Fabulous (Fabulators and Fabulation)

Making Believe 

Rikki Ducornet’s novels published in the 21^st century--so far Gazelle (2003), Netsuke (2011), and Brightfellow (2016)--have discernibly evolved away from the more purely fabular kind of fiction—often veering into the surreal or fantastic—that characterized her previous work, toward more naturalistic settings and more recognizably “lifelike” characters. Although these later novels are by no means conventionally crafted “literary fiction,” they draw less noticeably on the structures and iconography of fairy tales and fables than the novels for which Ducornet initially became known, especially the “elements” tetralogy, The Stain (1984), Entering Fire (1986), The Fountains of Neptune (1989), and The Jade Cabinet (1993). The recognizable motifs introduced in the earlier books recur in these later ones, but they are now not tied directly to the more imaginatively colorful contexts in which they initially appeared.

These three novels seem as well more directly autobiographical in choice of character and setting, as if only after invoking the “monstrous and the marvelous,” as the title of her 1999 collection of essays has it, through emphatically invented worlds could Ducornet then turn to the monstrous and the marvelous in the actual world of experience. The early novels were, of course, ultimately grounded in experience, both personal to the author—the settings were greatly influenced by Ducornet’s residence in a small French village, for example—and the very real human experience of wonder, cruelty, loss, and desire. In them, however, Durcornet chose to render human experience through undisguised fabulation, creating vivid characters who are nevertheless “flat” according to the prevailing assumptions of “depth” in characterization that inform most contemporary fiction. Ducornet’s fiction is intensely concerned with the effects of psychological impulses and states of mind, but these manifest themselves in the tropes, images, and external action of her stories, which perform acts of imagination rather than laboriously simulate consciousness.

Ducornet’s characteristic exercise of imagination has perhaps most frequently been described as a form of surrealism, and indeed her pervasive invocation of dreams and dreamlike situations certainly associated Durcornet’s work with surrealism in its original incarnation (not simply as the general purpose term for literary works that don’t strictly adhere to the protocols of realism it has largely become). But Ducornet’s surrealist narratives do more than incorporate hallucinatory imagery or uncanny events, although both are often featured. Instead they seamlessly integrate these elements within the formal conventions of folk and fairy tales, revealing not least the extent to which such stories themselves are inherently surreal in the way they draw on elemental fears and desires, and depict human experience in stark contrasts and distorted perspectives. Ducornet’s fictions offer distinct oppositions (good/evil, innocence/experience) that allow for occasionally extravagant plot devices, and if novels like The Stain and The Jade Cabinet draw extensively on the allegorical resources of the fairy tale (as do the stories collected in The Complete Butcher’s Tales (1980/1994) and 1997’s The Word “Desire”), the aura of dream they induce also works to modify their allegorical content, suggesting a larger encompassing meaning but in its altered reality also partially concealing it.

The dreamlike element has been muted in Gazelle, Netsuke, and Brightfellow, although the reality depicted in each is far from ordinary, the characters engaged in extreme behaviors that are not so far removed from those depicted in the earlier novels. The stories take place in mid-20th century Cairo, a current-day psychiatrist’s office and a college campus during the 1950s rather than “Dreamland” (as Phosphor in Dreamland (1995) explicitly identifies what in effect is the setting of all of Ducornet’s previous fiction), but both the often destructive latent impulses and the potentially liberating possibilities made visible in dream worlds continue to be manifest in the characters, situations, and formal assumptions of Ducornet’s most recent novels. Characters persist in being confused about the nature of their own desires, acting on them in heedless and hurtful ways, seeking to control and exploit others as a means of coping with a flawed sense of themselves and their place in the world. At the same time, wonder and beauty also exist, available to those willing to accept it, free of self-interest and the urge to possess.

Netsuke was a further departure from Ducornet’s usual practice in that its protagonist is an adult (a middle-aged verging on elderly adult at that), although the psychoanalyst whose account of his own sexual exploitation of his patients (and concurrent mistreatment of his wife) is the focus of the novel certainly well represents the Ducornet character type who, through an apparent inability to become properly attuned to the influences of desire behaves at best in a manner indifferent to the needs and well-being of others (and in the case of the psychoanalyst, that is ultimately self-destructive as well). More often the protagonist is young, if not a child (as in Gazelle) then a youth on the cusp of maturity. Brightfellow is more in keeping with Ducornet’s characteristic depiction of a youthful perspective on the world the character inhabits, featuring a young man of 19 whose “world” is mostly restricted to a college campus, where he is a ghostlike presence after he leaves his troubled home and takes residence there, successfully occupying its nooks and crannies and avoiding discovery.

Given access to the college library, the young man, who is identified simply as “Stub,” begins to read the works of an obscure anthropologist (and former professor at the college), an endeavor that pays off handsomely when one day Stub encounters an elderly man he presumes to be a retired professor and to avoid exposure claims he is an Australian student on a Fullbright scholarship studying the papers of this anthropologist, Verner Vanderloon. The professor, who insists that Stub call him “Billy,” invites Stub to live with him for what Billy assumes will be the duration of his visit as an exchange student. Stub, adopting the pseudonym “Charter Chase,” accepts, and for a while he flourishes in his new environment, cultivating with Billy what is obviously the most substantive human relationship Stub has ever experienced. In the meantime, however, Charter also develops a fascination with a young girl named Asthma, a fascination that quickly enough moves from heartfelt to creepy.

As a character, Stub/Charter seems most reminiscent of Nicholas, protagonist of The Fountains of Neptune, even though in that novel Nicholas is portrayed first as a nine year-old boy and then as a much older man who has awakened from the coma into which he fell after a near-drowning, a sleep lasting 50 years. Essentially each of these novels is a coming of age story (a favored narrative mode for Ducornet). Nicholas must cope with the emotional and psychological impulses of a pre-adolescent boy as he tries to catch up to his 60 year-old body; he has missed the maturation period that Stub is going through and must struggle to compensate. But where Nicholas finally succeeds in reconciling his mind/body split, Stub’s passage to maturity is blocked by his own emotional impairment. Eventually Stub begins to fear his masquerade is about to be revealed, but even more devastating is his disillusionment with Asthma when he finds her engaging in activity inconsistent with his romanticized vision of her. One day he sees her playing with her friend, Pea Pod:

. . .He sees Asthma slap Pea Pod across the face with such force Pea Pod stumbles and falls, vanishing as if swallowed by the floor—only to rise and fly at Asthma and, like a wild thing released from its cage, bite her arm.

Charter turns away. Repulsed and despairing, he falls to his knees, his hands held to his ringing ears. . .He has seen something primal, grotesque. He has seen two little girls transformed into harpies before his eyes.

Not long afterward, Stub sees Asthma and Pea Pod again, but to him it is as if “he has seen the end of time. . . severed from what he has come to count on, what he has come to know.” Feeling “solitary now in new and expected ways,” Stub takes his leave of Billy and proceeds to set Asthma’s house on fire, pausing only long enough to watch Asthma leap from her bedroom window and become caught in a tree before he walks away from the campus and makes his way through the woods to an isolated house that turns out to be the house of Verner Vanderloon. The novel ends on Stub’s acceptance of Vanderloon’s invitation to spend the night. “And in the morning you will be telling me just what it is you’re wanting,” Vanderloon says.

The novel’s conclusion is sudden and disconcerting. It doesn’t work only if you believe it isn’t consistent with Stub’s character as presented in the rest of the novel, but his actions force us to reflect on our response to Stub until these moments. Initially we are no doubt inclined to sympathize with him, considering the circumstances of his childhood related in the first chapters: abusive and neglectful mother, bitterly resentful father, Stub constrained to act on his own resources at an early age. When Stub takes up residence on campus (the descriptions of which seem to directly reflect Ducornet’s own experience growing up as the daughter of a professor at Bard College) and shows his skill in surviving despite his utter isolation, many readers are likely to admire him, to be rooting for him to overcome the obstacles that life has so arbitrarily put in his way. Even when he assumes his false identity and begins to take advantage of Billy’s goodwill, we might feel that, however much Stub is engaging in deception, his attempts to better himself through self-education have been real and Billy is benefitting from Stub’s companionship as much as Stub benefits from the momentary stability Billy has provided. Moreover, that Stub comes to feel a genuine attachment to Billy seems undeniable.

Perhaps it is even possible to regard Stubb’s infatuation with Asthma, at least at first, as a sincere appreciation of her childhood innocence (leavened by her cheekier qualities, as she is not always entirely respectful, especially toward Stub, to whom she has given the nickname, “Brightfellow”). But long before Stub releases his barely suppressed yearning in a literal conflagration (which must also be called an act of attempted murder), it is apparent something has gone awry in his psychic development, that his emotional wiring has become seriously crossed. If we are not quite prepared for him to lash out in such a deadly way, it finally should not really be a surprise that Stub’s idyll would come to be spoiled, most likely by his own actions. Still, the novel’s resolution is disturbing (a quality that should not be unfamiliar to long-time Ducornet readers), not least because Stub’s story is presumably still unresolved, or at least resolved only to continue, slightly revised in a different setting.

But this conclusion might provoke us not just to consider what lies ahead for Stub but also return to our initial view of him as an infant, left alone and playing on a linoleum floor: “He doesn’t know how beautiful he is,” the narrator tells us. “He doesn’t know he’s lonely and that his fear is not of his own making, that it will haunt him for the rest of his life. It will impede him years from now—twist and turn him just as an incessant wind twists and turns a tree—just as it will in unexpected ways nourish him. Yes: it will both nourish and impede him. And this is a terrible thing. How can he undo such a tangle?”

Since we have not yet been given illustration of the source of Stub’s fear, or just what makes such fear “a terrible thing,” it might be easy to take this lament as just part of an expository invocation, a lyrical flourish designed to suggest a kind of generic innocence, but Ducornet has actually provided the solution to the final mystery of Stub’s behavior at the beginning. The fear is not simply the fear of being abandoned or mistreated (both of which he suffers nonetheless), but a fear, bred from the inherent hostility he absorbs from his surroundings, of fully asserting the sort of allegiance to imagination we find him expressing as a child, as “the linoleum swells with stories” he is inventing. Consequently, his orientation to the world, to his own experience of the world, is warped, along with his relationships to other people. “At home his isolation deepens,” we are told just before Stub leaves it for his new existence lurking in the shadows of the campus. “But instead of dying, his affections are displaced.”

Those displaced affections find their ultimate displacement when Stub meets Asthma. In the solitude he has been unable to escape, his conception of beauty and wonder has not advanced beyond the childish versions he acquired while entertaining himself on the linoleum. Finally Stub’s interest in Asthma is not really sexual (although no doubt his post-pubescent libido has a role in coloring his interest), but instead he has idealized her from an infantilized perspective (probably reflecting Stub’s forced separation from Jenny, his live-in babysitter) that demands reality conform to Stub’s imagined perfection. One could say that Stub’s assumption of an invented identity is also a manifestation of his impaired sense of the role of imagination, an attempt to bring his spectral reality into actual existence through an act of make-believe.

But the primordial fear has indeed nourished Stub as well. If his presence in the world is askew, he is also undeniably resourceful, curious, and self-reliant. He skulks behind the façade of the college and its campus because he could never really participate in the routine, if often hypocritical and tawdry, life he observes on and around it. For better or worse, he is different, more alert and alive than those around him who are otherwise privileged to lead a “normal” life. Finally Stub is a character whose spirit has accommodated both the monstrous and the marvelous, so much so that they threaten to become indistinguishable. This makes him one of Rikki Ducornet’s most compelling characters, and the reason why Brightfellow leaves such a lingering impression.

Just What’s Happening Right Now 

In 1979, Robert Scholes published Fabulation and Metafiction, in retrospect perhaps the work of literary criticism most influential in shaping our perspective on “postmodern” or “experimental” fiction from the 1960s and ’70s. The fiction of this period, according to Scholes, systematically swerves away from realism toward the more elemental mode of fabulation, inspired literally by the fable rather than by modern realism and intent on “telling such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional,” unafraid of imaginative distortion or outright fantasy. Although Scholes saw fabulation and metafiction as linked, twin sides of the same experimental coin (indeed, he defines “metafiction” as “experimental fabulation”), the experimental impulse in American fiction has subsequently found expression separately in these two modes.

“Metafiction” as practiced by such writers as John Barth and Gilbert Sorrentino highlights the artificiality of traditional narrative, implicitly appealing to the “ingenuity of the fabulation” (as Scholes puts it) in substituting its own artifice for the traditional artifice of “story” (in Barth’s case attempting to renew narrative by exploiting its “exhaustion”). While this sort of self-reflexivity has continued to be common and appears even in more mainstream fiction, in the past fifteen to twenty years there has been among many avowedly experimental writers a conspicuous turn instead to a purer kind of fabulation. Whether the surrealistic fairy tales of Aimee Bender, the satirical parables of George Saunders, or the science fiction–tinged magical realism of Kelly Link, to name just three of the more prominent such writers, this sort of narrative, non-realist but still leaning on plot, has most consistently claimed the legacy of the kind of experimental fiction Scholes identified.

Among those writers devoting themselves to the fabulative mode clearly would have to be included Joanna Ruocco. Her most recent novel, Dan, is set in the fictional village named in the title, which itself seems to exist somewhere aslant reality as we know it, occupying a place on the border between the almost plausible and the mostly dreamlike. The characters in the novel likewise are at once both recognizably human and figures from the simplified world of the fable, including the protagonist, Melba Zuzzo, who on the one hand resembles the innocent maiden of a fairy tale, but on the other reacts to the dangers she encounters with a kind of incomprehension not so much expressing fear as a kind of confusion, as if she thinks her own inability to understand is to blame: her apprehensions arise not from the perception that her world is menacing, but from the possibility that it might be meaningless.

The novel follows Melba over the course of a day in Dan. While this day certainly proves to be an eventful one for Melba, those events are framed less as Melba’s story than as its dissolution, the ultimate denial of further development in her “character arc.” Melba’s experience bitterly answers the question posed at the novel’s beginning:

    Melba Zuzzo stood in the yard chewing tiredly on several pieces of gum. The day had barely started, and, as soon as it was over, another day was bound to begin. When would it end?

The novel’s conclusion suggests that it ends, both literally and figuratively, with Dan’s final words, and not just for the reader. As the narrative of Melba’s day proceeds, it quickly comes to seem that Melba has a fragile sense of herself and her place in Dan, indeed a very shaky grasp on the concept of existence itself—as reflected in a recalled conversation with her teacher Mr. Sack, to whom she declares, “I have a problem. . . I just can’t figure out what time is made of.”

            If it feels to Melba that time “must be like a kind of jelly,” as she further suggests, that is because Dan is in part the sort of provincial, backwater town in which life does indeed move slowly and in established patterns. But those patterns, while routinized, are off-kilter, seemingly normal to Melba and the inhabitants of Dan but odd and arbitrary from the reader’s perspective. Details of this skewed world emerge with deadpan regularity:

     Melba had looked around her mother’s kitchen. For years, snails had been wearing runnels in the floorboards, and in these runnels, Melba could see several dozen snails in transit. . . .

     Mr. Sack, the history and phrenology teacher, did not believe in text books. Instead, he distributed modeling clay, which the students used to shape the noses of 19^th century naval heroes. . . .

     “You’re not like the other children, Melba,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “You react poorly to elastics. Whenever you are given a piece of elastic your nose begins to bleed. I blame factors from your birth. Namely, your abnormally long umbilical cord.”

            Melba herself simply accepts the weirdness of her world, but she is nevertheless dissatisfied with what she perceives as the underlying uniformity of her existence. “You’re right,” she says in a conversation with one of the inhabitants of Dan:

"I’m always waiting. It’s because I’m confused about what’s happening. Life can’t possibly be just what’s happening right now. Then you’d be right, it would be just the two of us in the cold street, talking. This would be the whole thing. It’s only waiting that makes it more than that. I’d say remembering too, but you can’t trust memories."

Despite Melba’s reservations about the reliability of memory, the story of her day is structured precisely as a narrative of “waiting,” her experience of Dan’s all-too-familiar presence alternating with moments in which she is seized by an episode of “remembering,” usually prompted by something she observes. Like Melba, we readers wait to see what she will encounter next, what we will come to understand about this peculiar place in which she lives, although never does it really seem that we are in the midst of a conventionally developing “plot.”

            Melba’s plaint that “Life can’t possibly be just what’s happening right now” certainly puts her in conflict with the prevailing attitude in Dan, however, whose people do indeed seem wholly oriented to the present, so much so that the past seems swathed in the sort of cloudiness that hovers over the mountains surrounding the town, most disturbingly illustrated in the case of those people Melba recalls simply vanishing, a phenomenon the citizens of Dan have apparently taken in stride, provoking little curiosity or concern among them. Indeed, Melba’s references to these events and her clear resistance to the general complacency otherwise characteristic of Dan make her an object of suspicion. This suspicion and impatience is filtered mostly through the men she meets in the course of her activities (although she is castigated for her shortcomings most vociferously by her own mother), introducing the possibility that Melba’s status in Dan is especially precarious because she’s a woman.

            Certainly it is tempting to regard Dan as a novel employing  the allegorical or symbolic mode that can perhaps be taken as partly a feminist fable. Not only does the narrative conjure the atmosphere and attributes of a clearly make-believe world, a large part of this effect is achieved by Ruocco’s deliberately artless prose, its simple, straightforward diction and emphasis on declarative sentences without much figurative ornamentation. It is language that mimics the manner of a fairy tale, as if the primary effect of Melba’s experience of Dan has been to infantilize her, as evoked by the ingenuousness with which the third-person narrator conveys Melba’s awareness. Yet Dan has infantilized everyone who lives there, or at least lulled them into accepting existing conditions, however puzzling or arbitrary, as essentially inescapable. (Indeed, “the only way to leave is to go nowhere,” Melba is told.) At the novel’s end, we find Melba laid out on an examining table, exposed perhaps to some final degradation at the behest of Dan’s male authority. Yet the details of this final scene are typically enigmatic, and the scene might just as easily be interpreted as a kind of metafictional apotheosis: “The paper on this table is just like the paper I used for my drawing,” Melba declares. In the last view we have of her, “She felt the paper moving beneath her, and she lay very still on top of it, not saying anything, not moving at all,” as if Melba is being imprinted on the paper, returning her to the domain of artistic creation from which she came.

            It is difficult to say that by the novel’s conclusion Melba has found the “meaning” she desires. As well, the meaning of Joanna Ruocco’s fabulist novel is elusive, dispersed and deflected through its surreal imagery and motifs. A story with all the markings of an allegorical fable, it is closer to the kind of fabulation Scholes identifies in the work of Donald Barthelme, in which an apparent symbol really “symbolizes symbolism, reducing it to absurdity.” If Ruocco’s fiction doesn’t quite exhibit the formal or stylistic audacity of Barthelme’s, it does similarly compel us to register its motifs and images in their immediate and literal manifestation (in, as it were, their denotative state), without subordinating them to an external representational or symbolic order where they find their true significance. Ultimately Dan fails to deliver the kind of clear-cut moral traditionally associated with a fable, but this failure is actually a measure of its success.

Outside His Orbit 

Angela Woodward is a younger writer who clearly belongs to the group of innovative women writers who could be designated as fabulators, writers who tend toward undisguised fabulism as their chosen form of departure from conventional practice. Like Joanna Ruocco, Danielle Dutton, or Helen Oyeyemi, she favors fanciful, dreamlike worlds appropriate to fables and fairy tales, although similarly to, say, Ruocco, it is the ambience and mannerisms of allegorical fantasy that this fiction seeks to incorporate, not the underlying symbolic structure that allows an allegorical narrative to abstract a higher level of meaning (“the moral of the story”). For this mode of radical fabulism, the main object of subversion is “realism” conceived as fidelity to reality in its familiar aspect, subject to the know laws of causation, and in the fiction of the neofabulists this reality is freely transformed through the unfettered exercise of imagination.

Woodward’s Natural Wonders, like her previous novel, End of the Fire Cult, ultimately tells a story about a rather familiar subject—the stresses, strains, and uncertainties of marriage—but does so obliquely, through sidelong suggestion, as the relationships between the characters are filtered by and mirrored in narratives not directly relating those relationships (although the narrator/editor of Natural Wonders does provide us with some specific details about the course of her marriage to the novel’s ostensible protagonist). End of The Fire Cult most purely executes this strategy, indirectly telling us the story of the decline of its twin characters’ marriage through an elaborate exchange of stories about imaginary countries each of them invents. The conflicts between the countries correspond to conflicts in the marriage, although of course this is something the reader must deduce after accepting the novel’s unorthodox conceit. In this case, it’s the possibility of allegorical content in a narrative that the author exploits, but it’s the reader who adds meaning by reading closely enough to note the parallels and underlying connections.

Natural Wonders is somewhat less allusive than End of the Fire Cult, although in it as well what the novel at first seems to be about is not finally its literal subject. We immediately encounter what seems to be an academic lecture:

BENJY, FIRST SLIDE, PLEASE

Let me tell you about the age of the earth, he said. The English scientists worked together diligently and announced that the earth had been created on October 26, 4004 B.C. at nine in the morning. Out of formless mud, the sun rose and spread its light, the animals got to their feet and began wandering around the fields. Trees arched up, leaves unfolded out of their twigs and cast shadows on the meadow irises, purple flags wavering under the nostrils of curious gazelles.

In the second chapter, however, we learn that this is one of many lectures given by a professor (the narrator refers to him simply as “Jonathan”), now deceased, in his course on Earth and Prehistory. (We discover that the professor’s particular area of scientific expertise is “jaw measurement.”) The professor’s widow, Jenny, has been asked by his department chair to put together a “definitive edition” of her husband’s lectures as a memorial. Ultimately, however, she cannot help embellishing the lectures with scenes dramatizing his classroom presentations, his students’ responses, and episodes from her late husband’s courtship of her and their subsequent marriage.

Jonathan taught primarily an undergraduate course focusing on early scientific efforts to understand the “natural wonders” of the earth. Frequently the lectures center around a prominent scientific figure such as Louis Aggasiz, at other times they focus on more obscure figures, such as the astrophysicist Milutin Milankovitch, who calculated “the exact amount of the sun’s heat that had reached the earth at any time in its long history.” The lectures are more often fairly colorful and involved stories rather than recitation of facts, as when a crew of shipwrecked Portuguese sailors are introduced to a vegetarian diet by a “tribe of wild, matted-haired men” they encounter on the coast of India. When the ship finally returns to Portugal, the crew eagerly return to eating meat, but “meat didn’t taste the same. It had about it the possibility of not eating it, its negative, like a ghost on the stairs. Regret was its horrible aftertaste.”

This lecture arises from Jonathan’s interest in eating practices (thus his specialization), but one can ask how exactly Jenny is able to reconstruct the story, along with Jonathan’s asides, his habitual manner, and the responses of his students (often puzzled, at times uncomprehending), especially when Jenny herself says “It’s not easy to be his editor” due to the lack of clarity in the notes with which she is working. Indeed, finally the novel becomes as much about Jenny’s effort to bring her husband to life through imagination (partly that manifested by Jonathan in his lectures, partly her own) than about either Jonathan himself or the subjects of his lectures. Whether the portrait that emerges has much fidelity to the “real” Jonathan—likely it doesn’t—is less important than what it tells us about Jenny’s need to give Jonathan, and perhaps their marriage, a dignity he—and it—might not have possessed. She may also be attempting to persuade herself that she had good reasons to marry him in the first place (or realizing that she did not).

“We were both of us foolish, him for falling in love with me, me for not putting him off for his own good,” Jenny tells us early on, as she contemplates the attitude Jonathan’s colleagues take toward her following his death. In her own characterizations of the marriage Jenny confesses that whatever passion that might have existed at the beginning dissipated rather quickly:

. . .One morning as I left for work, he turned in to kiss my cheek, and I swerved sideways. As we both righted ourselves, our cheeks passed by each other, only a few inches apart, so that my refused intimacy nevertheless took me through the field of his heat, the smell of his scalp and shaving cream. A few months earlier, I might have inhaled with something like pleasure, or at least nostalgia for the early moments of our love affair. Now it was a relief to be just outside his orbit.

When Jenny immediately follows this fragment of memory that opens a chapter with Jonathan’s lecture on “geologic time” (“the scale of it all takes some imagination to comprehend,” she has him announce), it is evident that her mission to memorialize her husband’s work and her unavoidable reflections on a marriage that seems increasingly impalpable to her have merged into a narrative meditation on the inscrutable agency of time, the natural wonder of the ways human beings attempt to reckon with its force.

Ultimately Natural Wonders is less conceptually audacious in its formal conceit than End of the Fire Cult, and perhaps this is why eventually interest lags: the novel proves more readily assimilable to conventional expectations, even if it doesn’t really have a plot and the central relationship is “developed” only in the most implied and indirect manner. Readers who prefer fiction that is “about” something and invites emotional engagement would not be disappointed with Natural Wonders, although they must be willing to read more actively and imaginatively than a typically “immersive” novel might ask. This novel could without serious distortion be called a love story, albeit more about the natural wonder of its absence than its presence. Still, it finds a way to relate such a story that takes us beyond the familiar means of rehearsing it.

Aimee Bender and the Surrealist Fable 

There are really two writers at work in the fiction of Aimee Bender. First and most conspicuously we find the fabulist, who frequently invests her stories with a surface surrealism by evoking fables and fairy tales. The surreal qualities of her tales might be more pronounced and extreme (a human woman marries an ogre and begets ogre children) or more restrained and less insistent (as in both of her novels), but anyone who reads her collections of short stories in particular would have to conclude she is a writer partial to devices that enhance and distort reality. Nevertheless, there is also a realist lurking beneath the surface of Bender's surreal narratives, a writer who uses the surreal plot turns and fairy tale motifs to render middle-class American life in a way that remains faithful to its underlying configurations and habitual behaviors.

The surrealist Bender ("magical realist" is also a term that she has accepted as a description of her method) undeniably has been influential on other writers (particularly younger women writers), but while arguably her influence was felt strongly because her fiction seemed a significant departure from the norms of the minimalism and neorealism that dominated short fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, she is certainly not the first contemporary writer to work in the anti-realist mode inspired by fairy tales. Such postmodern writers as Robert Coover and Steven Millhauser have consistently practiced this sort of fabulism, but it is in the work of British writer Angela Carter that we really see the comprehensive appropriation of the fairy tale in order to fashion an invigorating and innovative form of what Robert Scholes called "fabulation." Her stories and novels exploit the elemental patterns and iconography of fairy tales to create very modern (not to mention very adult) works of aesthetically sophisticated fiction.

Bender is clearly enough influenced by Carter, although her approach, and especially her style, are much different than Carter's, in some ways their total opposite. Where Carter bends, twists, and transforms the conventions of the fairy tale, in a prose that is equally sinuous and startling, Bender more or less borrows these conventions and their attendant imagery in order to use them as extensions of her focus on the conflicts of ordinary life, and her prose is generally ordinary as well, more concerned simply with relating the bizarre plot turns than with enlisting language in the effort to transfigure entrenched narrative practice. Where Carter seemed inspired to assimilate the fairy tale in order to expand the formal possibilities of "serious" fiction, Bender seems content simply to invoke anti-realist strategies already recognizable from the work of writers such as Kafka, Marquez, and Carter herself.

In this way Bender's fiction contrasts as well with that of Rikki Ducornet, Angela Carter's most immediate and, in my view, most accomplished successor. Ducornet is rarely mentioned in discussions of Bender's books (or in interviews with Bender herself), so it must be assumed that whatever effect Ducornet's work may have had on Bender is either minimal or just gets lost in the citation of her other influences (which would not be surprising given the general neglect of Ducornet, both as an important writer in general and specifically as an important innovative woman writer). Like Carter, Ducornet uses fabulation as embodied in the fairy tale to create transformed fictional worlds, worlds that are not merely "unreal" but in fact are very real in their integrity as verbal-aesthetic inventions. Partly through her active, vibrant prose style and partly through her dynamic imagination, Ducornet makes us feel we are authentically inhabiting the fabricated world her fiction collectively invokes.

This is not really what Aimee Bender seems to be after. If her fiction does show imagination, it is imagination with a limited effect, the use of a surreal device almost as if it were a kind of trope, a flourish added to the text, not part of a larger effort to create a completely different kind of formal order, one in which such devices would not be the alternative means to the same narrative purposes. Not all of Bender's fiction in fact makes use of these devices. Her first novel in particular, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2001), is essentially a work of straightforward realism, albeit one with a "quirky" cast of characters and an "offbeat" situation. Other of her stories contain few if any surreal or fantastic touches, and these more conventional narratives reflecting a more familiar kind of workshop realism allow us to recognize that the surrealism in Bender's fiction complements its realism more than subverts it. Where the realism of middle-class anxiety and dysfunction leaves off, the whimsical distortion of magical realism takes up.

Perhaps this strategy is best illustrated in Bender's second novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010). Finally this is a novel about the hidden discontents of the American nuclear family, but rather than treat that subject as domestic drama, Bender creates an extended fantasia in which familial unhappiness is revealed not through specific conflict but via a supernatural plot device whereby each member of the family has been endowed with a special power--the daughter and protagonist of the novel is able to "read" food, to determine the emotional state of the person who prepared it, while her brother, we eventually discover, has the ability to disappear into inanimate objects, a power that ultimately he apparently exercises for good, as he vanishes and is not heard from again. Thus does the sadness, disappointment, and desperation that afflict this family become concrete through the fantasy device—at least to us, although not so directly for the family itself, except the daughter, who otherwise undergoes her journey of maturation more or less quietly, even if her brother's final fate does provide the novel with a creepy enough denouement.

Probably readers find this variation on the bildungsroman effective to the extent they can credit the fantastic elements of the premise. I confess to finding the protagonist's peculiar form of sixth sense an initially intriguing and potentially fruitful literary stratagem, but when Bender expands the trope to encompass the whole family's spooky endowments, the effect mutes the trope's signifying capacity, reducing it to a gimmick that finally can't maintain the integrity of its own quirk, leaving the novel itself stranded awkwardly between whimsical fantasy and a kind of naturalistic family drama in which the family can't escape its hereditary defect. This makes the subplot involving the protagonist's brother less mysterious than melodramatic, heavy-handed rather than horrifying. Indeed, when the protagonist encounters her brother in his apartment as he is in the process of literally disappearing into the chair he sits in, an episode that is clearly meant to be uncanny is really so overwrought as to seem inescapably silly.

In some of Bender's stories, whimsy wins out over all other tonal qualities. "Ironhead," for example, surely among her most surreal stories, tells the tale of a family of pumpkinheads who unaccountably sire a baby with an ironhead instead. The boy feels horribly out of place, of course, and the story pulls heavily at our heartstrings in provoking feelings of pity for the poor lad:

The ironhead turned out to be a very gentle boy. He played quietly on the his own in the daytime with clay and dirt, and contrary to expectations, he preferred wearing ragged messy clothes with wrinkles. His mother tried once to smooth down his outfits with her own, separated iron, but when the child saw what was his head, standing by itself, with steam exhaling from the flat silver base just like his breath, he shrieked a tinny scream and matching steam streamed from his chin as it did when he was particularly upset. . . .

A passage like this comes perilously close to, if it doesn't topple over completely into, a cartoon-like sentimentality. The remainder of the story doesn't really advance beyond this level of emotional engagement. Once we've registered the notion that a boy has been born with an iron for a head, the story has little more to offer. It continues to rely on faux-naïve phrasing ("a very gentle boy," "played quietly") and an altogether formulaic plot—the iron-headed boy dies, of course, leaving everyone very sad. In another story in the same book (Willful Creatures), "The End of the Line," a "big man" goes to a pet store "to buy himself a little man to keep him company." This rather tepidly surrealist premise established, again the story proceeds in a fairly predictable, and rather mawkish, fashion. The big man begins to torture the little man, who contemplates his escape but is unable to accomplish it. The big man sets the little man free, but decides to follow him as he drives away in a "small blue bus"—he "just wanted to see where they lived." A (literally) little girl looks up at the "giant" who has found them and wonders at the "size of the pity that kept unbuckling in her heart."

For a "parable" like this to work, in my opinion, it either has to implicitly examine the structural and thematic assumptions of the parable itself (in the process reconfiguring the possibilities of the form) or it has to manifest some stylistic vigor to compensate for the formulaic nature of parables and fables. Carter and Ducornet, as well as, say, Borges, Calvino, or Donald Barthelme, are writers who readily perform each of these tasks, but Bender's stories do neither. Beneath the ultimately superficial distortions of ordinary reality, plot conventions associated with the fabulative mode are preserved more or less unselfconsciously, and the stories are related in a flat and affectless style that mostly keeps the reader's attention on the developing actions. (Narrated in the first person, Bender's two novels are somewhat less illustrative of this style.) It's as if the author wants to urgently draw our attention to the strange events unfolding in these stories, except that they're related in such low intensity language they seem strangely uninteresting.

Bender's most recent book, the story collection The Color Master, is generally of a piece with her two previous collections, containing stories by both the realist and the surrealist Bender. A number of the former are first-person narratives, and thus the stylistic tenor of the book as a whole is more varied than The Girl in the Flammable Skirt or Willful Creatures. Among the realist stories "The Fake Nazi" and "The Doctor and the Rabbi" are perhaps the most effective, in each case managing to appropriately evoke strong emotions in contexts that might seem inauspicious ("The Fake Nazi," about a man who falsely accuses himself of having been a Nazi) or hopelessly grandiose ("The Doctor and the Rabbi," about the title characters talking about God), while "Tiger Mending" seems impossibly twee, succumbing to the kind of sentimentality that mars many of Bender's surreal fables. The best story in the book is the title story, a "prequel" of sorts to the French fairy tale, "Donkeyskin." It is a story that recalls the work of Carter or Ducornet more than any other of Bender's fairy tale-derived fictions in its imaginative expansion of this particular fairy tale.

In my view, Aimee Bender's fiction is more important as a sign of a shift in sensibility among current writers than a significant aesthetic achievement advancing the cause of innovative fiction. Her stories, beginning with the debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998), announced that an alternative to minimalist realism was available, a call that later writers such as Karen Russell, Kate Bernheimer and Joanna Ruocco clearly heeded. Whether these writers will ultimately ratify and extend the legacy of Carter and Ducornet more convincingly than has Bender herself is still to be determined, but unless Aimee Bender is freshly inspired to transcend the limitations of the strategies she has continued to employ so far, her work is unlikely to be a further part of that effort.

These Are the Days of Nothing 

It could be argued that the strongest rival to autofiction as the most noteworthy tendency in current American fiction is its effective opposite: non-genre fiction that distorts reality through fantasy devices that create fabulous worlds--"fabulous" as in suggestive of fables. Some of this fiction is indeed reminiscent of fables and fairy tales, while other such works make less use of allegorical narrative while still creating worlds that are essentially surreal. If the former renews a kind of story as venerable as storytelling itself, it perhaps is most immediately rooted in the fiction of a writer like Angela Carter, who performed arresting variations on recognizable motifs and themes drawn from the fabulist tradition. The latter are essentially a recent permutation, less tied to narrative conventions, more freely imagistic and amorphous. The fiction of Blake Butler might be put into this category.

Sarah Rose Etter's The Book of X more appropriately belongs to the first category. It takes place in a make-believe world (although retaining enough similarity to our own that it doesn't cross over into a purely hallucinatory surrealism) in which it is possible for a girl to be born with a torso tied in a knot (as had her mother and grandmother) and for her family to be in the meat business--meat they harvest from underground chambers where it grows on the wall. The narrative seems to follow a trajectory by which the girl, Cassie, after a life spent struggling with the hardships her condition unavoidably imposes, seems ultimately to face the possibility of redemption, of a happy ending to her story, but even after undergoing an operation that undoes her knot and offers her the possibility of a more "normal" life, contentment continues to elude her, and the novel ends with Cassie's apparent suicide. Thus while we are perhaps led to expect the sort of happy ending that usually concludes a fairy tale, The Book of X  subverts those expectations, to the extent that some readers might find it shocking (certainly distressing).

But this deviation from presumed narrative direction is actually the novel's most important move. Not only does it work to avoid the sentimentality that might accompany an unqualified fidelity to the conventions of the fairy tale narrative--indeed acting instead as a useful corrective to those conventions--a happy ending would likely diminish the book's thematic resonance, suggesting that the  hardships and suffering experienced by the protagonist can be mitigated easily enough, that the harm done to her is ephemeral and not a necessary source of her identity. Because of her circumstances, Cassie can be seen as emblematic in several different ways, most obviously as a disabled person but also as a young girl struggling with socially imposed "body issues," as a young woman succumbing to depression, and a "fairy tale ending" to her story would seem to rob her character of its evocative associations, if not actually defeat the purpose behind the plot and character devices employed for most of the novel.

Although the method by which Cassie tells her story is unorthodox--highly fragmented (with attention given to the spatial arrangement of the fragments), interspersed with "visions" in which, generally speaking, Cassie imagines an alternative to the life she is actually living--the story itself proceeds (in the present tense) chronologically through Cassie's life. In its broadest outlines, her life is relatively uneventful, if often melancholy and full of disappointment--most of the narrative's interest lies in Cassie's psychological turmoil and in the vividness of the surreal fantasia of many of the visions. (In one episode, she visits a "Man Store," where she buys half of a man (top half) because it is all she can afford, hoping to buy the other half later.) The first third of the book chronicles Cassie's youth, the second her attempt to build a life for herself after moving to the city, and the final third her relocation to an isolated cabin in the mountains in the aftermath of her operation.

Cassie's parents are depicted as more or less familiar sorts of parental figures, despite their ostensibly bizarre circumstances. Her mother suffers the same affliction as the daughter, but seems to have accepted her lot and raises Cassie to do so as well, although Cassie frequently expresses frustration with her exacting expectations. Her father at first seems distant and damaged, but it is the father to whom Cassie ultimately seems most strongly connected, and it is his death near the novel's conclusion that leads her to what seems her final unhappy act. While seeking out her independence in the city, Cassie as well maintains a basically ordinary existence working a routine office job, although she does acquire the habit of picking up men in bars. While some of them are indeed taken aback by Cassie's knot (one leaves her apartment immediately), nothing particularly untoward happens, just more discouragement and disappointment. After moving to the cabin she does fall in love with a married man named Henry, but her passion dissipates when her father dies.

Thus Cassie's apparent suicide--she takes some "white pills," and in the novel's concluding sentence tells us that "My eyes fail and my eyes widen, all pain finally gone" as she confronts "the wide bright mouth of death"--for the attentive reader does not exactly come from nowhere. Her experiences have left her vulnerable to despair after her father dies, and it is as if she recognizes that  the apparent realization of her quest for conventional happiness is inauthentic, romanticized wish fulfillment, in comparison to the grief she feels, a grief that is all too real. She falls into what is quite clearly an incapacitating depression:

These are the days of nothing: slow motion, under water, distant from other bodies, other thoughts, other humans. I stop wanting and become very still. I want to cut my life off at the legs.

That Cassie succumbs to this depression is surely disturbing, but it seems clear enough throughout the novel that she is, in the words of David Foster Wallace, a "depressed person."

It would seem, then, that Etter refuses to conclude a chronicle of depression with a happy outcome even more than the story about overcoming adversity the novel superficially evokes. Yet in most ways The Book of X still performs the same sort of signifying function we associate with fables and  fairy tales. To ultimately subvert narrative conventions is not to dispense with them entirely--they still condition our response to the story's development. And the surreal elements, particularly the fantastic transfiguration of the protagonist's body, are quite clearly designed more for their metaphorical  than for their tonal effect or creation of character (although Cassie is nevertheless a memorable and convincing character). We might even say there is a "moral" to Cassie's story, if a sobering one: things don't always work out.

I must say that of the two kinds of non-realist fiction described above, I am usually more impressed with works of the second kind, as the narrative-driven fabulist fiction often veers closely to didacticism, of using fiction as a means to "say something." This is unavoidably the case with The Book of X as well, although I would not say that it is overtly didactic. The impression it leaves most firmly is that of a skillfully directed act of imagination that is itself still the most important point.

The Artifice of Story

It seems accurate to call Jen Fawkes, at least on the examples offered by her first two books, Mannequin and Wife and Tales the Devil Told Me (the former published in 2020, the latter in 2021) a fabulist, in a line of fabulist writers that has been joined by more and more writers over the past 20 years or so. Perhaps the emergence (or reemergence) of the fanciful and dreamlike in American fiction--to call this sort of fiction "surreal" would tie it too closely to the 20th century literary movement that made the term popular, with which it really shares only a preference for the distortion of reality--can be understood as a reaction to the rise of minimalist neorealism as the prevailing practice in the 1970s and 80s. But while among those adopting fabulation as an approach could be counted a writer such as George Saunders, the practice seems to have been especially appealing to a burgeoning number of women writers, who have found it more compelling than realism as a way of representing women's experiences, especially as way of challenging social, cultural, and psychological stereotypes.

Although the current writers we immediately identify with such a tendency might include, say, Aimee Bender and Karen Russell, arguably the real precursors to this mode of contemporary fiction are, arguably, Angela Carter and Rikki Ducornet. Their work directly invokes fables and fairy tales, evoking female sexual desire in a way that seems in tune with the liberatory cultural energies of the times (1960s/70s) but also, given expectations of women writers before them, still seems truly transgressive. Their fiction has a complexity and allusiveness that transforms the elemental simplicity of the fabular into a poetically suggestive kind of tale that retains the allegorical ambience of the fable but conveys meaning indirectly through the beguiling potency of the imagery. Subsequent writers showing the influence of the approach taken by Carter and Ducornet have affirmed the pursuit of an "alternate reality" as a valuable strategy in evoking facets of women's lives largely glossed over in American fiction, but the depth of vision to be found in the earlier writers is more difficult to emulate.

Jen Fawkes seems more inclined to the complexity of perspective found in Carter and Ducornet, even if at first glance the stories in a book like Tales the Devil Told Me might be characterized as simple reversals of the viewpoint associated with traditional fairy tales (substitute as protagonist the evil character for the good one). The first book, Mannequin and Wife, does not so explicitly cross over into the fabular world of make-believe but instead injects elements of the fabulous and the uncanny into what might otherwise be ordinary situations, as in "Sometimes, They Kill Each Other," the first story in the book (told in the plural first-person by the secretarial pool), in which the executives in a corporate office express their competitive impulses by literally engaging in duels staged in the office for the spectatorial pleasure of everyone assembled. In "Iphigenia in Baltimore," the "strength" of the title's mythical character is again literally figured in the story's protagonist, a fourth-grade teacher described as the "strongest woman alive" who must refrain from romance out of her fear she may unwittingly injure her partner, as once she had done in the throes of passion, wrapping her legs around her would-be lover and crushing his pelvis. 

Other stories in Mannequin and Wife are less fanciful, although still disposed to the odd and eccentric. In "Rebirth of the Big Top," the owner of a drive-in theater begins to hire the former employees of a defunct Sideshow Carnival ("Miranda the Elephant Girl," "Julius the Lobster Man"), whose presence begins to revivify his business. The protagonist of "Call Me Dixon" (ultimately an  unreliable narrator, to say the least) assumes the identity of a code-breaker (whom the narrator tells us he found dead by suicide) during the London blitz of World War II, but discovers that he is not the only one who might be suspected of operating under a counterfeit identity. In general the stories in this book effectively contest the boundary between the real and the fabulous, but ultimately they are somewhat various in tone and structure, ranging from paragraph-long flash pieces to longer stories (such as "Call Me Dixon") that have the looser discursive structure (if not the length) of a novel rather than a more strictly controlled linear narrative.

The stories in Tales the Devil Told Me also vary in length (the longest story in the book, "The Tragedie of Claudius, Prince of Denmark," Fawkes's retelling of Hamlet from Claudius's perspective, is almost novella-length), but the stories are thematically and structurally unified by the book's underlying conceit: the stories are essentially "twice-told tales" by which well-known fables, fairy tales, and other famous narratives are retold from the point of view of the stories' ostensible antagonists or narrative foils. The recompositions include the stories of Rumpelstiltskin (of a race of creatures called "rumpelstilts), Peter Pan, and Hansel and Gretel, as well as more modern works such as Moby-Dick, The Jungle Book, and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Some of the narratives retain their original settings, while others are updated to a more contemporary scene ("Never, Never" is a sequel of sorts to Captain Hook's sea adventures, after he marries and settles down in an American suburb). Almost all of them intelligently and provocatively explore the potentially more complex and ambiguous imagined realities of characters who in their original incarnations played the narrower and more reduced role of villain.

Especially effective in realizing this ambition are "The Tragedie of Claudius" and "A Moment of the Lips," the latter the story of Polyphemus the cyclops and his encounter with Odysseus and his crew on their voyage back to Ithaca. It could be said that "Claudius" humanizes Claudius just by showing that, perhaps, there is another side to the story of Hamlet père's  betrayal, necessarily inaccessible to the son, but the effort doesn't really critique Shakespeare's lack of interest in this other story; rather, it illuminates the way in which Shakespeare had to ignore this part of the story so that his play could focus on the psychological deterioration of the title character--and thus fulfill the requirements of tragedy. As with many of the other pieces in the book, by providing us with an alternative version of an established story, Fawk/es highlights the artifice of story, perhaps prompting reflection on the contingencies in narrative, the varied purposes that determine both what is built into a story and what is left out. "A Moment of the Lips" makes us especially aware of the stark differences between the requisites of epic narrative and those of modern psychologically-directed fiction. Polyphemus doesn't mean to eat Odysseus's men: he just can't seem to escape his cyclops nature. His actions appall, but his sincerity appeals.

Fawkes reports that she will be following up these two collections of short fiction with a novel that sounds like it will continue in the fabulist mode but also be formally adventurous in a somewhat more conspicuous way (Tales the Devil Told Me in particular relies necessarily on essentially traditional narrative conventions). This surely is something worth anticipating, after this very engaging pair of first books.

The Temporal Compression of Daydream Experience

A brief synopsis of S.D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid (Coach House Books) certainly makes it sound like a work of science fiction or fantasy, or perhaps a futuristic dystopia: a man given to idleness and daydreaming, recently unemployed and occupied mostly with sleeping, meets a man who claims to be the "Ambassador of the Free Republic of Onirica," literally the land of dreams. This man, Chevauchet, recruits our narrator, after leading him on visits into other people's dreams, to join him in his mission to combat the modern plague of sleeplessness and to restore the value of reverie and dreams. Eventually the narrator begins to recruit people to go underground with him (literally) and symbolically resist society's increasing intolerance of sleep and dreams (they impede productivity, of course) by, well, sleeping. Unsurprisingly, the mission doesn't end well.

However, the reader who would thus expect The Eyelid to conform to the expectations we might have of fantasy fiction would probably be disappointed with this book. It does not render its story in the scenic, episodic way a work of fiction prompted first of all by a commitment to narrative would, as the story that finally gets told is secondary to the essentially expository discourse offered by the narrator, a very learned and allusive discourse incorporating 16th century French philosophy, neoplatonism, modern political theory, and numerous other references to European intellectual history. Most of these disquisitions are summaries of Chevauchet's philosophy of dreaming and its roots in dissident thinkers and emancipatory ideals. "Novel of ideas" is a label that certainly does fit  The Eyelid, although even here its ideas are not the occasional subject of conversation or remain merely metaphorical and emblematic; their explicit exposition by the narrator is the primary focus of much of the novella.

Perhaps the most sustained act of storytelling in The Eyelid occurs when Chevauchet takes the narrator on the journeys into the ongoing dreams of various dreamers, an endeavor in which, the narrator tells us, "Chevauchet made himself my Virgil, a genial cicerone through the circles of Hell and along the terraces of Purgatory, raising my hopes of Paradise." The narrator witnesses "dreams of love," dreams of dread," and other types of night-dreams experienced by the dreamers of Onirica, which, as we come to understand, is really a kind of distillation of dreaming, Chevauchet its keeper. But it is not only the night-dream (over which we have less control)  that Chevauchet seeks to protect but also daydreams and reverie, which can be more fruitful sources of human creativity. 

This series of scenes is relatively brief, however, as the focus switches to the exposition of Chevauchet's theories about the importance of dreaming to human fulfillment and, ultimately, the narrator's act of resistance against a society that eventually tries to eliminate dreaming altogether by simply forbidding it, substituting for it a mind-numbing drug that induces a "beatific state of high-functioning sleeplessness." (The novella is nominally set in Paris, but it is a Paris that has been absorbed into a "Greater America" that has imposed its exploitative ways on much of the world.) This drug, CI, might be a supercharged kind of opioid, but its effects might also reflect our now all-pervasive virtuality: "The masterminds of CI sought by degrees to replace all natural creative imagination with artifice. They claimed it was for the sake of quality control: optimized content and better use of time, what with advances in the temporal compression of daydream experience. In reality, it was to abolish mental activity that was off the grid and went untracked."

In the end, Chevauchet disappears, presumably enfeebled by the cessation of dreaming, leaving the narrator to persevere with his own meager rebellion, but soon enough his clandestine sleep sessions are discovered, and he must flee for his life--unsuccessfully, as it turns out. Thus the novella as a whole does advance a narrative, however interrupted or suspended at times, beginning with the recently unemployed narrator meeting Chevauchet on a park bench and ending with his presumed death. But it finally conveys less the impression of a story told than of a story added to a philosophical rumination on the ebbing of introspection and imagination in the 21st century, a reverie of its own that can be categorized as fiction because the story is quite obviously all made up, while the ruminations filtered through the characters seem just as obviously to reflect the thinking of the author.

Is this necessarily a problem, though? Since the author clearly does not intend to offer a conventional dystopic narrative but to use the conceit of dystopia to directly contemplate the actually existing conditions that might lead us to such a state, we can't really say that the book fails to fulfill its ambitions: It couldn't be called an aesthetic failure if its purpose is not primarily aesthetic to begin with. Finally the fantastic elements in conjunction with the frequent expository passages lead me to regard The Eyelid as an allegory, but an allegory of the pre-modern kind in which the allegorical meaning is not concealed within the symbolic design of the story, to be released through interpretation, but lies plainly on the surface, communicated directly.

An appreciation of this novella thus depends on the reader's acceptance not just of the allegorical mode but of this particular undisguised version of it. For myself, I can say that the book certainly does conceptualize the effects of our current hypercapitalist culture and its brutal work ethic in a way I find illuminating and insightful, although I confess I am also less able to take from it the sort of aesthetic gratification I normally hope to find in works of fiction. Still, when I consider whether the insights Chrostowska provides are more emphatically and memorably expressed in the form she has chosen than might be the case in more straightforward critical discourse, I would have to say they are.

Heir to a Prodigious Fertility 

The fiction of Steve Stern is arguably more suffused with traditional Jewish folklore and Judaic mysticism than all post-World War II American Jewish writers other than I.B. Singer and Cynthia Ozick. Yet Stern has said in interviews that he does not really feel himself an authentic part of that tradition, his familiarity with it being mostly second hand: "I was not born into an observant Jewish family and I really wasn’t exposed to the culture or tradition growing up, so I came into it pretty late. When I did, it began to determine the way I looked at the world and my work. Because it’s not a kind of primary experience with me—the idea of Jewish culture, tradition and heritage—I’ve had to define what that sensibility means. It’s something that I sort of wrestle with all the time" (Washington University Student Life, Nov, 21, 2008).

Few of Stern's readers could doubt that the portrayal of traditional beliefs and of a specifically Jewish milieu in his stories and novels seems thoroughly authentic. Whether the characters are rabbis or nonobservant Jews with little sense of attachment at all to tradition, they behave and speak just as one imagines such characters would behave and speak. Whether set in the Russian Pale of Settlement in the 19th century or in the Jewish quarter called the "Pinch" in 20th century Memphis, Tennessee, the stories Stern tells all seem firmly rooted in place and time, with all the attendant details we could want. And whether they are the customs of the shtetl or of the American suburbs, the way of life and beliefs of the communities depicted are represented with the same authority. Although the prevailing strategy of fabulation and fantasy in Stern's work makes it problematic to regard his narratives as "realistic," certainly the interaction of character, event, and setting produces a "world" both credibly and vividly rendered.

But that world is not one that seems reproduced directly (or indirectly) from autobiographical experience. Although there are characters in Stern's fiction who might originate in a version of a younger Steve Stern, none of their encounters with Jewish practices or Jewish lore appear to be derived from the "real life" of the author except for the sense of wonder inspired in them when they are initiated in such practices by discovering them and that must indeed reflect Stern's initiation as a young folklorist in Memphis. What is most remarkable about Stern's work is the way in which he is able to evoke a comprehensively believable world through acquired knowledge and force of vision. It is an alternate world in which Catskill monologists are inhabited by the dybbuks of comedians past and rabbis fall asleep and wake up a hundred years later, a world that Stern constructs from a vibrant tradition but that ultimately conforms only to the laws of storytelling and imagination. Stern is a writer of whose work one can profitably say it is both intensely real and utterly artificial, both transparently representational and a thoroughgoing, extended metafiction.

On the one hand, the world we encounter in Steve Stern's fiction has a vividness and a tangibility that surely makes us believe in it as a version of the reality inhabited by American Jews and their immediate ancestors. This feature of Stern's work is perhaps best exemplified by the story collection Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (1986), which offers nine stories of surpassing individual charm and almost flawless execution that also work together to memorably evoke the Pinch neighborhood on North Main Street in Memphis. By the time Stern began writing his stories (by the time he became aware of the existence of this downtown neighborhood in the first place), the Pinch had long since disappeared into urban facelessness, so Stern's depiction of it necessarily blends historical reconstruction with imaginative projection—by Stern's own account, largely the latter. The very first story in Lazar Malkin, "Moishe the Just," begins with its narrator noting how he and his friends spent one summer "on the roof, spying on our neighbors across the street":

        We would kneel on the sticky tarpaper, our chins propped on top of a low parapet, encrusted with bird droppings. In this way we watched the clumsy progress of the courtship of Billy Rubin and the shoemaker's daughter. We saw, like a puppet play in silhouette, Old Man Crow beating his wife behind drawn shades. Through their open windows we saw the noisy family Pinkus gesticulating over their hysterical evening meal. We saw Eddie Kid Katz sparring with shadows and amply endowed Widow Taubenblatt in her bath, but even with her we got bored.

One can't help but feel an initial alignment between the boys taking in the activities of the Pinch from their rooftop and the author of Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, identifying not so much with the lived experience of the people on the streets and in their homes but with the perspective from above, from outside that experience and attempting to find a purchase on it. But, like the boys, Stern's imagination won't settle for just the boring stuff, the ordinary cruelties and indiscretions. Although anchored in the ordinary, his fiction discovers the potential for transcendence and a place for wonder, even while the sometimes marvelous events and fanciful beings from Jewish folklore it introduces are presented as if they themselves are perfectly ordinary. The enhancement of reality Stern achieves is perhaps illustrated most suggestively in the conclusion to this book's title story. Lazar Malkin has just been spirited away by the Angel of Death, and the narrator observes:

        I threw up the window sash and opened my mouth to shout. But I never found my tongue. Because that was when, before the door slammed behind them, I got a glimpse of kingdom come.

        It looked exactly like the yard in back of the shop, only--how should I explain it--sensitive. It was the same brick wall with glass embedded on top, the same ashes and rusty tin cans, but they were tender and ticklish to look at. Intimate like (excuse me) flesh beneath underwear. For the split second that the door stayed open, I felt I was turned inside-out, and what I saw was glowing under my skin in place of my kishkes and heart.

The fictional world rendered in Stern's fiction is "tender and ticklish," although it does resemble the ordinary world in its external features. But ultimately Stern is more interested in the eternal than the external, even if the external view from the rooftop is where the story must begin.

Stern's characteristic use of fabulation and allegory to emphasize fundamental human experiences (however much they are represented through specifically Jewish images and devices) is perhaps most tellingly exemplified in "The Ghost and Saul Bozoff." This story (perhaps more appropriately called a novella) not only relates allegorically the story of Jewish immigration to America, but as well Stern's own rediscovery of his Jewish heritage and its transformation into the fiction to be found in Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven. Saul Bozoff—in this story at any rate, as he makes a reappearance as a younger man in The Angel of Forgetfulness—is a "novelist of modest renown, hailed at his debut by one reviewer as 'a brave new chronicler of failure,' he had failed to fulfill his initial promise. He had, in the twenty or so years of his so-called career, written himself into ever diminishing circles of confinement." On a retreat at a writer's colony, Saul comes across a collection of stories written by one Leah Rosenthal who, he discovers, was an immigrant from the Ukraine who had died at the age of 27. Dipping into the book, he finds the stories unlike anything he's read before: "in their communion of archaic and slapstick sensibilities, their illicit marriages of Old Testament and pagan themes, the stories were hard to pin down. They seemed, despite their situation in an undeniably authentic turn-of-the-century East Side, anchored to no particular place or time."

        One night, after an evening of partying, Saul looks up from his bed to find the ghost of Leah Rosenthal staring back at him. She suggests to Saul that they "collaborate," since "I had this cruelly aborted life. . .so I never got to finish what I started to say." Under Leah's influence, Saul begins to discover his own way of writing with authority:

        So what next, he wondered, rubbing his hands together, looking out the window as if for a clue. Somewhere beyond the pines the old moribund world was still rallying, he supposed, for its pyrotechnical swan song. So what else was new under that smudge of a sun? For his own material, thank you, Saul would prefer to look closer to home, where there were no end of tales to relate. Here, as beneficiary of Leah Rosenthal's invisible estate, he was heir to a prodigious fertility. Stories grew on trees! And all that Saul had to do to harvest them was to be there when they ripened and fell to earth.

If we take this final story in Lazar Malkin as a dramatization of an artistic credo of sorts, then both this book and Stern's subsequent work are the fruits of an effort to harvest those story-trees. Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, A Plague of Dreamers, and The Wedding Jester continue to offer the kind of emblematic narratives at work in Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, most (but not all) of them set in the Pinch. Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground is in fact the further elaboration of an idea contemplated by Saul Bozoff, the story of a young Jewish boy who takes up "with the black kids on Beale Street--'like their mascot or something'" and that features a black boy, previously thought mute, who suddenly "starts to jabber" and eventually dies of his malady. This novel employs less of the magical realism found in either Lazar Malkin or the subsequently published books, and seems more an attempt to flesh out the Pinch/Memphis as Stern's fictional "territory."

A Plague of Dreamers and The Wedding Jester more fully return to the fabular mode of Lazar Malkin. A Plague of Dreamers is an especially resonant effort in this mode, a collection of three novellas that not only incorporates the elements of fantasy and folklore introduced in Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven but also features fictions that perhaps most consistently employ a common motif in Stern's work, the underlying yearning among many of his characters to escape their confining material circumstances, to permanently inhabit the realm that is more "sensitive." The first novella, "Zelik Rifkin and the Tree of Dreams" is an especially good example of this. Zelik Rifkin, a "less than inspired grocer's assistant" in the Pinch, is chased up a tree one hot summer night as the citizens of the community are sleeping en masse in the park to escape the oppressive conditions in their homes. When he reaches the top of the tree, Rifkin finds himself literally in a dream world, one that gathers up the separate dreams of the slumberers below into a communal projection of their desires and confusions.

Rifkin soon discovers that he can intervene in the collective dreamwork of the Pinch, with the result that where before he was something of an outcast in the community, he now becomes its most celebrated member. Of course, such a state of affairs cannot last long, even in regions of the imagination. When the weather turns, Rifkin no longer has access to his dream world and is eventually returned to his previous lowly stature. The novella's conclusion, however, skips ahead one year to another heat wave and, in a gesture that reiterates the story's case for our overwhelming need for imaginative release, Stern follows Rifkin back up his tree of dreams—where his "outmoded self" apparently meets its demise and his spiritually transformed counterpart "stroll[s] off into the thick of things."

Although Zelik Rifkin's action borders on escapism—something that might perhaps be said of Stern's fiction itself—he is nonetheless determined to participate, albeit only in a world beyond the treetops, rather than look on passively as others live their hopeless lives. This effort makes him a hero of sorts, able to perceive a choice between an expanded consciousness and a constricting reality. Stern's otherworldly narratives enact a similar choice, offering an expanded awareness of imaginative possibilities while redefining reality in their own terms.

More recently, Stern has to some extent expanded his own ambitions, producing two novels that span both geography and time to create multi-stranded narratives the separate strands of which contribute to a broader perspective on both Jewish and American history. Both have at their core a fantasy narrative that, as in most of Stern's short stories, unfold as if the fantastic premise is merely an odd stitch in the fabric of reality. Both offer variations on Saul Bozoff's reintegration with the Jewish past, further emphasized in The Angel of Forgetfulness by the literal return of Saul Bozoff as a character, while The Frozen Rabbi also employs a supernatural occurrence as the device that triggers the rediscovery of roots.

In The Angel of Forgetfulness, Saul is a college student in New York City, where he meets Aunt Keni, one of the few surviving residents of what was a thriving Jewish neighborhood. Saul is drawn to Keni and her stories about the old neighborhood, and she passes on to him a manuscript—The Angel of  Forgetfulness—written by Nathan Hart, Keni's long-dead lover. The rest of the novel alternates between Saul's subsequent experiences on a hippie commune and as an instructor in a small New England college, a reconstruction of Nathan Hart’s life story as a recent immigrant and then a writer for the Jewish Daily Forward, and excerpts from the manuscript itself, which tells the fantastic tale of an angel named Mocky, who prefers life on earth to a less eventful existence in heaven. The Angel of Forgetfulness is thus, like "Saul Bozoff and the Ghost," a directly metafictional work, a story about storytelling and the reading of stories, even as it uses its metafictional frame to evoke the history of American Jewish settlement and struggle. These twin ambitions—to acknowledge the mediation of narrative artifice in the pursuit of an authentic rendering of historical experience—are accomplished as well and as directly in The Angel of Forgetfulness as in any other of Stern's stories or novels. The reader who would like to experience Stern's strategy of summoning the real through the free embrace of artifice would be well advised to start with this novel.

The Frozen Rabbi (2010), is also a typical blend of authentic detail and fabulation, but the specifically metafictional element in it is less pronounced (and less effective). Structured through alternating third-person accounts of Bernie Karp, a boy living in Memphis, and the history of his family's migration from Eastern Europe to the United States, the novel does interpolate a memoir written by one member of the family, but the device is mostly used simply to move the story along, and ultimately very little emphasis is placed on the power of storytelling to transform a colorless reality. This is not in itself a flaw in the novel, but it does put more of a burden on the decontextualized fantasy device with which the novel begins, as Bernie discovers a literal frozen rabbi stowed away in a basement freezer. It turns out that the rabbi has been in this state for over a century.

The rabbi's presence immediately exerts a great influence on Bernie Karp, who begins to familiarize himself with the mystical tradition the rabbi represents and of which Bernie knows nothing. (He is barely aware of himself as a Jew.) Otherwise, the fact that a cryogenically preserved Hasidic rabbi has suddenly appeared is not much noted. It is not unusual in Stern's fiction that wondrous events manifest themselves as if they are part of the natural course of things, but in The Frozen Rabbi the rather swift way in which the Rabbi adjusts himself to his new circumstances and Bernie regards him as simply his potential teacher creates a curiously flat effect—curious because Stern's fiction is usually nothing if not lively in its narrative momentum. In what seems like no time—with detours to the second narrative—Bernie Karp has become something of an adept at Kabbalah and Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr has succumbed to the temptations of American consumer culture, eventually refashioning himself as a kind of New Age spiritual leader and opening up his own House of Enlightenment.

Perhaps what makes this two-fold conversion seem thinly dramatized is not so much the rapidity with which it occurs but the fairly obvious satirical purpose to which it is put. Satire is not really a mode much pursued in Stern's previous work, which is comic but does not engage in mockery for the purpose of social correction or criticism. Stern's comedy is vaudevillian, schtick-laden. While Rabbi Eliezer's metamorphosis into a religious huckster is humorous enough, the accompanying "commentary" implicit in his transformation—America has become a place where true spiritual values are lost to greed and self-obsession—overrides the pleasure we might take in the sheer silliness of it. Since Eliezer's decline is paralleled with Bernie Karp's ascent (literally, as it turns out) into spiritual awareness, the contrast between the spiritual journeys undertaken by each becomes overly schematic. In his review of The Frozen Rabbi, Mark Athitakis correctly notes that Stern's comedy here "is to a purpose," that "Stern is drawing a bright line between religious commitment in the past and commitment in the present," but that line seems too bright to me. It obscures Stern's more discreet skills of subtlety and suggestion.

Thus the comedy in The Frozen Rabbi struggles for expression in the shadow of the novel’s earnest attempts to expose the misplaced values of American society and to document the hardships of Jewish history. This attenuated humor (at least in comparison to Stern's previous work) is perhaps a direct consequence of the novel's very attempt to provide an historical saga, however fragmented it is by the dual narrative strategy Stern employs. The prose style of The Frozen Rabbi seems to me more reliant on extended exposition and overt psychologizing than The Angel of Forgetfulness, which also provides an historical frame but is not preoccupied with moving the story forward, or Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, which settles for evoking one particular time and place (and which is a first-person narrative anyway). This is not to say that The Frozen Rabbi always fails to offer Stern's comedic riffs and trenchant prose, as can be seen in this description of Rabbi Eliezer's place of business:

        The New House of Enlightenment was situated in a stadium-size structure surrounded by crepe myrtle and lilac, atop a knoll carpeted in shaggy grass slabs like an igloo made of turf. Originally a Baptist tabernacle whose pastor had fallen from grace in a sex-for-prayer scandal, the hulking, flying-saucer shaped building had undergone few alterations since changing hands. Coming upon the place through the humid morning haze, Bernie found himself transposing it in his mind to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with the rabbi's followers dragging trussed and bleating animals up its steps for sacrifice. There was a big sign out front of the type that ordinarily proclaimed Jesus as Lord, its changeable letters now declaring Live Already Like The Day Is Here!

Passages like this make Steve Stern's fiction a great joy to read, and if The Frozen Rabbi perhaps features somewhat fewer of them (or if its structure and scope dilutes their impact), it is still a more dynamic and imaginative work of fiction than most of what is currently made available by American publishers.

Listening to the Spirits 

Reckoning with the legacy of Henry Dumas and his work as represented by Echo Tree, his collected short fiction now reissued by Coffee House Press, is an inherently fraught exercise. To begin with, the volume itself, while immensely valuable in keeping that legacy visible, does little to help us place Dumas’s work in the context of his life, tragically short as it turned out to be, or trace the development of his fiction, however abbreviated. Although it is evident enough in reading the stories themselves that they fall into two broad categories—stories set in the rural South (mostly his native Arkansas) and those set in the Harlem of the 1960s—it would still be useful to know more about his moves from one group to the other, whether his shift to the second category reflects a shift in Dumas’s political consciousness, whether he considered the one setting complementary to the other, etc. For this reissue, Coffee House does now include an introduction by John Keene, but its focus is largely biographical, and Keene provides just a general description of Dumas’s stories and their themes, which (understandably enough) Keene links to recent events associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Certainly Dumas seems especially pertinent to the current cultural and political moment, although this is due less to the fiction and more to the circumstances of his own life and death. Only a few of the stories in Echo Tree were actually published in Dumas’s lifetime, which was violently cut short in 1968, soon after the assassination of Martin Luther King, when he was no doubt murdered by a New York City policeman—the qualifier being necessary here because the incident remains murky in its particulars, and not even the police department’s own conclusion about the case can precisely be known (other than that no action was taken against the police officer) because its records of the case were destroyed 25 years ago. Allegedly, the police officer who shot Dumas later called it the result of “mistaken identity,” although the only extant contemporaneous report on the shooting (in the Amsterdam News) has it that the officer claimed Dumas threatened him with a knife. Of course, that Dumas was the victim of a racist-inflected cop killing is the most plausible explanation of whatever mystery still surrounds the incident, but to think of him most immediately as a previous victim of the systematic racism of American law enforcement risks overshadowing his considerable achievement as a writer, which has already been dimmed by the passage of time and the relative obscurity within the larger literary community in which his fiction has languished for too much of that time

Additionally, the nature of that achievement might be further misunderstood. Keene in his introduction compares Dumas’s fiction to the work of Ishmael Reed, William Melvin Kelley, and Charles Wright, but also insightfully distinguishes it from the fiction of these contemporaries in its attempt to “expand the genre’s possibilities by incorporating speculative modes and elements of the fantastic,” drawing “from a range of traditions, including realist, gothic, horror and supernatural fiction,” as well as “African and African-American spirituality, folklore, and myths.” Although the fabulative qualities Keene describes are perhaps most evident in the “country” stories, even those set in urban spaces can display elements of the uncanny. None of Dumas’s stories follow customary narrative patterns. They often feature episodes of terror and violence, but few of them seem constructed to melodramatically highlight such episodes as the “climax” of a conventional story. Dumas’s fiction can take us to unexpected places, even when it doesn’t necessarily seem to be leading anywhere in particular at all (or should be taking us somewhere else).

Since the stories in Echo Tree do not seem to be organized into those that were published and those left unpublished (presumably there are a significant number of the latter), or assigned a spot in Dumas’s all-too-brief career, it is altogether possible that some of the effect of open-endedness or drift in the stories results from works that were incomplete or that might have ultimately become parts of a finally unrealized whole. While this unavoidably gives us a possibly distorted view of Dumas’s aesthetic intentions, it is clear enough that he was not much interested in satisfying the presumptions of readers (predominantly white) expecting a certain kind of social realism (a trait he certainly shared with Kelley and Reed), more inclined to treat “racial prejudice” not as a “problem” to be solved but as a built-in feature of American society that African-Americans have long had to accept as an unavoidable obstacle to their own agency and well-being. Dumas is frequently linked to the Afrofuturism of an artist such as Sun Ra, to whom he pays tribute in “The Metagenesis of Sunra,” although as this piece itself shows in its atypically fanciful style, Dumas’s fiction is generally more subdued, less deliberately extravagant.

The first (and probably Dumas’s most well-known) story in Echo Tree, “Ark of Bones,” is perhaps the most explicitly fantastic, although it is a fantasy of the most sobering and funereal kind. It could be called a tale of the supernatural: Two boys, Headeye and Fishbone, find themselves down by the riverbank when on the river itself suddenly appears a ghost ship. The boys make their way to the ship (taken by two mysterious strangers in a rowboat), where they find a large collection of bones and a crew tending them. “The under side of the whole ark was nothing but a great bonehouse,” Fishbone tells us:

I looked and saw crews of black men handlin in them bones. There was a crew of two or three under every cabin around that ark. Why, there must have been a million cabins. They were doin it very carefully, like they were holdin onto babies or something precious.

Although the boys return to shore (where they learn that a black man has recently been lynched and his body thrown into the river), a few days later Headeye informs the narrator he is leaving, presumably to return to the ship and rejoin the crews in their mission of sanctifying the bones.

It is not difficult to see how Dumas’s work could come to the attention of Toni Morrison, who may have been the first literary figure (she was an editor at the time) to “rediscover” Dumas a few years after his death. Surely the future author of Beloved would have considered Dumas’s story to be evoking the same sort of folklore-influenced magical realism characterizing that novel. But while “Ark of Bones” is certainly one of Dumas’s more notable achievements, it isn’t really quite representative of the stories in Echo Tree, at least in its form and narrative strategy. (In its depiction of the legacy of white supremacy for rural Southern Black Americans it is entirely representative.) The stories that incorporate the preternatural or the uncanny generally do so in a more stealthy and muted way, and some of the stories are more or less straightforwardly realistic, if not necessarily driven by plot. The title story depicts a belief in “spirit-talk” between two young boys, as one of them attempts to conjure up this spirit, but ultimately what ghostly activity that does occur (strange sounds in the woods) could still be attributed to the boys’ heightened sensitivity rather than to the supernatural.

Another story that flirts (maybe more than a flirtation) with the fantastic is “Fon,” one of a handful of the Southern stories that depicts encounters with white people, encounters that are tacitly threatening, when they don’t inevitably lead to acts of racial terrorism. In this story, a white man named Nillmon is in his car when a big rock suddenly breaks through his rear window. After tracking down a black youth, Nillmon decides that the youth, who identifies himself as Fon (short for Alfonso), is indeed the culprit and determines to “break” him, which he attempts to do after rounding up three other men to join in on the effort. Before they are able to kill Alfonso, however, all four of the men are struck down by arrows, fired from somewhere in the trees (or the sky). Fon, it would seem, is the herald of avenging spirits, emerging from the land (or descending from the heavens), who will eventually secure justice.

Justice is less clearly on the horizon in the other rural stories featuring confrontations with whites (“peckerwoods,” as Dumas’s characters are wont to call them). In “Rope of Wind,” a boy named Johnny B witnesses three nightriding white men kill a black minister and drag his body, tied in a sack to the back of their car, around the countryside. When the men go into a house, Johnny B manages to remove the body from the sack, but all he can do is hide the body in the woods and run the ten miles back home, “as if behind him flowed a river of blood and tears, like a phantom in the nite, black Johnny B, the running spirit, breaking the silence of the nite with his breathing, the only sound that kept his feet pounding the road, running, running, and running.”

“Rope of Wind” is a realist story, but the situation in which the protagonist finds himself is allegorized more explicitly in “Devil-Bird.” In this story a young boy, who is also the narrator, watches as his father ushers into their apartment an elegant gentleman who turns out to be Satan himself. A little later, another man, God, it would seem (dressed more shabbily than the Devil), also arrives, and God and Satan proceed to play a card game with the narrator’s parents, the winner to be given charge of the soul of the boy’s dying grandfather. Johnny B was himself indeed witness as well to the work of Satan, in the actions of the white men on the rampage. In many of Dumas’s stories, young black men and boys come to a recognition (whether they are aware of it or not) of, if not the dominion of evil, then the brutal and baffling realities of the world they are otherwise compelled to inhabit. The final story in Echo Tree, “Riot or Revolt,” modifies this version of the coming-of-age trope: A boy in Harlem observes the scenes in and around a local bookstore, a hub for the community, during a series of demonstrations. (The bookstore is visited by the Governor and the Mayor because “leaders are known to come here.”) What the boy sees is clearly inspiring to him, and in the story’s conclusion he joyously starts marching in an ongoing demonstration himself.

This story, as are many of the Harlem-based stories, is more a work of conventional realism than most of the stories set in the rural South, presumably an attempt to record the rising resistance and resolve among African-Americans making itself felt at the time of Dumas’s death. Yet some of the Southern stories are also essentially slices-of-life realism, and some of the Harlem stories incorporate fantasy. Others, such as “The Lake” and “The Metagenesis of Sunra,” are fantastic but use neither of these settings. Some stories do not conform easily to a perception of Dumas as either a fabulist or a realist, although these are the twin poles between which the fictions in Echo Tree vary. Such variety, however, is part of what makes the book a charged reading experience. It surely does underscore Dumas’s talent as a writer of fiction, although at the same time reminding us that he was so barbarously prevented from fully harvesting that talent.

Entering Cross River 

Rion Amilcar Scott’s The World Doesn’t Require You is both continuous with his first collection of short fiction, Insurrections (2016), and a significant departure. Most obviously, both books offer stories set in Cross River, a fictional Maryland town outside of Washington D.C. The characters, almost exclusively African-American, in both collections are in general quite acutely aware of themselves as residents of this community, which is given its own unique history (the site of America’s only successful slave insurrection) and geography—abutting the “Wildlands,” a kind of wilderness area in the middle of an otherwise urban landscape, and bisected by the great river that gives the town it name.

The shared setting almost inevitably makes Cross River as much the subject of these books as the characters portrayed and stories told, but Scott as well reinforces the town’s centrality in The World Doesn’t Require You by moving more directly toward a mythopoeic treatment of it through emphasizing the fables and folklore that have accumulated through the community’s history, and by adding to the more or less realistic short stories in Insurrections more formally adventurous narratives marked by fantasia and a kind of magical realism. From the stories in the first collection to those in the second, it is as if Scott has moved on from the effort to convey the palpable reality of Cross River to the attempt to render the setting in the service of a larger, emblematic vision, as a kind of archetypal African-American milieu in its historical circumstances and cultural inheritance.

Both books together thus offer us a rather wide array of characters, all of whom are compellingly individualized but also collectively representative of the inhabitants of Cross River. However, while some stories, such as “The Slapsmith,” about an abused, transient woman and her encounter with two homeless men encamped near the railroad tracks, portray the most marginalized members of the community, a significant proportion of the characters are, if not exactly prosperous, notably well-educated and mostly middle class. Indeed, several of them, including “Good Times,” the first story in Insurrections, and “Special Topics in Loneliness,” the novellas that concludes The World Doesn’t Require You, feature characters who attend or teach at Freedman’s University, the local historically black college. Both books depict their characters interacting or in conflict with other black characters; few white characters appear, remaining on the periphery of a fictional world that is presented as a self-sufficient creation that in no way requires contrast to a white-dominated society to reinforce its authenticity.

This is not to say that the relationship between this African-American community and the racialized reality of American culture is obscured or unexplored. The history of this relationship suddenly intrudes in “Klan” (Insurrections), the narrator of which recalls “the time the Klan galloped through the main yard of Freedman’s University late in the evening. . . Four white-sheeted ghosts on white horseback riding in procession.” It is hard not to be aware of this history (and its accompanying stereotypes) when reading “Party Animal,” which takes the form of a dispassionate psychological case study of a young black man who has succumbed to “Reverse Animalism,” a disorder that has caused him to enter a “backwards evolution and descent into what can only be described as simian behavior.” For white readers especially, the effect of this story can only be unsettling; on the one hand, the transformation from metaphorical (party animal!) to literal might seem like an exercise in absurdist comedy, but to learn that the man, Louis Smith, after being confined to a psychiatric facility “often violently attacked other males for supremacy, sexually accosted female patients, and swung through the facility, hopping from wall to wall as if they were jungle trees” surely leaves the reader disconcerted. If the story is not quite an allegory of white racist perceptions of the black male, its bold manipulation of historically racist imagery evokes that history in an unanticipated way.

In The World Doesn’t Require You, Scott similarly incorporates such charged imagery in two stories featuring robot protagonists (although the robot’s creator plays a prominent role as well). “The Electric Joy of Service” and “Mercury in Retrograde” are narrated by Jim, a “Robotic Personal Helper”—RPH, or “Riff”—created by a man Jim refers to as “the Master.” Jim was one of the original Riffs, a survivor of the virus plague inflicted by the Master himself when his business partners object to his plan to “paint these fuckers black”:

Give them big red lips, dress them like lawn jockeys. Sell them to white folks. They’ll have slaves again and we’ll get rich.

The Master is himself a black man, and each of the stories track the ambivalent relationship between Jim and his creator—the Master chooses to call the narrator “Nigger Jim,” and while Jim is eventually fully aware of the implications of the name, he has nevertheless been programmed to meet his master’s needs—“coded to love and to serve him.” In the latter story, the robots carry out their own insurrection (after accessing tapes about the Great Insurrection in Cross River), but most are subsequently deprived of their self-created programming language in an Electric Holocaust” intended to suppress their revolt.

“Mercury in Retrograde’ is not satirical, and the connection between its SF-ish situation and American slavery is too unequivocal for the story to be taken merely for its allegorical parallels. Jim’s struggle to maintain solidarity with his robot compatriots despite their suspicion (if not outright hatred) of him, and despite the imperatives of his conditioning, makes him quite an affecting character. The story’s conclusion highlights the strength of that conditioning, and perhaps Scott wants to emphasize how insidiously the slaveholder mentality can warp the consciousness of the enslaved. But almost any interpretation of this story is going to oversimplify it, eliding some of the lingering uncertainties—how are we to respond to the Master?, what are the implications of the robot-slave conceit?—the story doesn’t really resolve. Something similar is true of “A Loudness of Screechers,” although in this case the inconclusiveness comes from the story’s hallucinatory quality: A young narrator tells us of his family’s encounter with a flock of Wildlands “screecher birds,” an encounter that apparently involves an ritual of appeasement the narrator is witnessing for the first time. The boy’s uncle makes an offering to the circling birds but is last seen “climbing higher and higher in the sky” as a screecher clutches him and flies away. Clearly this story draws on embedded Cross Riverian lore, but precisely what we are to make of the enactment of this particular rite—not to mention the phantasmic event at its climax—is surely subject to disparate conclusions.

Even in the stories less reliant on outright fantasy devices, our intended responses to the characters and situations aren’t insistently signaled. The dominant character type in The World Doesn’t Require You is the seeker—after knowledge, after success, after self-enlightenment. Some of these seekers are sincere in their efforts, but others are more self-serving, some outright frauds. A prominent source of the literal pursuit of transcendent insight is again to be found in the Wildlands, specifically in “a kind of forbidden zone they called the Ruins, a succession of abandoned plantations, many taken over by squatters claiming divine right to save the soul of the land.” Here, in “The Temple of the Practical Arts,” a group of people (including the narrator) follow “Dave the Deity” (introduced to us in the book’s first story, “David Sherman, the Last Son of God”) in his farmhouse turned temple. In this story, the aspirations of the faithful come to a literally fiery end, as the police burn down the temple in an action reminiscent of that taken by the Philadelphia police against the Move liberation group. The story depicts the narrator, Slim, grappling with his own darker impulses, even as he recalls the Temple’s beginning as the product of a “beautiful” vision, but a follow-up story, “Slim in Hell,” finds him succumbing to those impulses in the aftermath of the Temple’s demise.

Dave the Deity is not entirely a charlatan, nor is Slim merely an angry failure. Both have been deprived of their dreams (they are musicians), and both of them are forced to compensate for their disillusionment—in David Sherman’s case, his behavior might just seem eccentric, but it also courts danger, a danger that Slim, at least, believes was caused by Dave’s own bad judgment. (Dave brought into the Temple an aspirant named “The Kid,” who Slim believes is concerned about himself, not the ideals of the Temple. In “Slim in Hell,” it is the Kid’s musical success with the local “Riverbeat” sound that finally sends Slim over the edge.) Slim professes to believe in the mission of the Temple—even more than Dave himself—but “Slim in Hell” makes it clear enough that his personal envy is as large a factor in driving him to the destructive act that concludes the story as the existential despair produced by the burning of the Temple—although that existential despair is also real.

In their mixed motives and internal complexity, Slim and David Sherman are typical of most of the characters in The World Doesn’t Require You, although some characters and their actions are more morally ambiguous than others. Few of the characters could be called conventionally “sympathetic,” but neither do the stories seek to expose them to the reader’s disapproval. In some ways, Scott’s almost exclusive focus on this self-enclosed black community has the effect of making us even more aware of the overarching white world outside it, but our view of the people of Cross River is not dependent on their relation to that external world (the pernicious effects of which remain implicit—although this world occasionally encroaches in the form of neighboring Port Yooga, Virginia). The characters are presented in all their human complications, however much historical circumstances have inevitably conditioned their tangible expression.

The characters whose motives are arguably the most opaque are the two lead characters in “Special Topics in Loneliness Studies” (Scott’s longest published work to date). It is composed of a journal of sorts written by Dr. Simon Reece, an enigmatic figure who seems more ghostly than real. Reece tells us of the downfall of his quasi-colleague, Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, an English professor at Freedman’s University, an account supplemented by various inserted documents—emails, syllabi, student essays, writing by both Chambers and Reece. Reece appears to be an instructor himself, but his status seems nebulous at best: “Somehow I always had students,” he writes, “although my courses weren’t officially offered by the university. No idea where they came from. I just set up shop every semester in an empty classroom and start teaching.” Reece lives in the basement of a classroom building, which “had once been the morgue when the building was the school’s teaching hospital.” He reveals he had once been a low-paid adjunct at Freedman’s, so low-paid his family had been evicted, and it is as if he is now a revenging spirit eager to expose academe “for the dystopian wasteland it truly is.”

This he does not merely by witnessing the ruin of Chambers but actively participating in its progress. Whether Reece actually intends this to be the consequences of his actions is finally uncertain. What Reece’s narrative really discloses is that he himself is far from free of the narcissism and moral degradation he attributes to modern academia. Dr. Chambers’s most serious offense turns out to be his esteem for Roland Hudson, a Cross River poet known for his autobiographical poems about scorned love. When Chambers (with Reece’s encouragement makes Hudson the centerpiece of the course that gives the novella its title, the divergence of opinion about the value of Hudson and his work between Chambers and a colleague invited as a guest lecturer leads ultimately to a grievance filed by a student (ironically the only student to find value in the course to begin with) when Dr. Chambers doesn’t take kindly to his colleague’s influence on the student’s term paper ( a feminist critique of Hudson’s “erasure” of the real-life woman who scorned him) and begins to unravel. Perhaps in the end Chambers’s ordeal (which includes the enmity of his dean and a final humiliation before the faculty) does indeed confirm Reece’s view of the malevolence of academe—not malevolent enough to prevent Reece from accepting a position as Chambers’s replacement—but Reece himself has worked diligently to propel the version of it that defeats Reginald Chambers.

Looked at one way, “Special Topics in Loneliness Studies” could be regarded as an academic satire, but this, like calling “Mercury in Retrograde” science fiction or “The Loudness of Screechers” a horror story, is only a superficial characterization. These works both draw on specific actions or images generally associated with such generic forms and have a larger role to play in evoking the imagined reality of Cross River. In this way all of the stories in both Insurrections and The World Doesn’t Require You seem part of the same work, a project that could be extended indefinitely as a comprehensive creation equally allowing for formal exploration and an underlying continuity of purpose. Scott has indicated that a Cross River novel may be forthcoming, at the least a sign that there is indeed more to be known about this deftly realized place.

A brief synopsis of S.D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid (Coach House Books) certainly makes it sound like a work of science fiction or fantasy, or perhaps a futuristic dystopia: a man given to idleness and daydreaming, recently unemployed and occupied mostly with sleeping, meets a man who claims to be the "Ambassador of the Free Republic of Onirica," literally the land of dreams. This man, Chevauchet, recruits our narrator, after leading him on visits into other people's dreams, to join him in his mission to combat the modern plague of sleeplessness and to restore the value of reverie and dreams. Eventually the narrator begins to recruit people to go underground with him (literally) and symbolically resist society's increasing intolerance of sleep and dreams (they impede productivity, of course) by, well, sleeping. Unsurprisingly, the mission doesn't end well.

However, the reader who would thus expect The Eyelid to conform to the expectations we might have of fantasy fiction would probably be disappointed with this book. It does not render its story in the scenic, episodic way a work of fiction prompted first of all by a commitment to narrative would, as the story that finally gets told is secondary to the essentially expository discourse offered by the narrator, a very learned and allusive discourse incorporating 16th century French philosophy, neoplatonism, modern political theory, and numerous other references to European intellectual history. Most of these disquisitions are summaries of Chevauchet's philosophy of dreaming and its roots in dissident thinkers and emancipatory ideals. "Novel of ideas" is a label that certainly does fit  The Eyelid, although even here its ideas are not the occasional subject of conversation or remain merely metaphorical and emblematic; their explicit exposition by the narrator is the primary focus of much of the novella.

Perhaps the most sustained act of storytelling in The Eyelid occurs when Chevauchet takes the narrator on the journeys into the ongoing dreams of various dreamers, an endeavor in which, the narrator tells us, "Chevauchet made himself my Virgil, a genial cicerone through the circles of Hell and along the terraces of Purgatory, raising my hopes of Paradise." The narrator witnesses "dreams of love," dreams of dread," and other types of night-dreams experienced by the dreamers of Onirica, which, as we come to understand, is really a kind of distillation of dreaming, Chevauchet its keeper. But it is not only the night-dream (over which we have less control)  that Chevauchet seeks to protect but also daydreams and reverie, which can be more fruitful sources of human creativity. 

This series of scenes is relatively brief, however, as the focus switches to the exposition of Chevauchet's theories about the importance of dreaming to human fulfillment and, ultimately, the narrator's act of resistance against a society that eventually tries to eliminate dreaming altogether by simply forbidding it, substituting for it a mind-numbing drug that induces a "beatific state of high-functioning sleeplessness." (The novella is nominally set in Paris, but it is a Paris that has been absorbed into a "Greater America" that has imposed its exploitative ways on much of the world.) This drug, CI, might be a supercharged kind of opioid, but its effects might also reflect our now all-pervasive virtuality: "The masterminds of CI sought by degrees to replace all natural creative imagination with artifice. They claimed it was for the sake of quality control: optimized content and better use of time, what with advances in the temporal compression of daydream experience. In reality, it was to abolish mental activity that was off the grid and went untracked."

In the end, Chevauchet disappears, presumably enfeebled by the cessation of dreaming, leaving the narrator to persevere with his own meager rebellion, but soon enough his clandestine sleep sessions are discovered, and he must flee for his life--unsuccessfully, as it turns out. Thus the novella as a whole does advance a narrative, however interrupted or suspended at times, beginning with the recently unemployed narrator meeting Chevauchet on a park bench and ending with his presumed death. But it finally conveys less the impression of a story told than of a story added to a philosophical rumination on the ebbing of introspection and imagination in the 21st century, a reverie of its own that can be categorized as fiction because the story is quite obviously all made up, while the ruminations filtered through the characters seem just as obviously to reflect the thinking of the author.

Is this necessarily a problem, though? Since the author clearly does not intend to offer a conventional dystopic narrative but to use the conceit of dystopia to directly contemplate the actually existing conditions that might lead us to such a state, we can't really say that the book fails to fulfill its ambitions: It couldn't be called an aesthetic failure if its purpose is not primarily aesthetic to begin with. Finally the fantastic elements in conjunction with the frequent expository passages lead me to regard The Eyelid as an allegory, but an allegory of the pre-modern kind in which the allegorical meaning is not concealed within the symbolic design of the story, to be released through interpretation, but lies plainly on the surface, communicated directly.

An appreciation of this novella thus depends on the reader's acceptance not just of the allegorical mode but of this particular undisguised version of it. For myself, I can say that the book certainly does conceptualize the effects of our current hypercapitalist culture and its brutal work ethic in a way I find illuminating and insightful, although I confess I am also less able to take from it the sort of aesthetic gratification I normally hope to find in works of fiction. Still, when I consider whether the insights Chrostowska provides are more emphatically and memorably expressed in the form she has chosen than might be the case in more straightforward critical discourse, I would have to say they are.

Heir to a Prodigious Fertility 

The fiction of Steve Stern is arguably more suffused with traditional Jewish folklore and Judaic mysticism than all post-World War II American Jewish writers other than I.B. Singer and Cynthia Ozick. Yet Stern has said in interviews that he does not really feel himself an authentic part of that tradition, his familiarity with it being mostly second hand: "I was not born into an observant Jewish family and I really wasn’t exposed to the culture or tradition growing up, so I came into it pretty late. When I did, it began to determine the way I looked at the world and my work. Because it’s not a kind of primary experience with me—the idea of Jewish culture, tradition and heritage—I’ve had to define what that sensibility means. It’s something that I sort of wrestle with all the time" (Washington University Student Life, Nov, 21, 2008).

Few of Stern's readers could doubt that the portrayal of traditional beliefs and of a specifically Jewish milieu in his stories and novels seems thoroughly authentic. Whether the characters are rabbis or nonobservant Jews with little sense of attachment at all to tradition, they behave and speak just as one imagines such characters would behave and speak. Whether set in the Russian Pale of Settlement in the 19th century or in the Jewish quarter called the "Pinch" in 20th century Memphis, Tennessee, the stories Stern tells all seem firmly rooted in place and time, with all the attendant details we could want. And whether they are the customs of the shtetl or of the American suburbs, the way of life and beliefs of the communities depicted are represented with the same authority. Although the prevailing strategy of fabulation and fantasy in Stern's work makes it problematic to regard his narratives as "realistic," certainly the interaction of character, event, and setting produces a "world" both credibly and vividly rendered.

But that world is not one that seems reproduced directly (or indirectly) from autobiographical experience. Although there are characters in Stern's fiction who might originate in a version of a younger Steve Stern, none of their encounters with Jewish practices or Jewish lore appear to be derived from the "real life" of the author except for the sense of wonder inspired in them when they are initiated in such practices by discovering them and that must indeed reflect Stern's initiation as a young folklorist in Memphis. What is most remarkable about Stern's work is the way in which he is able to evoke a comprehensively believable world through acquired knowledge and force of vision. It is an alternate world in which Catskill monologists are inhabited by the dybbuks of comedians past and rabbis fall asleep and wake up a hundred years later, a world that Stern constructs from a vibrant tradition but that ultimately conforms only to the laws of storytelling and imagination. Stern is a writer of whose work one can profitably say it is both intensely real and utterly artificial, both transparently representational and a thoroughgoing, extended metafiction.

On the one hand, the world we encounter in Steve Stern's fiction has a vividness and a tangibility that surely makes us believe in it as a version of the reality inhabited by American Jews and their immediate ancestors. This feature of Stern's work is perhaps best exemplified by the story collection Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (1986), which offers nine stories of surpassing individual charm and almost flawless execution that also work together to memorably evoke the Pinch neighborhood on North Main Street in Memphis. By the time Stern began writing his stories (by the time he became aware of the existence of this downtown neighborhood in the first place), the Pinch had long since disappeared into urban facelessness, so Stern's depiction of it necessarily blends historical reconstruction with imaginative projection—by Stern's own account, largely the latter. The very first story in Lazar Malkin, "Moishe the Just," begins with its narrator noting how he and his friends spent one summer "on the roof, spying on our neighbors across the street":

        We would kneel on the sticky tarpaper, our chins propped on top of a low parapet, encrusted with bird droppings. In this way we watched the clumsy progress of the courtship of Billy Rubin and the shoemaker's daughter. We saw, like a puppet play in silhouette, Old Man Crow beating his wife behind drawn shades. Through their open windows we saw the noisy family Pinkus gesticulating over their hysterical evening meal. We saw Eddie Kid Katz sparring with shadows and amply endowed Widow Taubenblatt in her bath, but even with her we got bored.

One can't help but feel an initial alignment between the boys taking in the activities of the Pinch from their rooftop and the author of Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, identifying not so much with the lived experience of the people on the streets and in their homes but with the perspective from above, from outside that experience and attempting to find a purchase on it. But, like the boys, Stern's imagination won't settle for just the boring stuff, the ordinary cruelties and indiscretions. Although anchored in the ordinary, his fiction discovers the potential for transcendence and a place for wonder, even while the sometimes marvelous events and fanciful beings from Jewish folklore it introduces are presented as if they themselves are perfectly ordinary. The enhancement of reality Stern achieves is perhaps illustrated most suggestively in the conclusion to this book's title story. Lazar Malkin has just been spirited away by the Angel of Death, and the narrator observes:

        I threw up the window sash and opened my mouth to shout. But I never found my tongue. Because that was when, before the door slammed behind them, I got a glimpse of kingdom come.

        It looked exactly like the yard in back of the shop, only--how should I explain it--sensitive. It was the same brick wall with glass embedded on top, the same ashes and rusty tin cans, but they were tender and ticklish to look at. Intimate like (excuse me) flesh beneath underwear. For the split second that the door stayed open, I felt I was turned inside-out, and what I saw was glowing under my skin in place of my kishkes and heart.

The fictional world rendered in Stern's fiction is "tender and ticklish," although it does resemble the ordinary world in its external features. But ultimately Stern is more interested in the eternal than the external, even if the external view from the rooftop is where the story must begin.

Stern's characteristic use of fabulation and allegory to emphasize fundamental human experiences (however much they are represented through specifically Jewish images and devices) is perhaps most tellingly exemplified in "The Ghost and Saul Bozoff." This story (perhaps more appropriately called a novella) not only relates allegorically the story of Jewish immigration to America, but as well Stern's own rediscovery of his Jewish heritage and its transformation into the fiction to be found in Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven. Saul Bozoff—in this story at any rate, as he makes a reappearance as a younger man in The Angel of Forgetfulness—is a "novelist of modest renown, hailed at his debut by one reviewer as 'a brave new chronicler of failure,' he had failed to fulfill his initial promise. He had, in the twenty or so years of his so-called career, written himself into ever diminishing circles of confinement." On a retreat at a writer's colony, Saul comes across a collection of stories written by one Leah Rosenthal who, he discovers, was an immigrant from the Ukraine who had died at the age of 27. Dipping into the book, he finds the stories unlike anything he's read before: "in their communion of archaic and slapstick sensibilities, their illicit marriages of Old Testament and pagan themes, the stories were hard to pin down. They seemed, despite their situation in an undeniably authentic turn-of-the-century East Side, anchored to no particular place or time."

        One night, after an evening of partying, Saul looks up from his bed to find the ghost of Leah Rosenthal staring back at him. She suggests to Saul that they "collaborate," since "I had this cruelly aborted life. . .so I never got to finish what I started to say." Under Leah's influence, Saul begins to discover his own way of writing with authority:

        So what next, he wondered, rubbing his hands together, looking out the window as if for a clue. Somewhere beyond the pines the old moribund world was still rallying, he supposed, for its pyrotechnical swan song. So what else was new under that smudge of a sun? For his own material, thank you, Saul would prefer to look closer to home, where there were no end of tales to relate. Here, as beneficiary of Leah Rosenthal's invisible estate, he was heir to a prodigious fertility. Stories grew on trees! And all that Saul had to do to harvest them was to be there when they ripened and fell to earth.

If we take this final story in Lazar Malkin as a dramatization of an artistic credo of sorts, then both this book and Stern's subsequent work are the fruits of an effort to harvest those story-trees. Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, A Plague of Dreamers, and The Wedding Jester continue to offer the kind of emblematic narratives at work in Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, most (but not all) of them set in the Pinch. Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground is in fact the further elaboration of an idea contemplated by Saul Bozoff, the story of a young Jewish boy who takes up "with the black kids on Beale Street--'like their mascot or something'" and that features a black boy, previously thought mute, who suddenly "starts to jabber" and eventually dies of his malady. This novel employs less of the magical realism found in either Lazar Malkin or the subsequently published books, and seems more an attempt to flesh out the Pinch/Memphis as Stern's fictional "territory."

A Plague of Dreamers and The Wedding Jester more fully return to the fabular mode of Lazar Malkin. A Plague of Dreamers is an especially resonant effort in this mode, a collection of three novellas that not only incorporates the elements of fantasy and folklore introduced in Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven but also features fictions that perhaps most consistently employ a common motif in Stern's work, the underlying yearning among many of his characters to escape their confining material circumstances, to permanently inhabit the realm that is more "sensitive." The first novella, "Zelik Rifkin and the Tree of Dreams" is an especially good example of this. Zelik Rifkin, a "less than inspired grocer's assistant" in the Pinch, is chased up a tree one hot summer night as the citizens of the community are sleeping en masse in the park to escape the oppressive conditions in their homes. When he reaches the top of the tree, Rifkin finds himself literally in a dream world, one that gathers up the separate dreams of the slumberers below into a communal projection of their desires and confusions.

Rifkin soon discovers that he can intervene in the collective dreamwork of the Pinch, with the result that where before he was something of an outcast in the community, he now becomes its most celebrated member. Of course, such a state of affairs cannot last long, even in regions of the imagination. When the weather turns, Rifkin no longer has access to his dream world and is eventually returned to his previous lowly stature. The novella's conclusion, however, skips ahead one year to another heat wave and, in a gesture that reiterates the story's case for our overwhelming need for imaginative release, Stern follows Rifkin back up his tree of dreams—where his "outmoded self" apparently meets its demise and his spiritually transformed counterpart "stroll[s] off into the thick of things."

Although Zelik Rifkin's action borders on escapism—something that might perhaps be said of Stern's fiction itself—he is nonetheless determined to participate, albeit only in a world beyond the treetops, rather than look on passively as others live their hopeless lives. This effort makes him a hero of sorts, able to perceive a choice between an expanded consciousness and a constricting reality. Stern's otherworldly narratives enact a similar choice, offering an expanded awareness of imaginative possibilities while redefining reality in their own terms.

More recently, Stern has to some extent expanded his own ambitions, producing two novels that span both geography and time to create multi-stranded narratives the separate strands of which contribute to a broader perspective on both Jewish and American history. Both have at their core a fantasy narrative that, as in most of Stern's short stories, unfold as if the fantastic premise is merely an odd stitch in the fabric of reality. Both offer variations on Saul Bozoff's reintegration with the Jewish past, further emphasized in The Angel of Forgetfulness by the literal return of Saul Bozoff as a character, while The Frozen Rabbi also employs a supernatural occurrence as the device that triggers the rediscovery of roots.

In The Angel of Forgetfulness, Saul is a college student in New York City, where he meets Aunt Keni, one of the few surviving residents of what was a thriving Jewish neighborhood. Saul is drawn to Keni and her stories about the old neighborhood, and she passes on to him a manuscript—The Angel of  Forgetfulness—written by Nathan Hart, Keni's long-dead lover. The rest of the novel alternates between Saul's subsequent experiences on a hippie commune and as an instructor in a small New England college, a reconstruction of Nathan Hart’s life story as a recent immigrant and then a writer for the Jewish Daily Forward, and excerpts from the manuscript itself, which tells the fantastic tale of an angel named Mocky, who prefers life on earth to a less eventful existence in heaven. The Angel of Forgetfulness is thus, like "Saul Bozoff and the Ghost," a directly metafictional work, a story about storytelling and the reading of stories, even as it uses its metafictional frame to evoke the history of American Jewish settlement and struggle. These twin ambitions—to acknowledge the mediation of narrative artifice in the pursuit of an authentic rendering of historical experience—are accomplished as well and as directly in The Angel of Forgetfulness as in any other of Stern's stories or novels. The reader who would like to experience Stern's strategy of summoning the real through the free embrace of artifice would be well advised to start with this novel.

The Frozen Rabbi (2010), is also a typical blend of authentic detail and fabulation, but the specifically metafictional element in it is less pronounced (and less effective). Structured through alternating third-person accounts of Bernie Karp, a boy living in Memphis, and the history of his family's migration from Eastern Europe to the United States, the novel does interpolate a memoir written by one member of the family, but the device is mostly used simply to move the story along, and ultimately very little emphasis is placed on the power of storytelling to transform a colorless reality. This is not in itself a flaw in the novel, but it does put more of a burden on the decontextualized fantasy device with which the novel begins, as Bernie discovers a literal frozen rabbi stowed away in a basement freezer. It turns out that the rabbi has been in this state for over a century.

The rabbi's presence immediately exerts a great influence on Bernie Karp, who begins to familiarize himself with the mystical tradition the rabbi represents and of which Bernie knows nothing. (He is barely aware of himself as a Jew.) Otherwise, the fact that a cryogenically preserved Hasidic rabbi has suddenly appeared is not much noted. It is not unusual in Stern's fiction that wondrous events manifest themselves as if they are part of the natural course of things, but in The Frozen Rabbi the rather swift way in which the Rabbi adjusts himself to his new circumstances and Bernie regards him as simply his potential teacher creates a curiously flat effect—curious because Stern's fiction is usually nothing if not lively in its narrative momentum. In what seems like no time—with detours to the second narrative—Bernie Karp has become something of an adept at Kabbalah and Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr has succumbed to the temptations of American consumer culture, eventually refashioning himself as a kind of New Age spiritual leader and opening up his own House of Enlightenment.

Perhaps what makes this two-fold conversion seem thinly dramatized is not so much the rapidity with which it occurs but the fairly obvious satirical purpose to which it is put. Satire is not really a mode much pursued in Stern's previous work, which is comic but does not engage in mockery for the purpose of social correction or criticism. Stern's comedy is vaudevillian, schtick-laden. While Rabbi Eliezer's metamorphosis into a religious huckster is humorous enough, the accompanying "commentary" implicit in his transformation—America has become a place where true spiritual values are lost to greed and self-obsession—overrides the pleasure we might take in the sheer silliness of it. Since Eliezer's decline is paralleled with Bernie Karp's ascent (literally, as it turns out) into spiritual awareness, the contrast between the spiritual journeys undertaken by each becomes overly schematic. In his review of The Frozen Rabbi, Mark Athitakis correctly notes that Stern's comedy here "is to a purpose," that "Stern is drawing a bright line between religious commitment in the past and commitment in the present," but that line seems too bright to me. It obscures Stern's more discreet skills of subtlety and suggestion.

Thus the comedy in The Frozen Rabbi struggles for expression in the shadow of the novel’s earnest attempts to expose the misplaced values of American society and to document the hardships of Jewish history. This attenuated humor (at least in comparison to Stern's previous work) is perhaps a direct consequence of the novel's very attempt to provide an historical saga, however fragmented it is by the dual narrative strategy Stern employs. The prose style of The Frozen Rabbi seems to me more reliant on extended exposition and overt psychologizing than The Angel of Forgetfulness, which also provides an historical frame but is not preoccupied with moving the story forward, or Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, which settles for evoking one particular time and place (and which is a first-person narrative anyway). This is not to say that The Frozen Rabbi always fails to offer Stern's comedic riffs and trenchant prose, as can be seen in this description of Rabbi Eliezer's place of business:

        The New House of Enlightenment was situated in a stadium-size structure surrounded by crepe myrtle and lilac, atop a knoll carpeted in shaggy grass slabs like an igloo made of turf. Originally a Baptist tabernacle whose pastor had fallen from grace in a sex-for-prayer scandal, the hulking, flying-saucer shaped building had undergone few alterations since changing hands. Coming upon the place through the humid morning haze, Bernie found himself transposing it in his mind to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with the rabbi's followers dragging trussed and bleating animals up its steps for sacrifice. There was a big sign out front of the type that ordinarily proclaimed Jesus as Lord, its changeable letters now declaring Live Already Like The Day Is Here!

Passages like this make Steve Stern's fiction a great joy to read, and if The Frozen Rabbi perhaps features somewhat fewer of them (or if its structure and scope dilutes their impact), it is still a more dynamic and imaginative work of fiction than most of what is currently made available by American publishers.

Listening to the Spirits 

Reckoning with the legacy of Henry Dumas and his work as represented by Echo Tree, his collected short fiction now reissued by Coffee House Press, is an inherently fraught exercise. To begin with, the volume itself, while immensely valuable in keeping that legacy visible, does little to help us place Dumas’s work in the context of his life, tragically short as it turned out to be, or trace the development of his fiction, however abbreviated. Although it is evident enough in reading the stories themselves that they fall into two broad categories—stories set in the rural South (mostly his native Arkansas) and those set in the Harlem of the 1960s—it would still be useful to know more about his moves from one group to the other, whether his shift to the second category reflects a shift in Dumas’s political consciousness, whether he considered the one setting complementary to the other, etc. For this reissue, Coffee House does now include an introduction by John Keene, but its focus is largely biographical, and Keene provides just a general description of Dumas’s stories and their themes, which (understandably enough) Keene links to recent events associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Certainly Dumas seems especially pertinent to the current cultural and political moment, although this is due less to the fiction and more to the circumstances of his own life and death. Only a few of the stories in Echo Tree were actually published in Dumas’s lifetime, which was violently cut short in 1968, soon after the assassination of Martin Luther King, when he was no doubt murdered by a New York City policeman—the qualifier being necessary here because the incident remains murky in its particulars, and not even the police department’s own conclusion about the case can precisely be known (other than that no action was taken against the police officer) because its records of the case were destroyed 25 years ago. Allegedly, the police officer who shot Dumas later called it the result of “mistaken identity,” although the only extant contemporaneous report on the shooting (in the Amsterdam News) has it that the officer claimed Dumas threatened him with a knife. Of course, that Dumas was the victim of a racist-inflected cop killing is the most plausible explanation of whatever mystery still surrounds the incident, but to think of him most immediately as a previous victim of the systematic racism of American law enforcement risks overshadowing his considerable achievement as a writer, which has already been dimmed by the passage of time and the relative obscurity within the larger literary community in which his fiction has languished for too much of that time

Additionally, the nature of that achievement might be further misunderstood. Keene in his introduction compares Dumas’s fiction to the work of Ishmael Reed, William Melvin Kelley, and Charles Wright, but also insightfully distinguishes it from the fiction of these contemporaries in its attempt to “expand the genre’s possibilities by incorporating speculative modes and elements of the fantastic,” drawing “from a range of traditions, including realist, gothic, horror and supernatural fiction,” as well as “African and African-American spirituality, folklore, and myths.” Although the fabulative qualities Keene describes are perhaps most evident in the “country” stories, even those set in urban spaces can display elements of the uncanny. None of Dumas’s stories follow customary narrative patterns. They often feature episodes of terror and violence, but few of them seem constructed to melodramatically highlight such episodes as the “climax” of a conventional story. Dumas’s fiction can take us to unexpected places, even when it doesn’t necessarily seem to be leading anywhere in particular at all (or should be taking us somewhere else).

Since the stories in Echo Tree do not seem to be organized into those that were published and those left unpublished (presumably there are a significant number of the latter), or assigned a spot in Dumas’s all-too-brief career, it is altogether possible that some of the effect of open-endedness or drift in the stories results from works that were incomplete or that might have ultimately become parts of a finally unrealized whole. While this unavoidably gives us a possibly distorted view of Dumas’s aesthetic intentions, it is clear enough that he was not much interested in satisfying the presumptions of readers (predominantly white) expecting a certain kind of social realism (a trait he certainly shared with Kelley and Reed), more inclined to treat “racial prejudice” not as a “problem” to be solved but as a built-in feature of American society that African-Americans have long had to accept as an unavoidable obstacle to their own agency and well-being. Dumas is frequently linked to the Afrofuturism of an artist such as Sun Ra, to whom he pays tribute in “The Metagenesis of Sunra,” although as this piece itself shows in its atypically fanciful style, Dumas’s fiction is generally more subdued, less deliberately extravagant.

The first (and probably Dumas’s most well-known) story in Echo Tree, “Ark of Bones,” is perhaps the most explicitly fantastic, although it is a fantasy of the most sobering and funereal kind. It could be called a tale of the supernatural: Two boys, Headeye and Fishbone, find themselves down by the riverbank when on the river itself suddenly appears a ghost ship. The boys make their way to the ship (taken by two mysterious strangers in a rowboat), where they find a large collection of bones and a crew tending them. “The under side of the whole ark was nothing but a great bonehouse,” Fishbone tells us:

I looked and saw crews of black men handlin in them bones. There was a crew of two or three under every cabin around that ark. Why, there must have been a million cabins. They were doin it very carefully, like they were holdin onto babies or something precious.

Although the boys return to shore (where they learn that a black man has recently been lynched and his body thrown into the river), a few days later Headeye informs the narrator he is leaving, presumably to return to the ship and rejoin the crews in their mission of sanctifying the bones.

It is not difficult to see how Dumas’s work could come to the attention of Toni Morrison, who may have been the first literary figure (she was an editor at the time) to “rediscover” Dumas a few years after his death. Surely the future author of Beloved would have considered Dumas’s story to be evoking the same sort of folklore-influenced magical realism characterizing that novel. But while “Ark of Bones” is certainly one of Dumas’s more notable achievements, it isn’t really quite representative of the stories in Echo Tree, at least in its form and narrative strategy. (In its depiction of the legacy of white supremacy for rural Southern Black Americans it is entirely representative.) The stories that incorporate the preternatural or the uncanny generally do so in a more stealthy and muted way, and some of the stories are more or less straightforwardly realistic, if not necessarily driven by plot. The title story depicts a belief in “spirit-talk” between two young boys, as one of them attempts to conjure up this spirit, but ultimately what ghostly activity that does occur (strange sounds in the woods) could still be attributed to the boys’ heightened sensitivity rather than to the supernatural.

Another story that flirts (maybe more than a flirtation) with the fantastic is “Fon,” one of a handful of the Southern stories that depicts encounters with white people, encounters that are tacitly threatening, when they don’t inevitably lead to acts of racial terrorism. In this story, a white man named Nillmon is in his car when a big rock suddenly breaks through his rear window. After tracking down a black youth, Nillmon decides that the youth, who identifies himself as Fon (short for Alfonso), is indeed the culprit and determines to “break” him, which he attempts to do after rounding up three other men to join in on the effort. Before they are able to kill Alfonso, however, all four of the men are struck down by arrows, fired from somewhere in the trees (or the sky). Fon, it would seem, is the herald of avenging spirits, emerging from the land (or descending from the heavens), who will eventually secure justice.

Justice is less clearly on the horizon in the other rural stories featuring confrontations with whites (“peckerwoods,” as Dumas’s characters are wont to call them). In “Rope of Wind,” a boy named Johnny B witnesses three nightriding white men kill a black minister and drag his body, tied in a sack to the back of their car, around the countryside. When the men go into a house, Johnny B manages to remove the body from the sack, but all he can do is hide the body in the woods and run the ten miles back home, “as if behind him flowed a river of blood and tears, like a phantom in the nite, black Johnny B, the running spirit, breaking the silence of the nite with his breathing, the only sound that kept his feet pounding the road, running, running, and running.”

“Rope of Wind” is a realist story, but the situation in which the protagonist finds himself is allegorized more explicitly in “Devil-Bird.” In this story a young boy, who is also the narrator, watches as his father ushers into their apartment an elegant gentleman who turns out to be Satan himself. A little later, another man, God, it would seem (dressed more shabbily than the Devil), also arrives, and God and Satan proceed to play a card game with the narrator’s parents, the winner to be given charge of the soul of the boy’s dying grandfather. Johnny B was himself indeed witness as well to the work of Satan, in the actions of the white men on the rampage. In many of Dumas’s stories, young black men and boys come to a recognition (whether they are aware of it or not) of, if not the dominion of evil, then the brutal and baffling realities of the world they are otherwise compelled to inhabit. The final story in Echo Tree, “Riot or Revolt,” modifies this version of the coming-of-age trope: A boy in Harlem observes the scenes in and around a local bookstore, a hub for the community, during a series of demonstrations. (The bookstore is visited by the Governor and the Mayor because “leaders are known to come here.”) What the boy sees is clearly inspiring to him, and in the story’s conclusion he joyously starts marching in an ongoing demonstration himself.

This story, as are many of the Harlem-based stories, is more a work of conventional realism than most of the stories set in the rural South, presumably an attempt to record the rising resistance and resolve among African-Americans making itself felt at the time of Dumas’s death. Yet some of the Southern stories are also essentially slices-of-life realism, and some of the Harlem stories incorporate fantasy. Others, such as “The Lake” and “The Metagenesis of Sunra,” are fantastic but use neither of these settings. Some stories do not conform easily to a perception of Dumas as either a fabulist or a realist, although these are the twin poles between which the fictions in Echo Tree vary. Such variety, however, is part of what makes the book a charged reading experience. It surely does underscore Dumas’s talent as a writer of fiction, although at the same time reminding us that he was so barbarously prevented from fully harvesting that talent.

Entering Cross River 

Rion Amilcar Scott’s The World Doesn’t Require You is both continuous with his first collection of short fiction, Insurrections (2016), and a significant departure. Most obviously, both books offer stories set in Cross River, a fictional Maryland town outside of Washington D.C. The characters, almost exclusively African-American, in both collections are in general quite acutely aware of themselves as residents of this community, which is given its own unique history (the site of America’s only successful slave insurrection) and geography—abutting the “Wildlands,” a kind of wilderness area in the middle of an otherwise urban landscape, and bisected by the great river that gives the town it name.

The shared setting almost inevitably makes Cross River as much the subject of these books as the characters portrayed and stories told, but Scott as well reinforces the town’s centrality in The World Doesn’t Require You by moving more directly toward a mythopoeic treatment of it through emphasizing the fables and folklore that have accumulated through the community’s history, and by adding to the more or less realistic short stories in Insurrections more formally adventurous narratives marked by fantasia and a kind of magical realism. From the stories in the first collection to those in the second, it is as if Scott has moved on from the effort to convey the palpable reality of Cross River to the attempt to render the setting in the service of a larger, emblematic vision, as a kind of archetypal African-American milieu in its historical circumstances and cultural inheritance.

Both books together thus offer us a rather wide array of characters, all of whom are compellingly individualized but also collectively representative of the inhabitants of Cross River. However, while some stories, such as “The Slapsmith,” about an abused, transient woman and her encounter with two homeless men encamped near the railroad tracks, portray the most marginalized members of the community, a significant proportion of the characters are, if not exactly prosperous, notably well-educated and mostly middle class. Indeed, several of them, including “Good Times,” the first story in Insurrections, and “Special Topics in Loneliness,” the novellas that concludes The World Doesn’t Require You, feature characters who attend or teach at Freedman’s University, the local historically black college. Both books depict their characters interacting or in conflict with other black characters; few white characters appear, remaining on the periphery of a fictional world that is presented as a self-sufficient creation that in no way requires contrast to a white-dominated society to reinforce its authenticity.

This is not to say that the relationship between this African-American community and the racialized reality of American culture is obscured or unexplored. The history of this relationship suddenly intrudes in “Klan” (Insurrections), the narrator of which recalls “the time the Klan galloped through the main yard of Freedman’s University late in the evening. . . Four white-sheeted ghosts on white horseback riding in procession.” It is hard not to be aware of this history (and its accompanying stereotypes) when reading “Party Animal,” which takes the form of a dispassionate psychological case study of a young black man who has succumbed to “Reverse Animalism,” a disorder that has caused him to enter a “backwards evolution and descent into what can only be described as simian behavior.” For white readers especially, the effect of this story can only be unsettling; on the one hand, the transformation from metaphorical (party animal!) to literal might seem like an exercise in absurdist comedy, but to learn that the man, Louis Smith, after being confined to a psychiatric facility “often violently attacked other males for supremacy, sexually accosted female patients, and swung through the facility, hopping from wall to wall as if they were jungle trees” surely leaves the reader disconcerted. If the story is not quite an allegory of white racist perceptions of the black male, its bold manipulation of historically racist imagery evokes that history in an unanticipated way.

In The World Doesn’t Require You, Scott similarly incorporates such charged imagery in two stories featuring robot protagonists (although the robot’s creator plays a prominent role as well). “The Electric Joy of Service” and “Mercury in Retrograde” are narrated by Jim, a “Robotic Personal Helper”—RPH, or “Riff”—created by a man Jim refers to as “the Master.” Jim was one of the original Riffs, a survivor of the virus plague inflicted by the Master himself when his business partners object to his plan to “paint these fuckers black”:

Give them big red lips, dress them like lawn jockeys. Sell them to white folks. They’ll have slaves again and we’ll get rich.

The Master is himself a black man, and each of the stories track the ambivalent relationship between Jim and his creator—the Master chooses to call the narrator “Nigger Jim,” and while Jim is eventually fully aware of the implications of the name, he has nevertheless been programmed to meet his master’s needs—“coded to love and to serve him.” In the latter story, the robots carry out their own insurrection (after accessing tapes about the Great Insurrection in Cross River), but most are subsequently deprived of their self-created programming language in an Electric Holocaust” intended to suppress their revolt.

“Mercury in Retrograde’ is not satirical, and the connection between its SF-ish situation and American slavery is too unequivocal for the story to be taken merely for its allegorical parallels. Jim’s struggle to maintain solidarity with his robot compatriots despite their suspicion (if not outright hatred) of him, and despite the imperatives of his conditioning, makes him quite an affecting character. The story’s conclusion highlights the strength of that conditioning, and perhaps Scott wants to emphasize how insidiously the slaveholder mentality can warp the consciousness of the enslaved. But almost any interpretation of this story is going to oversimplify it, eliding some of the lingering uncertainties—how are we to respond to the Master?, what are the implications of the robot-slave conceit?—the story doesn’t really resolve. Something similar is true of “A Loudness of Screechers,” although in this case the inconclusiveness comes from the story’s hallucinatory quality: A young narrator tells us of his family’s encounter with a flock of Wildlands “screecher birds,” an encounter that apparently involves an ritual of appeasement the narrator is witnessing for the first time. The boy’s uncle makes an offering to the circling birds but is last seen “climbing higher and higher in the sky” as a screecher clutches him and flies away. Clearly this story draws on embedded Cross Riverian lore, but precisely what we are to make of the enactment of this particular rite—not to mention the phantasmic event at its climax—is surely subject to disparate conclusions.

Even in the stories less reliant on outright fantasy devices, our intended responses to the characters and situations aren’t insistently signaled. The dominant character type in The World Doesn’t Require You is the seeker—after knowledge, after success, after self-enlightenment. Some of these seekers are sincere in their efforts, but others are more self-serving, some outright frauds. A prominent source of the literal pursuit of transcendent insight is again to be found in the Wildlands, specifically in “a kind of forbidden zone they called the Ruins, a succession of abandoned plantations, many taken over by squatters claiming divine right to save the soul of the land.” Here, in “The Temple of the Practical Arts,” a group of people (including the narrator) follow “Dave the Deity” (introduced to us in the book’s first story, “David Sherman, the Last Son of God”) in his farmhouse turned temple. In this story, the aspirations of the faithful come to a literally fiery end, as the police burn down the temple in an action reminiscent of that taken by the Philadelphia police against the Move liberation group. The story depicts the narrator, Slim, grappling with his own darker impulses, even as he recalls the Temple’s beginning as the product of a “beautiful” vision, but a follow-up story, “Slim in Hell,” finds him succumbing to those impulses in the aftermath of the Temple’s demise.

Dave the Deity is not entirely a charlatan, nor is Slim merely an angry failure. Both have been deprived of their dreams (they are musicians), and both of them are forced to compensate for their disillusionment—in David Sherman’s case, his behavior might just seem eccentric, but it also courts danger, a danger that Slim, at least, believes was caused by Dave’s own bad judgment. (Dave brought into the Temple an aspirant named “The Kid,” who Slim believes is concerned about himself, not the ideals of the Temple. In “Slim in Hell,” it is the Kid’s musical success with the local “Riverbeat” sound that finally sends Slim over the edge.) Slim professes to believe in the mission of the Temple—even more than Dave himself—but “Slim in Hell” makes it clear enough that his personal envy is as large a factor in driving him to the destructive act that concludes the story as the existential despair produced by the burning of the Temple—although that existential despair is also real.

In their mixed motives and internal complexity, Slim and David Sherman are typical of most of the characters in The World Doesn’t Require You, although some characters and their actions are more morally ambiguous than others. Few of the characters could be called conventionally “sympathetic,” but neither do the stories seek to expose them to the reader’s disapproval. In some ways, Scott’s almost exclusive focus on this self-enclosed black community has the effect of making us even more aware of the overarching white world outside it, but our view of the people of Cross River is not dependent on their relation to that external world (the pernicious effects of which remain implicit—although this world occasionally encroaches in the form of neighboring Port Yooga, Virginia). The characters are presented in all their human complications, however much historical circumstances have inevitably conditioned their tangible expression.

The characters whose motives are arguably the most opaque are the two lead characters in “Special Topics in Loneliness Studies” (Scott’s longest published work to date). It is composed of a journal of sorts written by Dr. Simon Reece, an enigmatic figure who seems more ghostly than real. Reece tells us of the downfall of his quasi-colleague, Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, an English professor at Freedman’s University, an account supplemented by various inserted documents—emails, syllabi, student essays, writing by both Chambers and Reece. Reece appears to be an instructor himself, but his status seems nebulous at best: “Somehow I always had students,” he writes, “although my courses weren’t officially offered by the university. No idea where they came from. I just set up shop every semester in an empty classroom and start teaching.” Reece lives in the basement of a classroom building, which “had once been the morgue when the building was the school’s teaching hospital.” He reveals he had once been a low-paid adjunct at Freedman’s, so low-paid his family had been evicted, and it is as if he is now a revenging spirit eager to expose academe “for the dystopian wasteland it truly is.”

This he does not merely by witnessing the ruin of Chambers but actively participating in its progress. Whether Reece actually intends this to be the consequences of his actions is finally uncertain. What Reece’s narrative really discloses is that he himself is far from free of the narcissism and moral degradation he attributes to modern academia. Dr. Chambers’s most serious offense turns out to be his esteem for Roland Hudson, a Cross River poet known for his autobiographical poems about scorned love. When Chambers (with Reece’s encouragement makes Hudson the centerpiece of the course that gives the novella its title, the divergence of opinion about the value of Hudson and his work between Chambers and a colleague invited as a guest lecturer leads ultimately to a grievance filed by a student (ironically the only student to find value in the course to begin with) when Dr. Chambers doesn’t take kindly to his colleague’s influence on the student’s term paper ( a feminist critique of Hudson’s “erasure” of the real-life woman who scorned him) and begins to unravel. Perhaps in the end Chambers’s ordeal (which includes the enmity of his dean and a final humiliation before the faculty) does indeed confirm Reece’s view of the malevolence of academe—not malevolent enough to prevent Reece from accepting a position as Chambers’s replacement—but Reece himself has worked diligently to propel the version of it that defeats Reginald Chambers.

Looked at one way, “Special Topics in Loneliness Studies” could be regarded as an academic satire, but this, like calling “Mercury in Retrograde” science fiction or “The Loudness of Screechers” a horror story, is only a superficial characterization. These works both draw on specific actions or images generally associated with such generic forms and have a larger role to play in evoking the imagined reality of Cross River. In this way all of the stories in both Insurrections and The World Doesn’t Require You seem part of the same work, a project that could be extended indefinitely as a comprehensive creation equally allowing for formal exploration and an underlying continuity of purpose. Scott has indicated that a Cross River novel may be forthcoming, at the least a sign that there is indeed more to be known about this deftly realized place.