplished current American writers in the way they have adapted the strategy for their own audacious purposes.
“Consecution” is a concept probably best known through its iteration in Lutz’s essay, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place.” Lutz quite cogently explicates the general principle behind the notion of consecution—that the writer’s philosophy of composition should begin with sentences and the consecutive effects to be created by the linking up of sentences throughout a work of fiction—and explains his own use of the strategy, primarily for its sonic effects. Lish as well is attuned to the sounds of his sentences, and views the consecution of sentences as the essential aesthetic precept of fiction, but as well takes consecution as the source of form and theme more broadly, arguably using it more comprehensively than most of his acolytes. In his fiction, consecution frequently prompts recursion and repetition, so that the story or situation (often the former never quite departs from the elaboration of the latter) seems to remain static or to encircle itself (Lish’s own favored description of his method). No doubt readers expecting “normal” narrative development are frustrated by what seems to be Lish’s refusal to get a story told through anything like a conventionally efficient narrative, but those readers are missing the alternative story he is telling: the story of the story’s own composition as it comes into being.
In “Unstory,” a dialogue set-piece included in White Plains, one of the speakers responds to the other speaker’s comment “I thought the idea of speech was to get something said” by replying: “God gave man speech to give him the means to get himself lost. Whereas you stay on track, you run smack into death.” Lish’s fiction has been death-haunted since his first novel narrated by a purported serial killer, but this caution against running “smack into death” perhaps reveals to us that Lish has not only depicted characters obsessing about or confronting death (Peru depicts a man convinced that when he was a child he killed another child), but the literary strategy Lish has long employed itself embodies the imperative to get “lost” as the way to avoid the “death” represented by conventional fiction. Thus what some critics have taken as indulgence or merely antic provocation in Lish’s fiction is actually a profoundly serious—though never solemn—project in which the artistic stakes could not be higher.
Both Dear Mr. Capote and Peru effectively integrate Lish’s focus on the literal proximity of death and its representation in their formal and stylistic methods. In each case, the narrator-protagonist both wants to tell his tale (in the former he wants to sell it), but also simultaneously wants to withhold the story, to circle around the important events, to retreat and advance. In each as well we can’t ultimately be certain that the deadly events around which the narrators’ confessions are organized actually happened: the unnamed killer may be imagining, or just fabricating, his crimes, while the narrator of Peru is convinced that at age six he did indeed kill a neighbor child while the two were playing in a sandbox, but there is sufficient ambiguity in his account that we can finally doubt the extent of its accuracy. Still, if these two narrators could be called potentially unreliable, this effect cannot be attributed to the ease with which they relate to us a story that is too transparently suspicious. Indeed, both of them struggle to bring their stories together in a way that prefigures Lish’s later work, as they pause and backtrack, caught up in their own semantic webs, not in an apparent effort to conceal but to find the right language to express their experiences.
The narrator of Peru is named “Gordon,” but this character is not so obviously a version of Lish himself as we find in the later fiction. By 1991’s My Romance, the narrative voice has been turned over fully to a persona that seems as closely identical to the novel’s author as it is finally possible to be while still making a claim on the readers as a fictional device, the means to creating a work of fiction. One of Lish’s most unfortunately neglected works, My Romance announces itself as a transcription of a reading given by Gordon Lish, who begins by noting, “What a difficulty it must be for us all that it was destined to be such a long walk and, as you can now hear, applauseless walk for me to make it up here at the lectern.” The difficulties invoked certainly don’t end with this initial perception of some tension in the room as the narrator begins his presentation. Indeed, this will not at all be the kind of reading his audience no doubt expects, despite the books that he has carried with him to the lectern, as almost immediately Gordon begins to divert attention from the literary matters at hand and to relate a series of his own personal travails, starting with his drinking problem but focusing mostly on his father’s death (for which Gordon believes he is responsible), his wife’s crippling illness, and, most centrally, his lifelong struggle with psoriasis, and the extreme measures he must take to protect his skin.
Although we can see even in the brief passage quoted Lish’s sensitivity to the sonic, sensory qualities of language—the assonance of “applauseless walk,” the alliteration of “difficulty” and “destined, the homophonous rhyme of “hear” and “here,” not to mention the additional repetition “up here to here”), the effects of consecution are much broader in a work like My Romance. The underlying conceit, that this is a novel in the form of a spontaneously composed lecture, of course allows Lish great latitude for digression, but the digressiveness is not random but associative, united most immediately by a set of brief cues Gordon tells us he has written down on four business cards, while also cogently braided together through a few in-common images or motifs, illness in particular connecting many of the episodes. Thus Lish’s method of correlative seriality determines not only the character of Lish’s prose—how things are said—but also the content of his fictions—what ultimately gets said. Such is the artistic strategy at work in most of Lish’s stories, before and after My Romance, and the reader encountering Lish’s fiction for the first time with White Plains will find a very worthy representation of the strategy. Although in many ways this book has the same sort of coherence we find in a book like My Romance, in its focus on the life circumstances of “Gordon Lish” White Plains does offer more variety in its realization of the strategy.
Such variety is provided, for example, by the several stories composed mostly or entirely in dialogue, stories in which it might seem that the sort of consecution possible in conventional prose would be less achievable or apparent. Yet in a story such as "Naugahyde” presenting a series of phone conversations between a man and a woman, the conversation that unfolds seems unmistakably Lishian:
He said, ‘You know what I think of when I think of us?’
She said, ‘Tell me.’
He said, ‘The chair.’
She said, ‘Us in the chair.’
‘You with your leg up,’ he said.
‘My left leg,’ she said.
He said, ‘Right. I mean your left leg—right.’
She said, ‘I’ll think about this tonight.’
‘The chair,’ he said. ‘Our time in the chair?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘The way you said it,’ she said.
He said, ‘How I said it was how it came to me to say.’
She said, ‘Nothing just comes. It’s all rehearsed.’
Because of the relative brevity of the talk, the chain of associations animating this conversation are clear enough: After the repetition of “think”/“think of us,” echoed in the woman’s second comment, we move through the introduction of the chair and the woman’s leg, the two dominant images in this initial part of the exchange, the counterpoint of left and right, and the final ostinato flourish on “said” (with the fortuitous rhyme of “right” and “tonight” as a bonus). Both of these voices emerge from this story as belonging to separable characters with distinct personalities, but at the same time they both speak in recognizable Gordon Lish prose.
It is also true that Gordon Lish’s prose frequently sounds like someone speaking (and not just when used as a trope as in My Romance), especially when Lish’s narrator seems to be obsessing about his present circumstances: “Okay, granted, granted, I’m sitting here horsing around a little bit. Guilty. I’m pleading guilty—so sue me. Because, buster, I’m leveling with you. I’m taking you into my fucken confidence as a person I can go ahead and open my heart to. . . ” (“Jelly Apple”). Still there are times when this “spokening” effect is possible only in Lish’s version of expository prose, not actual dialogue:
So Father (the father in the unwriteable—unwritable?—piece), he, the man, decides (in his mind) the fish shall be taken from their habitat and placed indoors, this in a tank (a pretty biggish ‘object’) brought into the house for said purpose, conveyed (the fish, that is—or, viz. the fish) thereto or therein, as it would turn out, if it were, or was, to turn out, by means of many family-sized mayonnaise jars, or by one such jar, several trips (circuits?), from the far reaches of the backyard (back yard? yard out back? rear-yard?) to inside the house, therefore required. (“Make Night: Heidegger”)
If such a passage does evoke a process of thinking aloud, of going over a memory in the presence of a listener, the full impact of its radical digressions, diversions, and asides can really only be registered as writing, as words read. Certainly this is not a conventionally lucid prose style, but Lish writes prose that resembles the writing of no one else, and it is not as frivolous or capricious as its surface eccentricities might make it seem.
In my view Lish’s critics overlook the extent to which he is attempting to create a certain sort of comedy, a particularly outrageous sort that burlesques the very notion of linearity and unity that ordinarily predicate our expectations of fiction. Readers who are impatient with this element of Lish’s work ultimately are rejecting the implication that these expectations should be held in abeyance, that works of fiction can offer aesthetic satisfactions that do not depend on previously fixed conceptions of narrative continuity or formal unity. Yet if Lish’s fictions are often funny, and can simply be appreciated for the audacity of their execution, there is also something very earnest about Lish’s compositions, an impression that all the hesitations, reiterations, sudden reversals, and insistent clarifications are a sincere attempt to get it right, to find the words and formulations that will signify what his narrators seek to express. Of course, in the end they don’t quite know what they want to express, sure only of the need to express it and an ineluctable sense they can’t elude what’s already been said.
As if to underscore the slippage between speech and writing characteristic of Lish’s work, “Mr. Dictaphone” purports to be the testimony of one of these machines, but of course the dictaphone is surely the voice of the author of the story in the process of creating it (Mr. Dictaphone calls him “Georgie”). The story is relatively brief (as are many of stories in White Plains), and so we are able to enjoy the humor of the conceit before it perhaps wears out its welcome, although the story also affords us the opportunity to consider explicitly the fundamental assumptions behind Lish’s strategies, as the story essentially records Mr. Dictaphone’s reflections on the conditions of his own existence (“One is trapped in the trap of the trap,” he says near the end of the story, “lest one not speak.”) “Levitation, or, My Career as a Pensioner” is one of several stories that seem straightforwardly autobiographical, in this case relating the particulars of Lish’s firing from Esquire magazine, but like the others, it finally serves more to reinforce an overarching contemplation of decline and old age, a theme that emerges from White Plains with a clarity and consistency (beginning with a Wayne Hogan cartoon included in the book’s front matter) that could presumably satisfy the most traditional of readerly expectations. The longest story in the book, “Begging the Question,” shares with “Levitation” a depiction of the circumstances of Lish’s life as an elderly man living alone—in the latter case, the streetwork going on outside his building, in the former, conflict with his neighbors—again a palpable setting that ought to act as a kind of perceptual anchor for readers who might feel lost amid the stylistic eccentricities of the stories in this book.
In other stories we learn more about Lish’s stays in mental hospitals (brought on by the powerful medications he takes), as well as details about his wife’s illness and death. The final story in the book, “Afterword,” is a surprisingly touching (if not without some of those eccentricities) tribute of sorts to his first writing teacher, whose influence set “Gordon Lish” onto his journey in literature. Lish even gives the man the book’s final words, quoting from his short story that, we are told, is the only work of fiction to ever make Lish cry. Suffice it to say that if the more accessible elements of tone, setting, character, and subject in White Plains were to be found in a book more easily identified as “literary fiction,” most readers would likely find it altogether familiar. It is the singular and, in retrospect, revolutionary departure from the norms of prose style in fiction that makes Lish’s work seem, to some, alien and peculiar. But without the alien and peculiar, fiction as a form would stagnate and die.
Language Always Prevails
The "novel in stories" has become an increasingly common form in current American fiction, so while Pamela Ryder's Paradise Field is recognizable enough in its use of the developing conventions of the form, it expands the possibilities of this hybrid genre just enough to warrant publication by a press (FC2) that is one of the longest-lived publishers of "experimental" fiction, and illustrates that the "story novel" still might hold some potential for surprising us.
The overarching narrative to which the individual stories contribute (although not necessarily sequentially) concerns the final decline and death of the protagonist's father. These two characters (the protagonist is referred to throughout simply as "the daughter") and their at times problematic relationship emerge as the book's primary focus, but not every story in fact directly concerns them. Still, even the stories set elsewhere (France, in "The Renoir Put Straight") or apparently about other characters ("Arrow Rock") depict experiences universal enough (a young child observing the behavior of the adults around her in the former story, for example) that they might surely echo the lives of the daughter and her father, or may in fact refer obliquely to these two characters even if they are not directly identified (the characters in a motel room in "Arrow Rock"). "Badly Raised and Talking With the Rabbi" apparently takes place at the father's funeral, but in this case the daughter is identified only indirectly through a one-sided conversation carried on by the woman who may have been the father's live-in girlfriend.
This latter character makes a couple of appearances in the book, although her relationship with the father is not much developed. Since this is finally a collection of stories, however, such development is not a generic requirement, as "unity of effect" properly applies first to the discrete story and its self-sufficient aesthetic needs. This gives Paradise Field as a whole a more impressionistic surface quality while at the same time preserving the distinction between "story" and "novel," the tension between the two helping to sharpen our sense of how a "novel in stories" might be defined as a category of fiction in its own right, not simply as a series of stories with in-common characters or setting, or as an "episodic" novel. How far beyond the sort of unity we expect to find in a novel can such a book as this go, it seems to ask implicitly, and still have a broader coherence that transcends the separate goals of each particular story?
The book's impressionism is further reinforced by the variety of technique employed in the individual stories. The first, "Internment for Yard and Garden: A Practical Guide" takes the form of an instructional pamphlet for the "suburban Jew" on the proper disposition of the recently deceased, which begins to periodically blend together with specific details about the case of the daughter and her father, thus introducing us to this situation as the book's subject. The second story, the title story, takes us back to the daughter's childhood and narrates a series of phone calls between father and daughter that seems to establish the father's frequent absences from home as the source of the daughter's ambivalence about their relationship. Other stories emphasize the father's nostalgia about his days as an air force pilot, while eventually attention focuses mostly on the daughter's efforts to care for the father in the last stages of his old age.
Many stories rely substantially on dialogue, but others, such as "The Song Inside the Plate" and "Irregulars" consist of long blocks of prose. Similarly, some are more fully developed narratives that could be called "stories" of the conventional kind, while others, such as "Recognizable Constellations and Familiar Objects of the Night Sky in Early Spring," rely more on juxtaposition and association, while still others are very brief scenes that might qualify as flash fiction. Most of the stories are told in the third-person, with the viewpoint staying very close to that of the daughter (although without much attempt at "free indirect" psychologizing), but "Mitzvah" (about the father's stay in a nursing home) brings us even closer to the daughter's perspective by instead employing a second-person narration, the references to the daughter as "you" giving us an even more immediate appreciation of the daughter's troubles by implicating us in her actions. In the book's final story, "In Other Hemispheres," the daughter visits with her father's spirit one final time as his coffin is being taken to the cemetery, where the image of his body being lowered into the ground merges with one final reverie returning him to the cockpit of his airplane as it falls to earth.
While Paradise Field is formally interesting, however, what finally commends this book most to readers interested in something other than the customary sort of literary fiction is its way with language, a style that seems perfectly suited to the subject and methods of the book but that also seems reminiscent of the more adventurous prose of writers such as Noy Holland or Dawn Raffel. These are writers influenced by Gordon Lish (who indeed provides a back cover blurb for Paradise Field as well), and Ryder's fiction does feature the kind of sentence building and sonic effects identified with Lish's approach to writing:
They went to where there would be canyons, where the daughter had once walked in her younger years, had traveled along the bluffs and ledges, had seen those vast regions of sage and mesa cleft with chasms of stone and the rivers of their incisions--and now wanting the father to see--while there was still time, while there was still breath and sense and flow through these most turbulent of tributaries within his fisted heart--wanting the father to see again what he had already seen, though long ago and largely from the air. ("As Those Who Know the Dead Will Do")
In an interview, Ryder says of style in fiction that "Language always prevails over content. You’ve got to let the language win out, even if it changes what you think you want to say" ("Through the Viewfinder: Pamela Ryder with Peter Markus"). In the above passage (the first paragraph of the story), we can see a sentence in the process of "winning out." It seems to continually extend itself, adding detail and changing direction, not simply to accumulate information but to seek out the possibilities of its own prolongation and potential associations, through such devices as assonance, consonance, alliteration, and repetition. These stratagems are applied lightly, so that the wordplay doesn't distract from a story's expository and descriptive imperatives, but almost every story offers passages that might prompt us to pause and consider the dexterity with which the sentences take shape, making Paradise Field a consistently pleasurable and rewarding reading experience.
Living in Language
Voices in the River
(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)
If Melanie Rae Thon is a writer less widely read than might be expected, given her skill in creating vivid characters and evoking an equally vivid sense of place, among the reasons for this would surely be the sheer intensity of her work, which can at times seem unremitting, even claustrophobic. Not only does she typically focus on distressed characters often facing the direst circumstances, but her compressed yet urgent prose so insistently attempts to encompass these characters and their situations, to describe, summarize, and account for their states of mind and being, that the reader either becomes captivated by the lyrical pulse of Thon’s language, or it can start to seem oppressive. This effect is especially pronounced in Thon’s most recent fiction, including her new book, Silence and Song, in which lilting language takes on much of the role assumed by plot in more ordinary fiction.
Thon’s 2000 novel, Sweet Hearts features the character Flint Zimmer, a troubled boy just released from a juvenile correctional facility. “He’s smashed enough windows and been in enough houses,” we are told
to know the strange places people hide what’s precious. In unlit rooms, he’s smart as a blindman: he finds one loose brick with his fingers, hears the single board that wheezes beneath him. People on vacation stash jewelry in the freezer. An emerald ring with tiny diamonds, there wrapped in plastic behind the corn and carrots. He feels it. Long guns lie quiet between towels under folded linen. Do you think he won’t smell them?
If Thon’s style can be called “lyrical” or “poetic,” it is not because it casually spins off decorative phrases or floats on a cloud of figurative language. Its effects are more subtle, including parallel phrasing (“finds one loose brick . . . hears the single board”), deftly timed assonance (“strange places,” “wheezes . . . freezing,” “tiny diamonds”), and unobtrusive alliteration (“brick . . . board . . . beneath,” “corn and carrots”). Thon’s prose is pervasively rhythmic, achieved through tonal modulation of both sentence length and sentence types, modulations that give the prose its kinetic quality.
This kinetic quality is mirrored in the narrative structure both of Sweet Hearts and Thon’s next novel, The Voice in the River (2011). In each novel a story is told — in the former, the story of Flint Zimmer’s ultimate, desperate descent into murder, in the latter of the search for a missing boy, feared drowned trying to rescue his dog — but in both it is as if the story eventually just happens, emerging not from “storytelling” per se but as a consequence of shifting perspectives and circumstances, supporting and tangential characters providing a kind of narrative counterpoint that echoes on a formal level the tonal patterns of Thon’s prose style. Her fiction is attuned to “the voice in the river,” but it is the reverberations of that voice as it resounds among those who hear it that Thon’s writing attends to, not the river’s current as it rushes forward.
If this de-centering of plot is characteristic of all of Thon’s fiction, even the earliest, which is the most conventional in its use of character, point of view, and narrative sequence, Silence and Song is Thon’s most radical experiment in form and lyrical expression. Composed of two novellas, “Vanishings” and “Requiem: home: and the rain, after,” and a brief interlude between (titled “Translation”), the book is as full of lost souls as her previous work — immigrants wandering the desert, a runaway boy, a drug-addled killer and his suffering sister. But the purpose of telling their stories, however obliquely and discontinuously, seems less to simply give attention to otherwise marginal characters, or even to create sympathy for such characters, than to view them all as part of a living continuum, a continuum on which pain and suffering occupy their place in the enduring order of existence (as does redemption from that pain and suffering occupy its place). Orlando, one of the undocumented immigrants, nears death from thirst and exposure:
Stars pulsed: amber, orange, turquoise, violet. White flares and red implosions. Now, tonight, while the dead watched, whole galaxies popped in and out of existence. Never had Orlando known the names of stars, but he knew them now as he knew their colors. This sphere of broken light was the mind of God, and they were small and dark inside it.
A kind of spiritual animism or pantheism informs much of Thon’s work, but this effort to reveal the connectedness of all Being becomes especially central in Silence and Song. It comes off least effectively in “Vanishings,” which in its portrayal of the reality behind the impersonal headlines — “Illegal Immigrant Deaths Spiral to New High in Arizona” — threatens to sentimentalize the migrants and their plight, making it difficult for the reader to discern the broader theme separate from the pathos of the situation. Some readers no doubt assume that invoking such pathos is the author’s goal, an impression reinforced by the novella’s narration by a teacher of children with special needs, who can especially identify with the “disappeared” in the desert because her own infant sister “vanished” in a desert car accident (consumed by the ensuing fire”), an accident that also claimed the life of her older brother. The story of the narrator’s family, including her brother as a “ghost” roaming the desert, alternates with the scenes of suffering among the border crossers, such as the misfortune of a man who voluntarily leaves supplies of water for the immigrants who is shot and killed by a 14 year-old boy while attempting to help the boy after he has crashed a stolen car, as well as briefer scenes evoking nature — bears, honeybees, the saguaro cactus.
This is all done quite seamlessly, and the echoes and parallels among all the episodes bring coherence to the novella’s interlacing form. Yet finally “Vanishings” sacrifices aesthetic pleasure to an overindulgence in too-facile emotional effects, which also obscures its own enabling vision. “Requiem: home: and the rain, after,” is a much more effective realization of this vision, as its formal design, if anything even more adventurous than “Vanishings,” more successfully balances an intrinsic aesthetic interest with the underlying theme it is intended to communicate. Narrated by the sister of a young man who commits a convenience store murder that is captured on videotape, the novella relates the story of the murder and its aftermath, its roots in the man’s troubled past, interspersed with scenes from the after-effects of the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, an event that took place on the heels of the murder and, for reasons the narrator makes evident, became linked with the family’s attempt to assimilate the brother’s action and its causes.
The most immediately conspicuous feature of “Requiem” is its use of what seems a poem to begin the narrative exposition. The device is continued on subsequent pages as well, apparent poems juxtaposed with prose passages providing us, for example, our first glimpse of the crime scene: “The video stops and starts and plays again. Doesn’t show the girl’s face, the girl too stunned to move, the speed of a bullet leaving the gun . . . .” But when the sister recalls a visit from the police, we get a verse rendition:
Please, the policeman says, as if
he loves you. Dark hands flutter
open and close, exposing
pale skin of the palm, soft
pink skin of the fingers, everything
strange, hands too big, fingers flexing.
It is as if the lyrical impulse animating all of Thon’s fiction has here finally literally expressed itself as lyric. While the writing in these lyrics and the writing in the ostensible prose passages are not notably dissimilar in expression or cadence, the effect is to keep the reader suspended above the presumed narrative “flow” of a story that might otherwise seem well-suited to a dramatic — even melodramatic — treatment. Instead, the reader is made constantly aware that language, not story, is the irreducible medium of fiction, that “what happened” is only the beginning of the explorations a work of fiction might make. Thon is interested in the long reach of events, the mental afterimages they leave, the attempt to reckon with their consequences. If for the narrator of “Requiem” these events and their indelible influence return as poetically heightened fragments, such would only seem in its way an accurate representation of the character they assume in retrospect and reflection.
This free interplay of prose and verse also itself puts into question the very distinction between the two, between “poetry” and “fiction.” I do not believe that Thon wants to turn fiction into poetry, nor simply to write “poetic” fiction. Instead, she works to erase the boundaries altogether, leaving only the act of writing, which through its aesthetic ordering (whatever name we want to give it) can make us briefly aware of the potential consonance of existence. It is an illusion, of course, although in the process of “making poems of the words” within our reach, as the final lines of “Requiem” have it, we might momentarily imagine that at the end “we will need no more words ever.”
Incrementally Further
(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)
If we would expect a novel written by an accomplished poet to exhibit a gift for language beyond what we find in most fiction, then Joshua Corey’s Beautiful Soul certainly meets our expectations. Indeed, this gift is apparent literally from the novel’s beginning:
Black screen. A flicker. The letter:
In the heart of the night the new reader lies awake with the lights turned off listening to the rain tapping on the skylight. If she opened her eyes she would see the darkness above her, a rectangle gradually reorganizing itself into a gray filmy gleam, glassy surface blistered by streetlamps, and the little shudders of water whose shadows she can feel moving across the bedspread, her husband’s sleeping body, her own face, Like hieroglyphs or Hebrew letters they form and squiggle and dissolve almost tangibly before her closed eyes. The letters are falling on her roof and the roofs of her neighbors: they fall invisibly into Lake Michigan, that vast unplacid text, and coat metal and glass and asphalt from Waukegan down to the Indiana border. Others too are awake reading the weather, establishing degrees of correspondence between internal and external states of being, between the past and the present, what they expect from the day and what they are capable of anticipating.
This passage is precise and evocative without being overtly “poetic.” The figurative language is concise rather than elaborate (“blistered by streetlamps,” “vast unplacid text”), and does not obviously solicit the reader to respond to it as “fine writing.” In fact, Corey’s prose style throughout the novel does not employ its linguistic transformations and other syntactical devices as a kind of aesthetic ornamentation, of the sort we find too often in much “literary fiction.” Instead, language as transformation and illumination is inherent to the conception of prose at work in Beautiful Soul. There is narrative in this novel, but its verbal resources are not primarily dedicated to “telling the story” in the functional way most novels do, even those that seem more character than plot-driven or that are noted for their stylistic flourishes. (Which is not to say that Beautiful Soul is lacking in storytelling — the account of events relating to the Paris student riots in 1968, for example, is especially compelling.) Corey’s prose registers the sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the novel’s characters — primarily the protagonist — in truly the only way such characters actually come to life: they live in language, and to that end the writing in Beautiful Soul, in its scrupulous attention to phrase and image in almost every sentence, could be called an attempt to bring the characters and their milieu to life through the vigor of the words on the page.
If this kind of commitment to the generative power of language is part of what might lead us to consider Beautiful Soul a “poet’s novel,” we also find a keen attentiveness not just to the discrete phrase and the isolated trope but to the shape and rhythm of sentences, as well as the use of these sentences to form paragraphs that both provide narrative continuity and work as stylistic elements on their own. Corey’s sentences can be quite long, but they should be entirely accessible to readers who don’t always expect the “shapely” sentence, in which every part of the sentence (especially in longer sentences) is duly subordinated to a unifying, underlying thought, by which in turn the sentence is judged as a felicitous expression. Rather, Corey’s sentences seem to unspool or expand, through successive clauses and phrases much more loosely connected:
Our man Lamb leans forward with an appearance of desultory curiosity and speaks again in his flat American accent, the newscaster’s accent of imperial nowhere, clear and intelligible enough to bind us to him incrementally further, to further our investment in him, a narrow middle question mark of a man whose subjectivity, we understand, is to be viewed transparently by us and for us, as we might see a stranger approach the window of a café where we sit writing or talking and step across the invisible barrier to press his forehead against the window, shading his eyes, searching as if for us, and we stop our fingers on the keyboard, we stop the cup from reaching our lips, we half stop our breathing waiting for him to move toward the door, to become a destiny, a man in a long coat and a colorless expression, or else to drift past, to rejoin the long crazy stream of humanity past the intelligible, the acceptable, the corporate comfort of numbers in the darkened theater.
The internal rhythm manifest in sentences such as this is reinforced by their frequent modulation into much shorter sentences. All of Corey’s sentences work to move us “incrementally further” in apprehending the fictional world they are in the process of creating, as well as the characters in their own process of negotiating it. These sentences also incrementally develop often equally long paragraphs, whose length is determined not by the amount of information they contain or their role as links in a narrative chain (which usually require shorter rather than longer paragraphs) but by their capacity to accumulate the sentences in such a way that they are allowed their discursive freedom, the paragraphs also incorporating them into a larger structure that creates its own rhetorical and aesthetic effects, requiring us to read more deliberately, to appreciate the paragraphs as a formal element with aesthetic appeal, not just as the components used to construct a narrative in prose.
If Corey’s ability as poet is evident enough in the way he organizes language at the point where “writing” most fundamentally occurs, in the composition of sentences and paragraphs, one might still ask whether Corey shows equal concern for the broader formal design of his novel, in relation to the existing formal conventions of fiction. Certainly Beautiful Soul is not an entirely conventional narrative, although the novel could be described as primarily a character study using a central consciousness mode of narration (what is currently most commonly called “free indirect discourse”) that focuses our attention on the inner turmoil the protagonist, Ruth, is experiencing as she takes on the responsibilities of motherhood and seems to lose her professional identity (lawyer by training) in the process. At this vulnerable stage in her life, Ruth finds herself preoccupied with her own (deceased) mother, with whom Ruth had a troublesome relationship and about whom she really knows very little (including the identity of the man who fathered Ruth). This preoccupation gives rise to what turns out to be a secondary narrative, a noir-ish account of a detective who is charged with providing Ruth with information by traveling through Europe, where the mother (referred to simply as “M”), spent much of her life, her final years in the Mediterranean city of Trieste.
This secondary narrative is developed in great detail, but we are never certain that the story it relates is actually “real.” It emerges from the dream state into which Ruth falls shortly after we have opened on her listening to the rain. “Sleepwalking,” we are told, “she might rise and dress and drive in the dark to a wedge-shaped building in the heart of the city,” a building that holds the office of Lamb, the private detective. Thus the story of Lamb’s investigation of mysterious letters Ruth has received, letters apparently from M sent three years after her death, could be interpreted as a projection of Ruth’s inner struggle with her mother’s legacy and influence as she contemplates her future responsibilities, to herself and to her family. That the novel is finally to be taken as the story of Ruth becoming reconciled to her past and prepared for her future is confirmed by the novel’s conclusion. Ruth has herself traveled to Trieste, where she is depicted actually encountering Lamb in the Duino Castle, but upon her return flight we are told that “[t]he castle is behind her and the man she made.” Moreover, she begins to visualize the faces of “the daughter who needs her. The husband who waits for her.” She “opens the new book, the blank book, the book of home. . . .”
Duino Castle is, of course, the setting of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and we could certainly regard Beautiful Soul as also an elegy of sorts for M, as well as for the historical experience she represents as the child of Holocaust survivors. In this context, the story of Ruth’s rediscovery of mental and emotional balance is both persuasive and affecting, but finally it is still a rather familiar type of story. Even though the novel avoids narrating the story in a straightforwardly linear way, it finally does cohere as a recognizable story of transformation or discovery. Other devices that might seem departures from what is otherwise a variant of psychological realism, while they might provide some variety, are less successfully integrated into the novel’s aesthetic strategy. At times the narrative of Lamb’s activity is presented as if it were a movie, one that presumably both we and Ruth are “watching.” The parallel with classic detective films is relevant enough, but since Ruth throughout the novel is identified as “the new reader,” the cinema-style passages seem somewhat gratuitous, not really reflective of the way Ruth would be thinking about Lamb’s efforts (unless “new reader” is meant ironically). Similarly, the occasional metafictional interjections by the author of Beautiful Soul aren’t so much formally adventurous (such gestures have by now become almost commonplace) as they are formally (and thematically) superfluous.
In my view, a possible future for fiction, at least in its more forward-looking modes, might prominently include its partial merger with poetry (whence, paradoxically, it came), reconfirming fiction’s status as a literary genre, a form of verbal art. However, this would have to involve making the novel more “poetic” not just in its stylistic qualities, but in its extension of form beyond an exclusive dependence on narrative, however fractured or transfigured. Joshua Corey’s transfigurations in Beautiful Soul are compelling, and his skills as a prose stylist are well beyond those of most writers, but the novel doesn’t quite transcend the limitations of an approach still rooted in the recognized conventions of narrative-centered fiction.
Unsentencing the Sentence
(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)
Since the trifurcation of “Poetry” (roughly in the 18th century) into the three genres that in turn came to comprise the category of “literature” — poetry (primarily lyric poetry), fiction, and drama — the phenomenon of writers crossing the boundaries of these now three separate literary forms has not exactly been rare. Thomas Hardy was a great poet and a great novelist. Samuel Beckett was a great playwright and a great fiction writer. Edgar Allan Poe was equally adept at lyric poetry and short stories.
However, the divide between forms, especially between fiction and poetry, has arguably become even thinner, evident not only in prominent postwar writers who found success as novelists after beginning as poets (Gilbert Sorrentino, Denis Johnson, Sherman Alexie), or maintained parallel careers as novelists and poets (John Updike, Marge Piercy, Raymond Carver). It could be argued that the American fiction of the 1960s and 70s now considered “postmodern” was inherently a language-centered fiction that in disrupting conventional narrative forms substituted broadly poetic structures in their place (Donald Barthelme or John Hawkes), while some writers, nominally writing prose, were as gifted at figuration as any poet (Stanley Elkin or William Gass). More recently, writers who have been identified as the “school of Lish” (novelist, teacher, and editor extraordinaire Gordon Lish), including Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, and Christine Schutt, have brought attention to the sonic and syntactical effects of the sentence in a way that often compels us to regard one of their compositions at least as much as a poem as a “story” in order to fully appreciate its aesthetic character.
The increasing popularity of the prose poem among current poets has itself brought the two forms into closer proximity, through the confluence of prose poetry and what is called “flash fiction.” Not all writers of flash fiction, of course, regard it as a version of prose poetry, but rather as an experiment in the radical reduction of plot, character, setting, or scene to the minimum extent possible while still retaining some semblance of structure and coherence. Nevertheless, a number of such writers do blur the boundaries between prose and poetry, from both sides of the diminishing line between the two, and among those should be counted the Canadian Meredith Quartermain, whose book I, Bartleby is labeled “short stories” on its cover but surely does come close to making that line all but imperceptible, if not simply irrelevant.
This is especially true of the shorter pieces included in the book’s first section. Generally fewer than two pages long, most of these begin with a motif or image that is then developed through elaboration, association, or something like a brief narrative. “A Natural History of the Throught” riffs on color, beginning with violet, which is “opposite yellow on the color wheel.” “Out of the Dark” begins as a riff on light, but then light strikes someone’s hand (presumably the writing hand of “I, Bartleby,” introduced to us in the first story as a sort of metafictional stand-in for the author), bringing its corpuscles to life (who prove resistant to the effort). The story is at once both a lyrical reverie and an allegory of the recalcitrance of inspiration. In what seems a throwaway remark, “I” tells us in “A Natural History of the Thought” that “I’ve lost my train of thought,” but this assertion proves to be a kind of clue to the method Quartermain uses in many of these pieces, as the author/narrator pursues a “line of thought” in a way that produces less than a well-ordered story but more than disconnected utterances.
Other sections of the book offer longer pieces, although they too can’t really be called short stories in any conventional sense. The metafictional framework established by the initial short pieces is carried through the rest of the book, reflected in section titles: “How to Write”; “Scriptorium.” Several of the pieces directly concern writing and language, among them “If I prefer not,” in which “I,” transposed to the third-person “She,” attempts to write about a Chinese man she has passed on the street, “Cloth Music,” literally a story about Chinese calligraphy, and “If I noiselessly,” in which “She” is contemplating writing a manifesto:
. . . why not a manifesto of the sentence? Crossbreed every kind with another kind — twist and turn the thought shapes — so many butterfly nets. Une manifestation of clamouring motifs. Unsentencing the sentence. Smashing the piñata of complete thought to clouds of recombining viruses.
This story takes a more poignant turn when we discover that “She” has been reflecting on this projected manifesto as she is returning from a hike to a mountaintop to scatter the ashes of her just-deceased mother, “the dust that had been her mother clinging to her jeans and boots. Breathing the dust that had been her, had made her.”
Ultimately I, Bartleby does balance out the self-reflexive gestures and its more conventionally dramatized “content.” “If I, scrivener, print a letter” also focuses on the death of the writer’s mother (the woman is again “I,” telling her own story), blending a consideration of color imagery with recollections of her mother and with an interpolated episode in which she loses a job. Here “I”’s preoccupation with writing and the otherwise dispersed references to apparent memories and life experiences come together to more firmly identify “I” as the protagonist of the book, even if an unorthodox and sometimes elusive presence. In “Scriptorium,” perhaps the most conventional and straightforward story in the collection, the writer/protagonist recounts childhood memories of her artist father, but this leads not to a melancholy meditation on loss. Instead the narrator relates her eventual estrangement from the father, when she realizes they “don’t speak the same language.” Again “life” is unavoidably implicated in “language.”
Two other stories in I, Bartleby are noteworthy as well. “The Real Fictional House of His Imagined Film Director” tells the story of Canadian novelist Malcolm Lowry and his second wife, writer Margerie Bonner, via the overlaps and echoes among their lives, as Lowry is headed to his ultimate alcoholic breakdown, and characters in their books (Lowry himself being a notoriously autobiographical writer). “Moccasin Box” focuses on 19th-century Canadian/First Nations writer and actress Pauline Johnson, whose lingering presence in and around the Vancouver landscape the narrator tracks. The story’s most conspicuous feature is its incorporation of photographs as a narrative accompaniment. Each of these stories clearly shows Quartermain’s interest in situating her own work in the context of specifically Canadian writing.
I, Bartleby is the kind of book some readers undoubtedly could find disorienting in its initial reluctance to provide those markers we most associate with “short stories.” By the end, however, the book has made its own alternative, less commonplace strategies sufficiently recognizable that going back to the beginning and re-reading, especially given the book’s relative brevity (118 pages), can be a highly rewarding experience, as Quartermain’s achievement becomes even more distinctly visible.
Staying on Message
(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)
Among all writers whose work might be cited as experiments in “hybrid” writing, Thalia Field is arguably the most deserving. Her first book, Point and Line (2000), is a more or less indeterminate synthesis of fiction, essay, poetry, and drama, a fusion of genre that becomes only more pronounced in subsequent books, which also add photos and graphic illustration. Her work still seems classifiable as fiction, but to call individual pieces in her collections “stories” or her full-length work Experimental Animals (subtitled “A Reality Fiction”) a “novel” also seems inexact, if not misleading.
Without question Field’s work can also justifiably be described as “experimental,” if we understand “experiment” in fiction to be the testing of limits: How far can the effort to find alternatives to conventional practice while still retaining a place within a form’s ostensible boundaries be taken? Not only does Field challenge conceptions of conventional literary elements such as plot, character, or setting, but as well the linguistic and notational presumptions of writing itself and the customary logic of reading. In Point and Line we find arrangements of words in almost every possible configuration except sentences organized into traditional paragraphs (including one piece presented horizontally across its pages rather than vertically). Incarnate is perhaps the book that most fully crosses over into poetry (many of the reviews discussed it as “prose poetry”), while Ululu (Clown Shrapnel) most explicitly invokes theater — a performance piece that can’t really be performed.
If in these early works the author seems primarily engaged with the exploration of forms, beginning with Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010), Field’s formal variations are more directly put into the service of a single subject, treated with a fairly obvious polemical purpose. However, while all of the pieces in Bird Lover, Backyard evoke the human relationship with animals (especially birds) and often destructive interactions with the natural world, the focus on animal welfare in this book is more restrained and unobtrusive than it would become later, in some cases secondary to other, more portentous concerns, such as the legacy of American nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands in “Crossroads” or the inflated reputation of the naturalist Konrad Lorenz in “A Weedy Sonata,” which focuses on the implications in his scientific work of his documented Nazi sympathies, which have largely been ignored.
Experimental Animals (2016), an examination of the controversies surrounding vivisection in 19th century France, of course makes animal welfare the explicit subject, but the ingenuity with which this work is constructed allows it to avoid becoming too heavy-handed, although its sympathies with the anti-vivisectionists are clear enough. Moreover, the novel does not treat its ostensible antagonist, the celebrated French anatomist Claude Bernard, as a cartoon villain. While he is certainly haughty and self-absorbed and seems callous in his treatment of his wife (although we must keep in mind that this impression is created from his wife’s point of view, as her narration is the one completely fictionalized element of the novel’s discourse, the rest being an arranged collocation of historical documents), Bernard is not a wanton torturer of animals but a committed scientist who sincerely believes in the scientific importance of his work. His defense of experimentation on live animals is not the rationalization of a singularly cruel man but represents the collective ethical mindset of scientists (at least 19th century scientists), which Field subjects to an exacting critique without sentimentality or rhetorical manipulation.
Field’s latest book, Personhood, like Bird Lovers, Backyard a collection of shorter pieces (but like Experimental Animals with some graphical embellishment), is her most accessible, but also most transparently didactic, the two qualities undoubtedly related. The first four stories in the book especially make the thematic emphasis on animal rights unmistakable. Perhaps if we could say that in this book Field has adjusted her hybrid approach more to the formal procedures of the essay, then the polemical weight of these pieces might seem less heavy. But this is not really the case. While three of the selections (“Unseen,” “Liberty/Trees.” and “Glancing Backward”) might be described as poems, the rest, although as anchored in “reality” as Experimental Animals (one piece is an arrangement of transcripts in a legal proceeding), in their artifice and deployment of point of view are best regarded as fiction. The formal dexterity displayed does provide some welcome variation in a book with an otherwise monochrome thematic character, but it is less formally adventurous than either Point and Line or Bird Lover, Backyard.
The didactic tone of the book is set in the first story, “Hi Adam,” a second-person narrative that follows a visitor to an exotic bird sanctuary around the menagerie. Individual birds (such as Adam, who turns out to be female) become the characters in the story, as we are provided with the parrots’ direct speech and much of their backstories (how they came to be in the sanctuary). The appeals to sentiment are quite strong in this piece: we learn of parrots’ complex emotional lives and the damage done to them by living in captivity as a companion to humans — even when they are ostensibly “well-treated.” The second story, “Happy/That You Have the Body (The Mirror Test)” restages the court case concerning Happy the Elephant, whom an animal rights organization has tried to free from captivity in the Bronx Zoo by having her legally declared a person because she is self-aware, having passed the titular mirror test, and is entitled to release via a writ of habeas corpus. The narrator directly declares outright, abstracting from the legal briefs:
Yet doesn’t the very will to autonomous life grant a right not to be deprived of it? Or suffering at the hand of another confer a right to be relieved of it? Don’t inflicted damages give standing, and once standing, doesn’t a form of law evolve along with every animal who stands in the shadow of those laws?
“Turns Before the Curtain” and “True Crime/Nature Fakirs” shift the focus somewhat from animal rights to the insidious influence of human activity on the equilibrium of the natural environment more generally. The former is a kind of meditation on the phenomenon of “invasive species” cast in the form of a theatrical entertainment, although gradually this conceit recedes in favor of a serial recitation of the history of such invasions: tumbleweed, fungi, feral pigs, rabbits. In all of these cases human intervention is the ultimate source of disharmony, making humans the truly “invasive” species. “True Crime/Nature Fakirs” is a variation of sorts on this same theme, in this case taking the form of an absurdist crime story — complete with invitations to the reader to fill in some of the details — about home invasions by wild animals. “Is it possible they still thought they lived here” asks the narrator at one point, highlighting the artificial conception of “home” employed by the human species, one imposed on all other animals to constrict their own natural rights.
Both of these stories surely employ lively and innovative forms, which again gives them an aesthetic interest that could stand apart from the appeal of the subject, but if anything the uniformity of theme we continue to find in Personhood almost makes the aesthetic invention Fields genuinely displays start to pall, as it seems to be employed as a kind of ornamental contrivance meant to serve the theme but otherwise superfluous. The remaining pieces in the book to a degree modify the prevailing subject — although environmental degradation and its malign effect on animals is still the abiding concern — and ultimately Personhood really does little to detract from Thalia Field’s achievements as an innovative writer. But in this book the unorthodox formal devices seem less adventurous, made more “readable” by subordinating them more obviously to the communication of “message.” Certainly writers can find their way to innovative forms because a subject has in effect compelled unconventional treatment. However, here Field’s already well-established formal virtuosity at times seems imposed on a favored topic.
Which is not to deny that some of the pieces in the book work considerably, even powerfully, well within the more limited play of form and content Field has allowed in Personhood. “Liberty/Trees” is a hybrid Whitmanesque poem/reality fiction organized around the image of the famous Boston “liberty tree,” but it also ranges more widely to relate the story of liberty trees more generally (several other revolutionary-era communities planted trees in commemoration of the Boston tree), and riff on the fate of trees over the course of American history. Most notably, we are given the details behind the spread of the Dutch Elm Disease, which wiped out so many elm trees across the world, as well as the longer-term effects on the environment this blight helped to produce. Neither is the association of trees with liberty dropped from the story, and it concludes in bitter irony with a consideration of a lynching tree:
Men surround, again, a tree, to lose their wits
to drink their brains, to lean against the trunk
to drag a boy over, and beat a man [two names, to cross
out, to map]
a mob enjoys a picnic on the designated day
yelling, lemme see! at others
laughing. . . .
Perhaps “The Health of My Stream or The Most Pathetic Fallacy” best represents both the strengths and weaknesses of Personhood — strengths if you think that works of literature can bring descriptive and narrative specificity to a cause in a way that advances that cause beyond sloganeering, weaknesses if you note that in this piece Field’s formal idiosyncrasies have been smoothed out almost entirely, leaving only a fairly ordinary mode of fragmented narrative. The narrator of the story owns a property through which a stream flows. The narrator uses the stream for irrigation during the dry season, creating a luxurious, plant-strewn riverbank. Soon enough the narrator begins to observe the fish in the stream, deciding to intervene in the water current to create a more flourishing environment for them. This does not work out well, and the narrator learns about the well-being of streams and the dangers of human meddling with nature. The depiction of the ecology of river environments is vivid and engrossing, but, especially in a collection that takes up the same theme more or less repetitively, “The Health of My Stream” is also entirely predictable.
Experimental fiction (or poetry) ought to be predictable only in being unpredictable. Most of Thalia Field’s books have indeed been characterized by their aesthetic ingenuity and variety. She is, in fact a writer about whom it is justified to say that her work so blurs the distinction between forms and genres that it could be regarded simply as an integrated practice of “writing.” But Personhood suggests that her audacious verbal imagination has started to become merely the available instrument for promulgating an increasingly familiar message.
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