The Reading Experience

Meaning’s Music (William H. Gass)

If writers such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, and Christine Schutt have brought increased attention to the sentence as the fundamental, perhaps even self-sufficient, source of aesthetic interest in fiction, the most important precursor to their particular kind of inspired sentence-making must be William H. Gass. While these writers cite Gordon Lish and his notion of “consecution” as the most immediate influence on their own practice of allowing form to evolve from the serial progression of meticulously constructed sentences rather than regarding form as the pre-existing container to be filled with the writer’s words, Gass was exploring the potential of the sentence as the focus of the writer’s art before Lish began exhorting his cadre of students to embrace this approach. All of the adventurous, “postmodern” writers of the 1960s and 1970s, among whom is Gass is usually placed, wanted to redirect readers’ attention to the “play” of language, but arguably William Gass was always the writer who most consistently demonstrated that such play is in fact the very essence of all serious literature.

The care Gass devotes to his sentences can be seen in his earliest work of fiction, “The Pedersen Kid,” as well as more generally in the stories collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968). “Mrs. Mean” in particular reveals Gass’s way of converting specific details of observation into verbally sensuous language:

Now the blood lies slack in her but the pressure mounts, mounts slowly. The shears snip and smack. She straightens like a wire. She strides on the house, tossing her lank hair high from her face. She will fetch a rake; perhaps a glass of water. Strange. She feels a dryness. She sniffs the air and eyes a sailing cloud. In the first shadow of the door she’s stunned and staggered. There’s a blaze like the blaze of God in her eye, and the world is round. Scald air catches in her throat and her belly convulses to throw it out…

Although it will become even more pronounced in his later fiction, here we already see Gass’s characteristic use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance, as well as the cadenced rhythm and startling figures of speech that can make Gass’s prose seem to dance on the page.

But it is in Gass’s first novel, Omensetter’s Luck (1966), that we can really see he is no ordinary stylist content with merely “lyrical” ornamentation. Especially in the longest section of this novel, devoted to the internal monologue of the Reverend Jethro Furber, Gass uses language not to depict scenes that in effect pre-exist the words that describe them but to bring the scenes and characters into their distinctive mode of being in the first place. Reverend Furber exists for us mostly, if not solely, through the verbal expressions that evoke his hyperactive consciousness. By contrast, his foil, Brackett Omensetter, has only the most rudimentary relationship with language at all, and as a character he thus is largely an absence in the novel that bears his name, as he and his “luck” are conveyed through the obsessions of Furber and the novel’s other important character, Henry Pimber. Both Omensetter’s absence and these characters’ obsessions work to make Omensetter a rather elusive and mysterious figure, but paradoxically he remains a character entirely enveloped in language—just not his own.

The strategy Gass uses in Omensetter’s Luck could be described as the “free indirect” method of narration (called by Henry James “3rd-person central consciousness”), and indeed the internal perspective giving rise to the narrative makes Omensetter’s Luck the Gass novel most reminiscent of Faulkner. Still, the ambition of the novel is not to give us access to the minds of the characters so that we might better glimpse their mental processes, understand their “thinking” separate from its necessary embodiment in language, but precisely to make a certain kind of language visible as a style. Gass’s prose doesn’t so much “reflect” his characters’ pre-verbal consciousness as itself create an artifice of consciousness that exists only as a phenomenon of language. In Gass’s next works, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968) and (after an interval of over twenty-five years) The Tunnel, language is treated even more obviously as the primary object of interest, although in these books language isn’t merely “style” in the conventional sense, the usual sequence of sentences and paragraphs; instead, Gass allows form to emerge as an extension of the disposition of language in an especially literal way, as the words on the page migrate here and there, arrange themselves into unorthodox shapes and patterns, and call attention to themselves through the use of variable fonts and shades, including colored ink.

These books gained William Gass the reputation of a “postmodern” writer indulging in verbal “tricks” and “games.” Gass’s new novel, Middle C, is likely to strike most readers as less dependent on language games, but such an impression would ultimately be only superficial, based on the novel’s fewer explicit graphical flourishes and a return to the central consciousness strategy. At the core of this narrative is the protagonist’s own obsessive language game, as throughout the novel he recasts and revises a single sentence, turning it around, expanding and contracting it, not so much to get its meaning “right” (the point it makes is entirely clear from the first version and never really changes) but to explore its variability, to treat the words and their place in the sentence in a way analogous to the treatment of notes in the  twelve-tone  method in music pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg. Indeed, the novel comes to its real conclusion when protagonist Joseph Skizzen judges that the initial sentence—“The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure”—has reached its final form in a sentence of “twelve tones, twelve words.”

Joseph Skizzen is himself a music professor, a self-proclaimed Schoenberg scholar, although eventually we learn that his credentials to be the former are fraudulent and his interest in being the latter mostly feigned. The novel essentially tells us the story of Skizzen’s life, from his birth in London during the Blitz to his emigration to Ohio with his Austrian-born mother to his ultimate crisis when he fears the college that employs him has found him out. But the narrative is related in a discontinuous if still orderly and ultimately coherent way that could be said to mimic the serialism of Schoenberg or Anton Webern. The story of Skizzen’s life gets told, just as all the notes in the twelve-tone scale are played and heard, even if it is accomplished while avoiding the kind of “development” expected of both conventional narrative and music, and while preserving the possibility of surprise and evocative juxtaposition. The musical parallel is certainly not exact, and the novel can be read simply as an episodic if fragmented sort of immigrant narrative, or even a coming-of-age story, but clearly enough Middle C wants us to be aware that such a parallel is possible, whereby the role of language goes beyond the “meaning” we can derive from it and does become a more self-sufficient medium, an arrangement of words analogous to music as the arrangement of sounds.

Appropriately enough, this conception of literary language is perhaps best exemplified in the pages devoted to Professor Skizzen’s lectures on modern music:

The materials of a work of art, my dears, appear first as simple differences but then begin to migrate into oppositions and into pairs. For instance, the cleeks and buzzes of insects in the night, each with their own scratch on the face of darkness, sidle alongside the clarinet’s happy candy like ants to a melt of chocolate—apparently an enemy of our pleasure. No matter how pure a note is, when singly sounded, we realize its man-made character and its preordained place in the confectional box, the musical scale: whereas we trace nightime’s clatter back to the cricket, who is broadcasting its lust, first in one direction, then in another, with sharp chirps like the crepitations the locust makes by bowing its legs vigorously back and forth upon steadied wings to signal its presence and advertise its need…These little wails of music, or bits of ragged scrape, are seeking a companion, a connection, even if only momentary, but always so they may give more sense to their sounds and make more of meaning’s music.

Such a passage, of course, conveys an important sense, “meaning” about the nature of musical art that Gass no doubt wishes to communicate, but it is a sense that is inseparable from its sense-centered images and the sensuous unfolding of Gass’s sentences, their distinctive wordplay (made even more pronounced when read aloud). Among his contemporaries, only Gass’s friend Stanley Elkin can rival him as a stylist who offers an alternative version of “style” in which the aesthetics of prose does not consist of adding the occasional felicitous phrase or figure to the otherwise utilitarian stream of sentences that set scenes and advance plots, but instead extends to the way plot, setting, and even character are conjured from the verbal wizardry devoted to almost every sentence. Both writers make it very difficult to ignore style as the central, irreducible element of fiction, the pleasures of which in the work of Gass and Elkin precede and determine the other pleasures of plot or character.

In some ways the pleasures of this particular passage are largely separate from a consideration of character, since Skizzen’s lecture seems at least as much like an essay interpolated into the text as it does a recitation in his own voice—indeed, an essay very much of the kind we might expect from William Gass in his work as an essayist. That Skizzen possesses at best a self-education in music and has dubious enthusiasm for modern music in the first place only makes his disquisition all the more artificial, less a window onto Skizzen’s character than an opportunity for Gass implicitly to align his own art, the art of the novel we are reading, with that of a modernist such as Bela Bartok, although in doing so he is also thus engaging in the kind of self-reflexive gesture that would associate the novel with the postmodern in fiction. While Middle C is certainly less explicitly metafictional than Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife, and contains fewer textual embellishments than The Tunnel (although Gass has suggested in interviews that in his original conception Middle C would have included more of these), by focusing so intently on music it nevertheless clearly invites the parallel between musical art and the art of fiction, at least as practiced by William H. Gass.

Still, this is probably Gass’s most accessible work of fiction in the way it provides a conventional emphasis of sorts on character and events, even if finally the reader must be wary of extending complete sympathy to Joseph Skizzen, or even of entirely trusting that we have gotten a strictly accurate account of Skizzen’s life. The novel’s final episodes involve Skizzen’s potential exposure as a fraud, the story he has created about himself and his life a fiction. Although we already know his academic credentials are fake, we are still tempted to take Skizzen’s side, to hope he will not be exposed by the powers that be at Whittlebauer College. And when indeed it turns out that the college is after someone else, this seems to be a happy ending, one that will allow Skizzen to continue to live out his fiction. If, instead, we think that Skizzen is morally culpable for perpetrating this fiction and should have to reveal his “true self,” which of the three selves he himself identifies as both marking the stages in his life’s progress and continuing to co-exist in the present construct “Skizzen” should we recognize? Joey, the immigrant boy? Joseph, the young man trying to understand his place in the world to which he has been brought? Professor Skizzen, who has decided that this persona is the most effective buffer against that world?

It could be said that “Skizzen” is born into fakery and fiction. His father—originally Rudi Skizzen—changed his own and his family’s identity more than once in migrating from Austria to England. If the elder Skizzen soon afterward disappeared, leaving his wife and children to remake themselves yet again in America, Joseph Skizzen ultimately embraces his patrimony in forging a usable identity, although where the father took on his assumed identities in order to more fully assimilate himself to human reality (at which he failed), the son assumes his in order to keep his distance from that reality. Joseph Skizzen in fact is so alienated from the world made by human beings that he curates his own “Inhumanity Museum,” cataloguing the atrocities people have inflicted on each other.  Skizzen wants nothing more than to hide his “true self” from this abhorred reality. The question finally is whether such a self even exists, so thoroughly has he hidden it from possible contamination by the virus of intimate human contact.

It is the triumph of Gass’s novel, however, that, through the energy and prodigious invention of his singular prose, he is able to transform his protagonist’s evasions and attempted disguises into a fully revealed, intricately composed work of literary art.

Simulacrum (Don DeLillo)

Among the writers commonly labeled “postmodern,” the two most immediately mentioned are usually Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Since the term was first coined to describe a turn away from the reemergent realism of the post-WWII years, it has been defined and redefined to the point that it has lost any coherent meaning. That it now so reflexively brings to mind the work of these two writers is a telling indication that it has come predominantly to refer to recurrent themes, a “worldview” more than a formal innovation. To write postmodern fiction is to find the form that adequately reflects a postmodern reality, not to extend form beyond its purely functional assignment to reflect reality in the first place.

If the relevant touchstone is the work of John O’Hara or J.D. Salinger, then of course the narratives of Pynchon and DeLillo are far from orthodox or familiar. While by no means does either writer abandon storytelling—their stories in fact can be very dramatic, the action at times extreme—the narrative structure in their novels highlights discontinuity and indeterminacy, creating plots that wobble and loop, ultimately suspending rather than resolving themselves. Readers seeking a conventionally immersive “good read” generally do not find the novels of Pynchon and DeLillo suitable candidates, although the prevailingly comic tone and the extremity of situation and character in them can certainly be provocative and entertaining. These qualities, however, do not substantially distinguish the work of Pynchon and DeLillo from black humor, absurdism, or many other recognizable practices of modernism still influencing adventurous writers after World War II. The formal features of their fiction would not alone prompt us to put it in a separate category designated “postmodern.”

When we do discuss Pynchon and DeLillo as postmodernists, then, we are talking about a certain sensibility that is attuned to a world that is itself postmodern, with the characteristics attributed to it by such theorists as Fredric Jameson and J.F Lyotard—a world without universal or metaphysical grounding, vulnerable to randomness and drift, dominated by forms of technology that both accelerate and mark the loss of presumed coherence. Pynchon and DeLillo depict this world with particular force and insight, paradoxically making their novels, ostensibly challenges to ordinary realism, works of especially compelling realism (metaphysical realism, perhaps), able to represent a suddenly fractious reality more faithfully than existing modes of social realism. If modernist “stream of consciousness” was not really a subversion of realism but an intensification of it, its extension to a deeper level of human perception, so too are the unconventional narrative strategies of Gravity’s Rainbow, White Noise, or Underworld not really an abandonment of realism but its reconfiguration.

Such a description applies to DeLillo’s work even more directly than Pynchon’s, as few if any of DeLillo’s novels really depart much from the protocols of realism (except perhaps Ratner’s Star, which remains his most Pynchonesque novel). Indeed, after the shifts in time and space, the seemingly random occurrences, and trademark set-pieces are accounted for as devices meant to amplify, not undermine, the evocative power of narrative, it could be argued that the fundamental aesthetic assumptions of DeLillo’s fiction are realist, albeit a realism thoroughly informed by the strategies of formal disruption made available to the novelist by modernism. If it seemed to many observers that the events of 9/11 were like excerpts from a DeLillo novel, this is because in his novels he had so accurately portrayed the forces at loose in the world that made something like the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, as well as their immediate aftermath, seem almost inevitable. DeLillo’s new novel, Zero K, about cryonic preservation, could be described as a straightforwardly realist novel, indeed the most linear exercise in realism he has yet produced. The subject of this novel may seem exotic and excessive in its portrayal of unrestrained technology, but once we accept that the sort of death-defying technology the novel invokes has actually been developed (though perhaps not as extravagantly), its narrative is not at all implausible. Many of us might find the behavior depicted all too recognizable.

Perhaps we should say that DeLillo has a postmodern vision, an especially acute perspective on the particular ways the late 20th century (and now early 21st) has simultaneously fostered the dissociation of belief from a central, commonly available source of value and meaning, while also generating counter-movements, some laudable, some desperate, some purely destructive, that attempt to assert a substitute for the lost center. DeLillo’s fiction is a chronicle of such attempts. His first four novels provide a template for the portrayal of this dynamic, introducing the range of responses to the postmodern condition to which DeLillo consistently returns throughout his work. In Americana (1971) and Great Jones Street (1973), the effects of mass media and consumerism are the focus of attention, themes that become even more pronounced in later novels such as White Noise (1985), Mao II (1991), Underworld (1997), and Cosmopolis (2003). End Zone (1972) announces the interest in language that on one level preoccupies much of De Lillo’s fiction, as does the more general consideration of the dominion of science and technology depicted most directly in Ratner’s Star (1976).

The effects of media and the triumph of consumerism are of course in DeLillo’s fiction baneful and corrupting, the product of a misbegotten response to the postmodern loss of moral and epistemological stability whereby representations of reality replace reality and acquisition for its own sake replaces all other values. The cultural ravages of these phenomena are closely linked to the deep dysfunction of the current political order, the dark recesses of which De Lillo began to explore in his late 70’s novels, Players (1977) and Running Dog (1978). Here conspiracies and random violence have more adherents than anything resembling democracy.

If DeLillo’s portrayal of an increasingly globalized capitalist culture that has lost its bearings but attempts to exploit that loss for profit seems to many readers a startlingly familiar rendering of the world they live in, it also lends DeLillo’s fiction some of the characteristics of social satire. While only the first four novels could really be called “humorous” in any conventional sense, the later novels certainly have a critical edge that can be regarded as satirical, even though the implicit absurdity of speech and action they register is related in a deadpan and affectless tone that has become DeLillo’s signature mode of expression. This is the quality of DeLillo’s fiction that most creates the impression his work is postmodern, as the cool and detached narration—often via DeLillo’s trenchant, honed dialogue—only intensifies the disturbing ambience that permeates DeLillo’s created worlds. But the effect of this device is less the impression of a wholly fabricated world than of one just a few degrees of knowing transfiguration away from the world we actually inhabit.

DeLillo’s postmodern vision thus seeks its own kind of representational coherence, but such coherence is challenged by the element in DeLillo’s fiction that has the best claim to be called postmodern, the underlying examination and critique of the signifying function of language first featured prominently in End Zone but identifiable, sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly, in most of DeLillo’s subsequent novels as well. End Zone uses the language of football and warfare (the two being closely associated throughout the novel) in its portrayal of its football-playing protagonist and his philosophically-informed meditations on words and their meaning. (“It was a sinister thing to discover at such an age, that words can escape their meaning,” Gary Harkness muses at one point. “A strange beauty that sign began to express.”) The Names makes DeLillo’s interest in the power of language to both shape and misshape perception most directly the subject of the novel, and is probably his most sustained treatment of the role language plays in creating the conditions that make the postmodern world possible.

The Names alerts us to its dominant theme in its title, which refers to a “language cult” that ritually murders people whose initials correspond to those of the places where they are killed. What seems random to the outside world is for the cult the enforcement of order and pattern, the kind of order produced by words and the meaning they provide. However, the language cult merely exaggerates (to a deadly degree) our habitual orientation to the language we use, which we assume is transparent in its meaning and direct in its authority. DeLillo’s fiction consistently questions these assumptions, never more directly than in The Names, and many of the oblique, discontinuous stylistic features of his novels can be explained as a prolonged response to the critique of language it also works to disclose, offering an alternative practice that acknowledges the instability and uncertainties of human language. The need to cultivate a different, less transcendental relationship with words and their use is explicitly depicted in The Names, whose protagonist comes to appreciate the “cadences” of language, and can accept “the rise and fall of the ironic voice.”

This acquiescence to the inconclusive nature of language is echoed in the formal and narrative structures of the novels as well. Most of them feature characters engaged in a search for meaning or enlightenment, only to have the search frustrated, become hopelessly convoluted. Such a narrative scheme is most visible in Libra (1988), in which the invented character of Nicholas Branch seeks to assemble a CIA secret history of the Kennedy assassination, but can only conclude that the “real” story will never be known, so thoroughly confused, contradictory, and circuitous is all the “evidence” he encounters (a judgment that doesn’t so much gainsay the parallel narratives relating the story of Lee Harvey Oswald and the plot to assassinate the President as it makes all three narrative strands essentially indeterminate, impossible to reconcile). A novel like Libra explodes the human propensity to seek order and pattern by invoking a patterning that is out of control, susceptible to an endless loop of explication and interpretation. It also works to reveal the kind of order and pattern fiction itself offers, which also prompts indefinite explication and interpretation rather than providing fixed meaning. What is most meaningful in a work of fiction is found in the process of reading, not in the resolution of conflicts or mysteries.

The gravest threat to our presumption of meaning and coherence is surely the prospect of our own death. If death is final, oblivion looms, annihilating any meaning we try to force on existence and making belief in immanent order or beauty pointless. Fear of death pervades DeLillo’s fiction, but—at least before Zero K—probably most directly in White Noise, whose main characters are preoccupied with death (including Murray Siskind, who is no doubt the preeminent philosopher of death in DeLillo’s fiction, especially in his notorious lecture on the supermarket as America’s way of deflecting consciousness of death) and the plot of which incorporates the literally free-floating allegorical specter of death, the “airborne toxic event” that sends the novel’s protagonist on his own journey of reckoning with death’s reality. For all of the ways the postmodern condition as depicted in DeLillo’s fiction is characterized by the attempt to fill a void, the ultimate void left by human mortality looms even more ominously, resistant to our efforts to lower its horizon.

Zero K illustrates how determined those efforts can be. Even more concentrated in its focus on a culture haunted by death, this novel continues the trend among DeLillo’s novels after Underworld, his last “big” book and the one that secured his reputation as a major writer, toward a smaller canvas and a more formally condensed scale. Unlike The Body Artist or Cosmopolis, however, which in using the novella form produced enigmatic narratives that exploited the reduced scope to evoke dreamlike and more poetically charged effects, Zero K does little either formally or stylistically to transform its narrative beyond its relatively familiar and rather straightforward premise. On the one hand, it is not surprising that DeLillo would write a novel about obsession with death and the extremes to which human beings might go to defeat it; on the other hand, it is disappointing that the novel he wrote seems predictably the sort of thing Don DeLillo might write in addressing these themes.

The story the novel tells is certainly disturbing, but most of what is provocative about it is implicit in a brief outline of its characters and plot: A young man is invited by his long estranged father to witness the final stages of the process by which his fatally ill stepmother will be frozen in a cryogenics facility, to be revived at a time when, according to the owners of the facility, she will not only be cured of her illness but completely revitalized, brought to life in an “advanced” form. The father, nearly inconsolable at the loss of his wife but a believer in the promise of the reanimating technology, threatens to have himself frozen while still perfectly healthy, but assures his son he will not go through with it. Eventually the son finds himself back at the facility as his father does indeed choose to join his wife in the “cryostorage” section of Zero K.The novel chronicles what is essentially an assisted suicide, although in this case it is assisted not by a Dr. Kevorkian but by technological development itself, capitalism attempting to usurp the remaining role still mostly reserved to God—determining when the end of life should come. Ross Lockhart, a successful businessman and a millionaire several times over, genuinely longs to be reunited with his wife, but he helped to establish Zero K (along with its accompanying philosophy of resurrection, the “Convergence”) because he shares its self-actualizing ethos, which his great wealth allows him to indulge. Clearly the Convergence appeals to his sense of self-importance: death is an especially unwelcome intrusion to someone of such wealth and status, a belief no doubt shared by most of the other “customers” now sealed in their pods awaiting their own rebirth and triumph over death. The fear of death exhibited by people like Ross Lockhart and his wife is magnified by, and closely related to, their delusions of grandeur.

The novel is narrated by Lockhart’s son, Jeffrey. The father left his first wife, Jeffrey’s mother, and their son when Jeffrey was 13, and while the son and the father eventually became closer, Jeffrey tells us he “went nowhere near the businesses he owned.” Jeffrey uses his narrative of his visits to Zero K—located in a desolate part of Central Asia—to reflect on his life with his abandoned mother and his more recent personal successes and failures (more of the latter). Unfortunately, there’s not much about Jeffrey Lockhart’s account that makes the narrator himself a very interesting character. He seems to exist mostly as the recording eye reporting to us on the startling and often bizarre things he sees and hears; indeed, the detached perspective Jeffrey assumes can seem eerily removed from the horrors he witnesses, especially as he observes his father preparing himself for what Jeffrey surely knows is a premature death:

He was naked on a slab, not a hair on his body. It was hard to connect the life and times of my father to this remote semblance. Had I ever thought of the human body and what a spectacle it is, the elemental force of it, my father’s body, stripped of everything that might mark it as an individual life. It was a thing fallen into anonymity, all the normal responses dimming now. I did not turn away. I felt obliged to look. I wanted to be contemplative. And at some far point in my wired mind, I may have known a kind of weak redress, the satisfaction of the wronged boy.

You might expect a son viewing his father “naked on a slab” under such circumstances to express somewhat more concern about the wisdom of what is happening, to find it harder to describe this scene in such clinical terms. That he doesn’t isn’t so much a character flaw causing us to lose sympathy as it is an emptying out of Jeffrey Lockhart as a character beyond his functional role as “the son” and as mouthpiece for the author. This would not be such an obstacle if the language DeLillo put in his mouth was livelier, more transformative, but unfortunately the passage quoted is representative of the style throughout Zero K, mostly expository, unobtrusive, utilitarian in its descriptive language. It is a style that seeks to convey the extraordinary scenes the narrator beholds with a kind of diligence and precision, and in the process the narrator loses definition as a character who has something important at stake in the events he recounts.

The lack of affect exhibited by Jeffrey Lockhart might have produced an effectively chilling evocation of the absurdity inherent in the spectacle before him—human beings willing to die because they perceive it as a way of cheating death—through the contrast between his earnest, matter-of-fact tone and the extremity of the situation. But Jeffrey’s account throughout the novel is finally just earnest and matter-of-fact, amazingly enough helping to make an intrinsically shocking story at times verge on tedium. Perhaps it is just that the circumstances of this novel are so conspicuously, even predictably, those to which DeLillo would be drawn, or perhaps the blankness of the writing finally just represents a blankness in this character, but Zero K is a DeLillo novel in which the scrupulous representation of folly and madness has begun to pall. Even the video images broadcast incessantly on giant screens in the Zero K facility, serving as something between interior decoration and religious iconography and before which Jeffrey Lockhart often stands mutely, as if unable to avert his gaze from their cumulative power, devolve in Jeffrey’s recitation into a simple list of oddly prosaic summaries:

Men in black walking single-file, each with a long sword, sunup, ritual murder, black head to foot, a chill discipline marking their stride.

Soldiers asleep in a bunker, stacks of sandbags.

Exodus: masses of people carrying whatever possessions they can manage, clothing, floor lamps, carpets, dogs. Flames rising across the screen behind them.

Such images could be stolen from previous Don DeLillo novels, or at least a fancied version of a DeLillo novel. When a character in White Noise recites a litany of predictions made by “leading psychics” in a tabloid newspaper (“A Japanese Consortium will buy Air Force One and turn it into a luxury flying condominium with midair refueling privileges and air-to-surface missile capability”), it might superficially resemble a list like this one, but these transcribed television images seem expected, perfunctory, and without the blend of humor and foreboding that make the earlier discursive inventory, and others like it, more rhetorically effective. In Zero K, this particular list seems largely redundant, an empty flourish.

Zero K doesn’t exactly seem like self-parody, however; it is more like DeLillo has come to this DeLillo-like premise and cast of characters belatedly, after a dominant impression of “typical” DeLillo themes and motifs had been established among many readers and critics and before DeLillo himself could treat the premise with any kind of fresh inspiration or create characters that don’t already seem like stereotypes. Murray Siskind seems to have anticipated the novel’s focus when he describes technology as “lust removed from nature,” further characterizing it as “what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies.” Zero K at times reads like a needlessly extended illustration of Siskind’s point. The book is either the least postmodern novel DeLillo has written or the most: an apparently sincere and authentic effort that manages to read like a simulation, a version of the cultural moment that seems like its own antecedent.

The Backward Part (Michael Martone)

Although he is a well-known figure among other writers, widely published in literary magazines both prestigious and more obscure, and popular on what might be called the “reading circuit,” Michael Martone has during his now rather lengthy career received few reviews in the mainstream literary press. This cannot be due to the quality of his fiction—which is very high indeed—but that he is primarily a writer of short fiction (as well as two novellas, themselves largely comprised of unified shorter pieces adding up to a whole), could perhaps partly explain his absence from the most-read book pages, where novels are rewarded the majority of review coverage.

Perhaps Martone is considered primarily a humorist, a Twain-like figure (on a smaller scale), whose books emphasize jokes, wordplay, weird situations and wacky conceits: a parodic travel guide with invented facts and attractions, a collection of authorial contributor’s notes, some of which conflict in their details with some of the others. Also like Twain, Martone is strongly focused on evoking place, in this case the state of Indiana—more precisely, the northeast corner of Indiana, where is located Martone’s home state of Fort Wayne. Thus Martone can easily enough be dismissed as a regionalist, although his portrayal of Indiana, and the Midwest more generally, is hardly an exercise in “local color,” even though many of the characters Martone creates, in stories that are often quite brief, could indeed be called colorful. What Martone offers us in his fiction is not so much the “real” Indiana but a version he has transformed into a fanciful heartland, one that seems no less real for its apparent incongruities.

Martone has cited Edith Hamilton (from Indiana) as a formative influence on his depiction of their mutual home state: her renderings of Greek mythological stories suggested that telling stories about Indiana might bestow on these midwestern characters the sort of heightened emblematic significance we find in the figures depicted in Hamilton’s Mythology, even if such characters’ interests are mundane and their actions not always exactly heroic. Thus, while it would be patronizing to say that Martone seems to express affection for his characters, they are nevertheless granted an integrity in their circumstances and outlook as Midwesterners that allow them both to assert their individual identities and to seem representative of a midwestern (or Indiana) experience of the world. Even Dan Quayle, whose “pensées” are featured in Martone’s series of stories about the Indiana-born Vice-President, is not presented as an object of ridicule but a man sincerely influenced by his Indiana roots, fully aware of his public image and secondary status as Vice-President, who, in one story, silently indulges his frustration by imagining all of the audience members naked as he presides over the State of the Union speech.

It would not really be accurate either to call pieces such as “Pensées of Dan Quayle” satirical, although Martone’s fiction certainly is dominantly comic in tone, albeit less one of outright hilarity than a more restrained, implicit kind of humor that arises from character and situation: in simply being themselves, Martone’s characters take up the kind of ordinary, recognizable activities—setting up the searchlight displays that announce the new fall Chevrolets have arrived, observing a school carnival, with it obligatory fish ponds and cake walks—that might elicit a knowing smile, not a belly laugh, and does not at all raise the suspicion that the characters in carrying out these activities are being subjected to mockery. Really no other current American writer manages to effect quite such a union of an underlying realism of character and place with an inevitably distorting comic outlook as successfully or distinctively as Michael Martone, especially in the short fictions collected in his earliest books (through perhaps Seeing Eye, published in 1985).

Beginning with The Blue Guide to Indiana (2001), Martone began offering more formally unified works—if not novels, then longer fictions with a readily discernible unifying device. While the earlier works were surely not altogether conventional in form (Martone is not really a storyteller in the strictest sense), these later books are more audacious and adventurous. The Blue Guide to Indiana is an ersatz travel guide (named after the actual “blue guides”), full of history, notable sites, and available attractions that purport to acquaint the reader with the Hoosier state, but really describes an Indiana of twisted folklore and invented history, not the actually existing place. One might call the book a novella, but this requires accepting that such a work might not include any characters (much less plot) in the conventional sense at all. Michael Martone (2005) has one character, the author himself (or a slyly fictionalized version of the author), on whose biographical background the book performs numerous variations in the form of Author’s Notes, in the process telling us many often contradictory things about “Michael Martone,” although finally what we learn about Michael Martone, about the influence of his mother, and about Fort Wayne, Indiana add up to a relatively comprehensive account of the collective existence maintained among the three.

Four for a Quarter (2011) is more plainly a collection of shorter pieces, but it too employs an artificial device to effectively integrate the parts into an aesthetically satisfying whole. As the title suggests, the number 4 is used freely as a structural and thematic motif—all of the stories come in four parts, are riffs on familiar phrases employing “four” (“Four Eyes,” “Four Dead in Ohio”) or simply treat subjects that conveniently involve fours (“Four Fifth Beatles,” “Mount Rushmore”). This unifying device might seem arbitrary, but it enables a series of stories that provide dynamic and sometimes surprising juxtapositions and variations, as well as an opportunity for some of Martone’s most supple and evocative writing, from demotic first-person narratives to more lyrical prose, as in this description of the accumulation of cotton lint in an Alabama autumn (Martone now lives in Alabama):

. . .The lint escapes the screened-in trailer trucks of the raw harvest or gets kicked up by the gleaning in the fields and threads itself into the wind, winds up coating anything with a burr enough to stick. It snows, little squalls of it accumulated in the niches, the pockets fall has turned out. It is snow that is not snow, a white remainder, until it dyes itself with all the other detritus, becoming the glue of bark and twigs and leaves, leaving nothing but filth, tilth, a kind of felt.

Martone’s most recent book, The Moon Over Wapakoneta (2019), is less intricately structured than Four for a Quarter, although its subtitle does indicate the loose connection among the stories: “Fictions and Science Fictions from Indiana and Beyond.” Not all of the stories in the book are strictly science fiction by any means, but even those that are (“Amish in Space”) seem not so much like full-fledged attempts to appropriate this genre than the sort of flights of fancy anchored in the ordinary we might otherwise expect from Michael Martone. Like Four for a Quarter, The Moon Over Wapakoneta is less exclusively focused on Indiana and the Midwest than Martone’s earliest collections of short fiction, putting less emphasis on setting and more on formal ingenuity and variety. If only a few of the stories might really qualify as science fiction (besides “Amish in Space”—literally about a spaceship carrying a colony of Amish through space on a journey that has already lasted centuries—the title story and “20^th Century” are both stories set in an indefinite future), others, such as “The Digitally Enhanced Image of Cary Grant Appears in a Cornfield in Indiana,” an exercise in the paranormal or “A Bucket of Warm Spit,” a retelling of Jack in the Beanstalk with a drought-stricken midwestern farmer as Jack are more accurately described as engaging in imaginative embellishment through forms of fabulation.

 “The Moon Over Wapakoneta,” the first story in the book, projects into a future containing some of the usual sci-fi elements—travel to other planets (in this case the Moon), hyper-developed technology, etc.—but most of the futuristic imagery is merely alluded to, not really developed into a story about the future. Indeed, what is most striking about the story is the extent to which events in the future seem to have made very little difference to the present life of its protagonist. Wapakoneta is a town in Ohio, just across the border from Indiana, where the narrator-protagonist lives, traveling back and forth to Wapakoneta in order to experience a kind of mundane time travel—Indiana being an hour behind Ohio in clock time. The narrator, who announces immediately that he is drunk (“I am always drunk”), thinks of himself as “the last man on earth” and throughout the story contemplates the moon over Wapakoneta, revealing through his reveries a sense of alienation both from the now colonized moon and from his own current circumstances, drifting between rural Indiana and rural Ohio. “What part of the moon is the backwater part?” he wonders at one point, obviously considering his own situation. He further “imagines some Podunk place” on the moon “where the slack-jawed inhabitants can’t begin to imagine being pioneers, being heroes.”

“The Digitally Enhanced Image of Cary Grant,” another Indiana story, is a tale of the uncanny rathe than outright science fiction. A family driving through the cornfields of Indiana witnesses the apparition of Cary Grant in his role as Roger Thornhill in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, fleeing from a pursuing crop duster plane, as Thornhill famously does in the film. If “The Moon Over Wapakoneta” conveys a palpable sense of emptiness and isolation, this story is lighter in tone, closer to the kind of tongue-in-cheek depictions of Indiana we get in most of Martone’s stories; in this case, the isolation of Ade, Indiana (known previously as the location for the scene rendered in the apparition) is made rather more poignant, the ghost of Cary Grant providing this place with its only chance of receiving renewed attention. The other Indiana-based story in this book, “Versed,” is arguably one that most clearly illustrates the predominant tone in Martone’s fiction about the state. The situation is faintly comic: the narrator works for a company in Fort Wayne that manufactures a sedative used in colonoscopy exams. Throughout the story he observes a fellow who lives next to the office park mow his lawn, and contemplates the paintings of Modigliani, reproductions of which are hung around the office. (At one point in the story, the narrator pauses to also inform us that on their lunch break, he and his coworkers like to go outside and “dowse,” because “we like the exercise, being led by a stick this way and that.”) The story at times becomes almost elegiac, however, as when the narrator reflects on the office park’s location at what was once the outermost boundary of Fort Wayne, now extended so much farther that the Bypass “now bypasses nothing,” and the narrator recalls how in his youth this was an area where lovers parked and, of course, curious teenagers lay in ambush for them.

If only a few of the stories in The Moon Over Wapakoneta directly invoke the Indiana setting, others are clearly motivated by their subjects’ connection to the state, including stories about the Indiana writer Gene Stratton-Porter and Philo T. Farnsworth, an inventor of early television technology whose company was located in Fort Wayne. In the brief “The Blues of the Limberlost by Vladimir Nabokov,” “Michael Martone” purports to review a posthumous work by Nabokov written in response to the writer’s butterfly collecting trip to Indiana’s Limberlost Swamp. The remaining stories in the book highlight Martone’s formal dexterity, which has always accompanied his treatment of “the Heartland,” as it is officially called in the futuristic “20^th Century.” Martone has called himself a “formalist” rather than an experimental writer (although his publisher is FC2, a press long associated with experimental fiction), and while Four For a Quarter shows Martone forging form on a larger scale—a whole assembled from its parts—The Moon Over Wapakoneta, in stories like “The Man’s Watch” (made from a list), “App ro x  im   ate” (presented in facing columns), and “A Convention of Reanimated William Faulkners” (with graphic accompaniments), most prominently features unconventional exercises in form. The final story, “MM + MM + MM + MM: Footnotes in Search of a Story” (followed by an Author’s Note a la Michael Martone) concludes the book with an explicitly metafictional flourish, but much of Martone’s later work has incorporated a kind of prankishly blatant self-reflexivity, reminiscent perhaps of Martone’s mentor, John Barth.

The inherently playful (although not frivolous) tone of The Moon Over Wapakoneta makes it fully representative of Michael Martone’s fiction in its overall approach, although readers less familiar with Martone’s work would certainly want also to sample the early stories as collected in Double Wide (2007), as well as The Blue Guide to Indiana and Michael Martone. These books especially reward the reader interested in the literature of the Midwest, from a writer with an engaging and original vision of the Midwestern sensibility.

Deforming Form (Percival Everett)

Percival Everett’s novels participate in the form “novel” primarily as extensions of the much older mode of satire, which requires no particular form or genre for its more general task of comic deflation. Satire targets behaviors and attitudes that are implicitly marked as so unacceptable or pompous they are deserving of the deflating mockery satire provides. The essentially corrective message of satire—this behavior needs to be eradicated or changed—thus always takes precedence over the purely formal and aesthetic niceties over which some other practitioners of the form at hand often dwell, even when the satirist him/herself might be taking extreme liberties with form and style.

Everett certainly does take liberties with form in his novels, and they are liberties frequently accomplished to hilarious effect. However, these efforts seem mostly directed toward simply dismantling the novel as “form”, without much interest in aesthetically reconstituting the text, Everett’s text, as at least a temporary alternative to established forms, as a new iteration of form in fiction. The first target of Everett’s satire is the writing of fiction itself, which is portrayed implicitly as an enterprise saturated in pretension and moribund assumptions. Although intellectual and academic fraud and pretension in general, as well as the cultural frauds historically perpetuated by white American institutions, are the ultimate objects of satire in most of Everett’s fiction, the force of this satire is so intense and thoroughgoing it seems irresistibly to extend to the literary/philosophical underpinnings of fiction as an “institution” of intellectual practice.

Glyph (1999) well illustrates both the pleasures and the limitations of Everett’s approach. It has a typically outrageous premise: a baby is born with the ability to read and to think (although not to speak) at a near-genius level. When this is discovered, the baby is abducted from his parents (an artist mother whom the baby rather likes and a clueless literary academic he decidedly doesn’t) by a series of academics, scientists, and government goons, all of whom want to harness the infant prodigy to their own personal and professional agendas. Along the way, all of these character types are thoroughly mocked, shown to be concerned only with their own personal and professional aggrandizement. But at the same time the baby, Ralph, is also inclined toward his own kind of self-absorption and intellectual pretension:

. . .My dreams became so transparent that they became devoid of meaning. Jung would have been proud of me. Freud would have gone to sleep during our sessions. My dreams became an exercise in boredom, though I was actually impressed with my imagination and its ability to create so many characters, even if they were stock and repetitive. I thought I knew how it felt to be Louis L’Amour or James Michener or even Dickens.

          Ironically, the actuality of my having subverted my dreaming practice made the fact of my dreaming of great interest. I wondered what indeed it meant about me that I was so set against the notion of convention that I should attack it. So, I replaced the dream with the novel, stripping the stories of my dreams of any real meaning, but causing the form of them to mean everything.

Later in the novel, we are presented with “Ralph’s Theory of Fictive Space,” a long list of propositions that as they accumulate become more and more nonsensical:

    B._E) Story is self-determining and therefore conceptually finite, but fictive space has no boundaries and only boundaries.

    B._F) The world, story and, by extension, fictive space make up reality.

    B._FA) Realities are dependent on fictive space.

    B._FB) Fictive space contains, controls, and contributes truth in reality.

    B.A) A story cannot be seen at once.

Such passages are very funny, but not only do they make it difficult to muster up much sympathy for Ralph as the novel’s protagonist, they work to extend Glyph‘s mockery to itself as a text, as one struggles to discern how Ralph’s various assertions and pronouncements relate to the text we are reading, only to decide that this very struggle is one of the novel’s satirical targets.

To some extent, Everett’s practice in a work like Glyph is an illustration of M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of the “carnivalesque,” in which an attitude of “radical skepticism” makes it impossible for anything to be taken seriously. But Bakhtin makes a distinction between carnivalesque comedy and satire—the latter takes nothing seriously except its own, its author’s, authority, which is invoked to ridicule that which needs to be corrected. My sense of Everett’s fiction is that finally it does not fully relinquish that authority, that its attack on literary processes and pretensions seeks to evade comedic reduction where the work of Percival Everett is concerned. That Everett, or the text at hand, at least, depicts the assumptions behind literary representation to be risible does not mean that Everett’s text is also risible. The alternative to “causing the form of [novels] to mean everything” is causing Everett’s satire of it to “mean” at least something.

The essentially satiric character of Everett’s fiction is even more pronounced in I Am Not Sidney Poitier. This novel is much less metafictional than Glyph or Erasure, its most outrageous gesture in this direction being the introduction of a character named “Percival Everett,” although this Percival Everett is an Atlanta-based professor teaching a course in the “Philosophy of Nonsense.” As such, he is in the line of academic frauds to be found in his namesake’s fiction, but he doesn’t really act as a focus of satiric attention on literary creation per se. His role instead is as a kind of advisor—whose advice is mostly nonsensical, of course—to the novel’s protagonist, Not Sidney Poitier. The novel chronicles Not Sidney’s travails as he attempts to find his place in the world after inheriting a fortune from his mother, who made a lucky investment in the Turner Broadcasting System just before it rose to prominence, along with its founder, Ted Turner.

The novel gets most of its laughs, such as they are, from Not Sidney’s rather loopy conversations with Ted Turner, as well a series of episodes in which Not Sidney finds himself, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in reality, acting out the scenarios of Sidney Poitier movies such as The Defiant Ones, Buck and the Preacher, and, ultimately, In the Heat of the Night. Unfortunately, as a character Ted Turner falls flat, the satirical intent motivating his portrayal being rather fuzzy at best. The parodies of the Poitier movies come off rather better, although ultimately they seem rather obvious in their satirical ambition to illustrate that the obstacles to civil respect and equality encountered by Sidney Poitier’s characters in these “social problem” films are still with us these many years later. And this ambition seems to be the novel’s primary motivating force, even if it is leavened with the sort of “nonsense” one expects from both Percival Everett and “Percival Everett.”

If I Am Not Sidney Poitier Sidney Poitier is satire of a more or less conventional kind, in which mocking, often corrosive humor is used for a traditionally corrective purpose, in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, as in Glyph or Erasure, the authority of the very narrative we are reading (to the extent we can unravel the narrative) is itself questioned, quite deliberately, as Everett takes storytelling, and fiction as a mode of storytelling, for targets of mockery. This quality in Everett’s work, but I believe the impulse behind it is still best regarded as satirical rather than postmodern per se. While Everett does blatantly and persistently call attention to the artifice of fiction-making, the object seems less to simply complicate the reader’s response to the act of narration and to disrupt the maintenance of illusion than to expose both notions to travesty.  Fiction as a literary form is itself not spared the hard edge of Everett’s satire. Among postwar American writers whose work consistently incorporates self-reflexive strategies, perhaps only Gilbert Sorrentino so relentlessly dismantles the existing support structures of fiction — the novel in particular — as does Everett, although Sorrentino seems more interested than Everett in supplying new such structures, even if they are only temporary, made to fit the specific work at hand.

In Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Everett does not seem engaged in an effort to replace the blasted remnants of the conventional novel with a fresh form of his own invention. It would be more accurate to say this novel settles for deforming form as a self-sufficient aesthetic principle. It courts confusion on almost every level: Is “Percival Everett” the narrator who begins the novel by narrating the dream of his “father,” or is it the father? Is the son thus “Virgil Russell”?  Is “Percival Everett” Percival Everett? Is it the latter whose voice appears periodically to remind us he’s in the midst of creating the work we are reading? If the premise of the novel is that is that the two men, “Percival Everett” and “Virgil Russell,” are relating stories to each other, how do we know whose story is which, since the “dialogue” is never clearly demarcated as such? If the stories are emerging as part of a “novel” the father is writing (or is the son writing a novel about the father writing a novel?), why do the characters, their situations, and their actions keep transmogrifying and blending together? Is the story ultimately related of the father’s attempt to escape confinement in his “hospital” the novel’s real story, or is this just more make-believe? What in the world do the photographs in the novel’s concluding section have to do either with the accompanying text or the novel as a whole?

This concluding section finally suggests to us that the father may be in a coma, or perhaps has just died, so that we could choose to interpret the novel we have just read as the spontaneous projections of a dying brain. No doubt some readers who expect formal continuity to be more firmly established, and sooner, will not have the patience to acquiesce to the novel’s apparent disorder until this conclusion provides a kind of retrospective justification (maybe). One suspects, however, that Everett not only anticipates such a response but to a degree expects and welcomes it. The extreme skepticism of fiction’s ability (the ability of all human discourse) to adequately render the truth about human reality that sustains Everett’s satire is surely accompanied by a skepticism of our ordinary ways of reading, which necessarily is expressed by confounding the reader’s expectations, deliberately alienating the reader from these ingrained habits. That Everett’s fidelity to such skepticism would so completely alienate readers who stubbornly cling to their expectation that they reject a novel like this one in frustration is perhaps an acceptable price to pay.

Everett is a prolific writer (by my count Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is his 21^st book), so one also must presume he does after all believe fiction has value. Indeed, in Everett’s case that value may very well consist of the opportunity each book gives him to exercise his satirical imagination and to challenge readers to a more active and self-aware reading experience. The very ferocity of Everett’s satire, as well as the relatively rapid rate at which he chooses to offer it, suggests further that he finds no lack of appropriate targets in current American culture (although his interests extend to American history as well) and that their satirical deflation is a worthy object, perhaps one most appropriately undertaken by fiction of a sufficiently adventurous kind.

Those who do grant Percival Everett by Virgil Russell its ultimate formal integrity and follow it through to the end will actually find that the story it tells, however obliquely, and the subject it addresses, however indistinctly, are among the most emotionally engaging, even moving, in Everett’s fiction. In whatever way we choose to identify “Percival Everett,” the character’s plight is treated with considerable sensitivity, at least to the point we find Everett’s depiction of old age and its indignities convincing and compelling. The relationship between father and son, although no more free of regret and misunderstanding than any other, also emerges from the novel’s formal uncertainties as nevertheless genuinely felt, captured almost poignantly in the novel’s final scene:

    . . .Twitch a finger here. Twitch a finger there. Fuck with them any way you can. I’m dead, but they don’t know it. Forget the adage let sleeping dogs lie. How about we let dead men die?

    You hold my hand

    I hold your hand.

    I write this for you.

    If I wrote, this would be it.

    If you wrote.

    Yes.

    I will always be here.

    And I.

    I’m dead, son.

    I know that, Dad. But I didn’t know you knew it. If this conclusion suggests that genuine human connection is possible, even (especially) in facing imminent death and inevitable suffering, it also thus paradoxically reinforces the judgment that Percival Everett is fundamentally a satirical writer, albeit one of a particularly radical sort. A satirical writer must ultimately believe that the satirical gesture has some conceivable efficacy, that it is not simply an expression of nihilism or despair. One certainly wouldn’t go to Percival Everett’s novels for good cheer and false comfort, but in being often savagely funny they are also balanced by a concern that we behave better, and make such mocking laughter less necessary.

Mutated Reality (George Saunders)

The fiction of George Saunders is usually received enthusiastically by readers and critics who admire it for its “quirky” departures from what are still even now the predominantly realistic norms of literary fiction. And it is not so hard to understand why these readers and reviewers would find Saunders’s fiction appealing. To first-time readers especially, his stories are no doubt a little puzzling, requiring some accommodation to their surrealistic settings and premises, but ultimately they are puzzling in an entertaining way, the settings and events just off-kilter enough to provoke the reader’s curiosity, the premises just outrageous enough that we find their surrealism both disconcerting and surprisingly tangent to existing conditions of American reality. Above all, the stories are often very funny, so that even if we remain uncertain how to interpret the narratives’ mutated reality, we can still enjoy their oddities as conveyed through Saunders’s deadpan, understated style, which can assimilate the most stilted, bureaucratic jargon with the most colloquial, slang-ridden expressions, often in the same paragraph or even the same sentence. Reinforced by Saunders’s ability to mimic the inanities of American speech in his dialogue, this adept orchestration of voices and languages is frequently a source of pleasure in itself.

Tenth of December (2012) manifests all of these appealing qualities. It may be, in fact, his most consistently engaging book since his first, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996). The title story of that book introduced a narrative trope that by now has become a signature Saunders device, a trope encompassing both plot and setting, through which the story’s protagonist, also the narrator, relates his experiences as an employee of an outlandish theme park in which American life and history have been reduced in scale and repackaged as entertainment— although there is never much indication that anyone is actually entertained by it (certainly not the employees). Parks such as this signify both the way American history has been reduced to its value as the subject of such simplistic entertainments, designed to fulfill the needs of commerce rather than citizens and their shared culture, as well as the way in which American life in the present has organized itself around the commercial imperative, emptied itself of interest in anything except mindless spectacle. “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” may be the prototypical such story, its title an accurate forecast of the story’s portrayal of a Civil War-era theme park in crisis and the unfortunate consequences for its employees, especially the narrator (who winds up dead). The story isn’t in fact entirely surreal, since one can indeed imagine an American culture so debased that something like the phenomenon it depicts could arise, but its imaginative amplification of these nascent cultural tendencies is darkly comical and disturbing.

Most of the stories in CivilWarLand (including the concluding novella, “Bounty”) are of this kind, giving the book itself a structural and thematic coherence. Stories of this type recur in Saunders’s later work as well (“Pastoralia”), suggesting that this narrative is especially expressive of Saunders’s concerns as a writer, that his return to it allows a continued development of those concerns. There is but one such story in Tenth of December, “My Chivalric Fiasco,” which is actually one of the least substantial pieces in the book, a diverting enough turn using the theme park setting that gives Saunders an opportunity to indulge in some quasi-Elizabethan verbal tricks but is otherwise rather slight. Most of the other stories in the book nevertheless still seem recognizably to originate in the same sensibility that offers the dystopic theme park narrative as a touchstone of sorts for the aesthetic and thematic assumptions of Saunders’s fiction.

Stories such as “Escape from Spiderhead” and “The Semplica Girls Diary” share a setting in what must taken as a near future in which currently ominous practices and trends have proliferated even farther, to the point they have simply become an accepted feature of the cultural landscape. In the first, prisoners have been assigned to a facility where they serve as test subjects for drugs with names like “Darkenfloxx” (administered through a “MobiPak”), which work to alter mood or increase sexual proficiency. (Saunders readers will not be surprised when the tests go horribly wrong.) In the second, a suburban family in distress wins a lottery jackpot and uses the money to keep up appearances by buying “Semplica Girls” (“SGs”), poor young immigrant girls who have essentially agreed to act as lawn ornaments through some sort of new technology that allows them to hang suspended in the air. Both stories could be called satirical, but again they less provoke laughter than sober recognition such things might not be so farfetched. In each story as well, at least one character resists the general moral drift that accepts the ongoing situation as normal and instead experiences an awakening of sorts. In “Escape from Spiderhead,” the narrator protagonist decides he will not contribute to the possible death of another test subject, at the cost of his own life. In “Semplica Girl Diaries,” the family’s youngest daughter is so deeply upset by the treatment of the SGs that she sets them free, causing the family even greater hardship.

Thus, while stories such as these clearly enough have some satirical intent, they are in most cases just as clearly explicit moral fables, tales of overcoming the degrading and dehumanizing attitudes that appear to underlie the social order depicted in the stories. It seems likely that this quality in Saunders’s fiction also contributes to its appeal: the imaginative projections into the future come marked with palpable disapproval of the sorry state of affairs it has produced, but offer some hope that the human capacity to overcome cultural conditioning and make morally courageous decisions might still survive. This sort of provisional optimism does not color every story, but finally one can’t call Saunders a gloomy writer, however much his fiction does illuminate the march of folly on which the human species, especially in America, seems to be proceeding. He has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut, who certainly did have a gloomy outlook, and whose fiction contains the same sort of SFish elements and the same straight-faced humor, but where in Vonnegut the humor is about all that comes between us and nihilistic despair, in Saunders it, as well as the movement of narratives like “Escape from Spiderhead” toward an ultimate moment of moral recognition, acts to reinforce, as in most conventional satire, the critique of social dysfunction. Saunders’s fiction leaves the discernible impression its representation of human folly is at least partly meant to suggest we should (and could) stop doing and believing the things that make it possible.

The stories particularly register the depredations of “late capitalism” and the class divisions it perpetuates and intensifies. In addition to the dehumanizing practices depicted in “Spiderhead” and “Semplica Girl Diaries,” the demeaning necessities of current economic arrangements are featured in “Exhortation” (composed in that most debased form of capitalist communication, the memorandum) and “Al Roosten,” in which a man voluntarily debases himself in the name of good business. Class conflict is portrayed very directly in “Puppy” and “Home” and emerges as the dominant theme in the book’s first story, “Victory Lap,” which compels attention first of all as the story of a young woman abducted by a madman but rescued by a neighbor boy before she is killed. Finally, however, the thriller-tinged plot (which seems taken from a television crime drama) serves as a device to dramatize the distance that has grown between the young woman and her rescuer, once childhood friends, a distance exacerbated by the pretensions of class. These stories, less fantastic than “Semplica Girl Diaries,” Pastoralia,” or “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (or certainly than Saunders’s novella, “The Brief Frightening Reign of Phil”), nevertheless only reinforce the conclusion that Saunders is a writer with the ambition of “saying something” about the state of American life and culture.

However much these particular stories depict characters facing extreme situations, they ultimately might still be characterized as works of narrative realism. Even Saunders’s more radically surrealist stories do not really depart from the requisites of conventional storytelling, and in this his fiction is consistent with (probably one of the inspirations for) most of the neosurrealist fiction that has become quite a noticeable development in recent American writing (for example in the work of Aimee Bender and Stacey Levine). If anything, this fiction observes the dictums of plot development even more scrupulously than traditional realism, as the freakish or oddball characters and absurdist events are chronicled in a strictly linear way, encompassing appropriately rising actions and clear resolutions and generally satisfying any reader’s need for narrative. At the same time, claims are often made that this mode of fiction is nevertheless audacious and unconventional, claims based entirely on its defiance of the surface logic of ordinary reality. Thus the alternative posed to “realism” is a diametrical anti-realism that informs a story’s content but not its form. Saunders is probably the most accomplished of these new surrealists, but his stories only illustrate most prominently that such fiction derives its appeal from conjuring fanciful flights from reality related through familiar narrative strategies. That Saunders employs his vision of an altered reality at the satirical level to achieve the traditional goals of realism—to depict the way things are—could lead us to the conclusion that Saunders’s ambitions aren’t that far removed from those associated with the realist tradition. They might be seen as two sides of the same literary coin.

The relatively large proportion of stories in Tenth of December that are more or less straight realism only reinforces this conclusion. It would seem that sometimes Saunders’s effort to capture the degeneration of American life requires the surreal satire of “Semplica Girl” or “CivilWarLand,” while in other cases the realism of “Puppy” or “Home” works as well. Their shared use of conventional storytelling is allied with another in-common feature that finally helps to account for the appeal of Sanders’s work: All of Saunders’s stories ultimately create an emotional atmosphere that solicits considerable empathy for his characters and their plight. This is accomplished to a great extent through Saunders’s prose style, which can be ingenuous in an almost merciless way but through that very quality also provokes sympathy for a character such as the title character of “Al Roosten,” a struggling merchant who has entered into a “luncheon auction of Local Celebrities, a Local being any sucker dopey enough to answer yes when the Chamber of Commerce asked.”

Roosten stepped warily out from behind the paper screen. No one whooped. He started down the runway. No cheering. The room made the sound a room makes when attempting not to laugh. He tried to smile sexily but his mouth was too dry. Probably his yellow teeth were showing and the place where his gums dipped down.

Frozen in the harsh spotlight, he looked so crazy and old and forlorn and yet residually arrogant that an intense discomfort settled on the room, a discomfort that, in a non-charity situation, might have led to shouted insults or thrown objects but in this case drew a kind of pity whoop from near the salad bar.

The most transparently emotion-laden story in the book is perhaps the title story. In it, a boy and a middle-aged man are making their way through a patch of woods. The boy is simply enjoying himself, lost in fantasy, but we discover that the man is ill with cancer and has come to the woods to commit suicide. The man winds up rescuing the boy when he falls through the ice on a pond, and the man decides he wants to live, after all. The plot itself tugs pretty strongly at the heartstrings, but the language used to convey the suicidal man’s despair (Saunders hews pretty closely to the character’s stream of thought) bears an especially direct emotional weight as well:

Ouch, ouch. This was too much. He hadn’t cried after the surgeries or during the chemo, but he feels like crying now. It wasn’t fair. It happened to everyone supposedly but now it was happening specifically to him. He’d kept waiting for special dispensation. But no. Something/someone bigger than him kept refusing. You were told the big something/someone loved you especially but in the end you saw it was otherwise. The big something/someone was neutral. Unconcerned. When it innocently moved, it crushed people.

A passage such as this does not hide the underlying pathos through irony or “wacky” humor. The emotion it is clearly soliciting from the reader even verges on being sentimental. (I would maintain it actually crosses that line.) The story’s placement at the conclusion of this book would seem to further indicate that Saunders regards it as bringing together the book’s common concerns or revealing its important assumptions. For me, the story works to clarify that, despite the fact many of his stories court the bizarre and chronicle extreme states of being, finally George Saunders’s fiction fits comfortably enough within the established protocols of the American short story as recognized and accepted by most readers. That this is true does help explain the widespread enthusiasm for Saunders’s work—the surface content of his stories is pleasingly weird, but they are also told in familiar ways and engage the reader’s emotions rather straightforwardly. At the same time, it does little to help justify claims that Saunders’s fiction, in addition to being entertaining, also occupies a place on the cutting edge of American fiction.

Clothing Optional (Nicholson Baker)

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Nicholson Baker’s fiction is the way it seems both to ingratiate and provoke, aspires to be both accessible and difficult. Most of his novels could be described as at the same time formally simple–a man tends to his six-month old baby one afternoon, two people hold a telephone conversation–and quite radical, at least while we are still attempting to adjust ourselves as readers to such reduced narrative assumptions (which conversely expand the scope of the narrative’s attention.) Stylistically, the novels are also simultaneously transparent, with few “literary” affectations, and elaborate, the sentences themselves expanding in length and complexity to meet the challenges of the kinds of minute observations and prolonged reflections in which Baker’s narrators habitually engage. Even the themes of Baker’s books can seem both obvious and not that easy to discern. What finally are we to make of the succession of images and memories that go through the mind of the narrator of The Mezzanine as he ascends an escalator, or are we left simply with the fact of their succession? How are we to regard the narrator of The Fermata, who tells us of his magical powers to suspend time, which he then exploits to remove the clothing of desirable women? Is he repulsive? Pathetic? An honest portrayal of the creepier inclinations harbored by all men, maybe by everyone?

Baker is probably best known for works such as The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, and A Box of Matches, in which the dilation of time, the obsessive recording of detail, and the constant sidetracking onto secondary and tertiary paths of thought characterizing his work are most pronounced. These novels test the reader’s patience with their narrators’ propensity to digress, as well as their intense interest in such things as shoelaces and airplane tray tables, but the narrators go about their business with such good cheer, assuming we will of course share such interests and appreciate the painstaking delineation of them, our resistance is weakened, ideally leading us to reconsider our presumptive need for a more recognizable story to develop. As the first, most audacious, and probably most successful of these books, The Mezzanine in particular seems likely to endure as a signature work, both standing as an impressively achieved first novel and providing potential insights into Baker’s strategies that I believe can help us approach Baker’s other books as well, even those that might seem departures from the expectations set up by The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, his second novel.

Because at the time The Mezzanine was published “minimalism” was the most prominent trend in American fiction, some critics did attempt to associate this novel with minimalist neorealism, and there are on a first impression some reasons to regard Baker both as a minimalist of sorts and as a realist. Although his minimalism is a minimalism of plot rather that style, Baker’s first books do seem to share with minimalism an inclination to pare back the ambitions of fiction and to return it, after the purported excesses of postmodernism, to a more willing acceptance of the conventions of realism. However, their reduction of plot to such microlevels of act and observation are so extreme, their fixation on surface details so insistent, they could almost be regarded as parodies of minimalism. Fiction’s scale and scope have been constrained so radically in these novels that it may even at first seem they do not ask to be taken seriously. When it eventually becomes clear the author is sincere indeed, the effect is if anything more comic yet, although certainly Baker’s narrators do not intend for us to take their accounts with anything other than the dedicated seriousness of purpose with which they are related.

Ultimately Baker’s minimalism is really its own kind of maximalism. The microscopic focus on quotidian objects and processes that ordinarily escape our notice is a way of rescuing them from neglect, of preserving them in their actual profusion as elements of human reality. His characters are so immersed in their environments and their interests that the perspective normally provided in a work of fiction, which avoids proliferation of detail and refrains from following all streams of thought in the selective way that allows a story to emerge, is necessarily replaced with one that sacrifices story but arguably stays closer to reality–at least as these characters engage with it. Moreover, their preoccupations are certainly not registered in a style that could be called minimalist:

. . .For a second the fifteen-percent figure made me unhappy, and then I thought, Fine, yes, I welcome all this imperfect mingling–I want this circling refluxion of our old reconditioned pleasures and our new genuine ones to continue for years, decades, until it becomes impossible to trace backward the history of any particular liking, just as it was impossible to unstir the rash dollops of red or yellow tint my mother used to add to the custom-mixed paints she got from Sears: she used old peanut butter jars as receptacles, and sat cross-legged in the side yard pouring imperceptibly different yellow-greens from one jar to another, refining the color that she wanted for the porcelain-knobbed dresser in my sister’s room, though the young technician in the paint department at Sears had with apparently scientific precision injected what seemed to me a perfectly acceptable series of squirts of yellow, cyan, and magenta from the paint organ into a while base, according to the recipe in a notebook for the sample chip my mother had matched to the border of the cloth calendar. . . . (Room Temperature)

In what may be Baker’s most notorious books, Vox, The Fermata, and now House of Holes, we are presented with characters whose preoccupation is with sex, but even here the emphasis is on variety and detail. Baker is not really concerned with the psychology of sex, with sex as an expression of love or intimacy, or even with sex in the conventional form of sexual intercourse. All of these books emphasize the multifarious ways of eliciting sexual arousal and of achieving sexual release. Autoeroticism and mutual masturbation occur as frequently as actual sexual congress between a man and a woman (and Baker’s depiction of sexual activity is almost entirely heterosexual). Fantasies of sex are perhaps as common as sex itself. The most noteworthy quality of Baker’s treatment of sex may be the way it emphasizes the sheer enjoyment it provides. The depiction of sexual desire and the myriad ways it might be satisfied is relentlessly sex-positive, even in The Fermata, whose narrator acts on his fantasies in a way many readers could find distasteful. Vox is an unambiguous celebration of sex, in this case allowing both its male and its female protagonist to indulge their uninhibited fantasies.

House of Holes is even more emphatically about sex than Vox or The Fermata. One could argue that Vox is also about the need for caution in sexual relations in the AIDS era, with its protagonists confining themselves to the safety of phone sex, or about “sex” as an artificial construct, a phenomenon of language, while The Fermata could be taken as a satire of the male preoccupation with sex. Both of these novels certainly offer representations of explicit sexual activity (at least in fantasies), but neither could really be called pornographic in either legal or artistic terms. Each features well-rendered, believable characters whose existence cannot be reduced to their participation in sexual activity. The creation of these characters involves subtle uses of point of view, so that in Vox the more aggressive and at times more explicit conversation of the male caller is balanced off against the more restrained sensuality evidenced in the talk of the female caller, each influencing the other, eventually approaching a kind of harmony that mirrors the movement of a love story. The Fermata is related to us in the first person by its potentially unsympathetic narrator, but Baker gives him a voice that is undeniably engaging and helps to mitigate the contempt we might otherwise have for him, an aesthetic triumph that in itself brings redeeming value to the novel that raises it beyond the pornographic.

House of Holes has few of these complexities and might indeed be the most direct and sustained exercise in pornography of the three sex novels. It is about people having sex, explicitly and in almost innumerable varieties. There is no single protagonist or controlling consciousness, simply a third-person narrator relating the various characters’ escapades at the “House of Holes,” an erotic resort to which its sundry visitors suddenly find themselves transported by entering real holes. This initial fantasy device—characters are sucked through a hole on a golf green, through a straw, etc.—sets up the House of Holes as itself a place where sexual fantasies can be fulfilled, and Baker lets his imagination loose. In addition to depicting a multitude of sexual positions and expressions, the novel features a severed arm and hand adept at pleasuring women, a “crotchal transfer,” whereby a man and woman exchange genitals, and a sculptress who gives birth to her sculptures (made of “ass wood”) after engaging in anal intercourse. As in Vox and The Fermata, sex is portrayed with great energy and humor, and while it is all very colorful and explicit, it would be difficult to call this a “dirty” book, if to be dirty or smutty requires that sex be implicitly regarded as shameful, something that otherwise should remain furtive, hidden from view and excluded from conversation.

In an essay criticizing Baker for writing a book like House of Holes, Barret Hathcock asserts that it is indeed a dirty book and cannot “be evaluated as anything but pornography.” That House of Holes consists of graphic representations of sex is undeniable, but Hathcock’s assumption appears to be that if the novel is pornographic it is thus by definition irredeemable as literary art. He goes so far as to charge that Baker is “demeaning” himself by indulging in the pornography of this novel. But there is no reason to conclude that even if a literary work can be called pornographic it can’t also be worthwhile as art. The possibility that the pornographic representations in House of Holes might make some readers uncomfortable or even offend them is not itself a reason to assert the author ought to feel shameful because he is not also uncomfortable. It is also no reason to regard the work as without value, however difficult one might find it to appreciate that value because of a distaste for the sexual content it offers.

Hathcock believes that House of Holes could be aesthetically credible only if it were to “comment” on “our current sex-saturated culture” or if it revealed “an interesting inner life” in its characters, neither of which is attempted by the novel. This assumption that a work of fiction can be regarded as “art” only if it is engaged in “saying something” or in “going deep” into human consciousness (ideally both) is a widely shared one. It betrays the further, rather strange, assumption that aesthetic success has more to do with subject and content than it does with the actual fashioning of art through style and form. Presumably if Baker could be found to be satirizing sexual mores or critiquing the cultural preoccupation with sex as reflected in pornography Hathcock would find something aesthetically valuable in House of Holes. Similarly, if it were to focus on revealing what goes through the minds of the sexually adventurous characters as they frolic their way through the narrative, we would be witnessing something more appropriately aesthetic. But Baker merely presents their frolics without satire or social commentary (although certainly with humor); this is content of which Hathcock disapproves, so it by that measure alone lacks art.¹ Such standards seem to me misguided as applied to any fiction with specifically artistic ambition, but they are especially misguided when applied to Nicholson Baker’s work.

Baker is neither a satirist nor a psychological realist. However much his fiction examines the shared (if often ignored) details of contemporary social reality, it does so not in order to dissect it but to record it, not to mock it or call it into question but simply to apprehend it fully. If anything, Baker’s fiction could be accused of being too uncritical of the reality it records, too willing to accept things as they are, especially the “things” that exist as the commodities of modern capitalism. One could say that Baker’s novels are “about” their characters’ self-conscious immersion in their reality, but this focus is on the “inner life” only in the way in which the novels’ protagonists themselves bring it to the surface. Since most of the novels are first-person narratives, we have access only to the thoughts and perceptions the narrators have chosen to verbalize. Psychologically, these characters are remarkably transparent: one would hardly think to look for their hidden motives or deep psychological conflicts. Finally, that House of Holes offers no social criticism and attempts no exploration of its characters’ minds should not be at all surprising, since these ambitions have always been absent from Nicholson Baker’s fiction. Baker’s art is the art of sincerity and the surface.

In some ways, sex seems a quintessential subject for Nicholson Baker’s art and House of Holes his most adventurous treatment of the subject. It is a common human activity that might be considered fundamentally simple but that invites almost infinite expressions–especially in Nicholson Baker’s meticulous rendering. The multiplicity of sexual acts might seem obsessional, but what have Baker’s books been from the beginning but chronicles of obsession (including his own obsession with John Updike in U and I)? Similarly, one might find the episodic structure of the novel, by which each episode relates a new sexual experience, repetitive, but why would anyone familiar with Baker’s work find the strategic use of repetition surprising? That House of Holes completes what is now a trilogy of sex novels suggests not so much that Nicholson Baker has a dirty mind but that he himself recognizes that this subject allows him to exploit his distinctive approach to fiction in a particularly felicitous way.

Yet at the same time, House of Holes significantly departs from Baker’s previous novels both formally and stylistically. Although it shares with those novels a refusal of conventionally plotted narrative, its use of sequential episodes, each of them tidily provided with a proper story structure, aligns it more closely with traditional storytelling, while continuing Baker’s resistance to larger-scale narrative development. This episodic structure combined with the novel’s large cast of characters necessitates that Baker use a third-person point of view for the first time in his published work. The narrative voice is lively enough, specializing in particular in colorful names for the sexual organs—”She lay on the bed and stuck two fingers up her simmering chickenshack and shook them”—but this voice does lack the more personal charm many of Baker’s first-person narrators are able to convey through their sincere efforts to share their experiences, however strangely magnified or entangled they become. The most immediate manifestation of the different sort of voice we encounter in House of Holes is literally in its style, which is much more functional, less disposed to the sometimes circuitous syntax of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature:

    Pendle peered closely at the ad, and suddenly he felt a powerful air current pulling his hair and the whole of his head downward. He was vacuumed down into the black circle. He lost consciousness for a moment, and he came to he was in Lila’s office. Lila was the director of the House of Holes. She was large and pretty in bifocals, about fifty, with lots of loose light-brown hair. Pendle told her that he was there about the job in The Rooster.

It may really be the tamer prose style represented in a passage like this, more than the pornographic content, perhaps, that prompts some readers to regard House of Holes as a disappointment, “unworthy” of Nicholson Baker. In those scenes depicting explicit sex, such a style would seem to even further emphasize the sexual content, leaving the impression that Baker’s usual facility with language has been sacrificed for the naked (so to speak) pornographic imagery. Even so, we should not overlook that much of this imagery is actually conveyed through dialogue, making House of Holes closer in form to Vox and, as in that book, framing the subject as talk about sex and the healthy loss of inhibition such talk can bring at least as much as about direct representations of sexual acts. This loss of inhibition seems to have a particularly liberating effect on the female characters, who are portrayed affirming their sexual desires and asserting their right to sexual satisfaction. If what Baker has produced here is “pornography,” it is certainly much in contrast to the usual male-centered focus characterizing pornography as a genre.

Since Baker has now written three novels about sex, we must assume that he himself considers this a subject both worthy of his time and consistent with his concerns as a writer. Perhaps it is coherent to believe that he shouldn’t think so, but unless we are led to conclude that taking up this subject makes Nicholson Baker some sort of moral reprobate, I don’t really know what purpose it serves to insist he should write about something else. It seems unlikely Baker would have written these novels only to provoke indignant responses from readers and critics, although House of Holes reinforces the impression his ambitions do not include the attempt to court universal approval.¹It should also be said that Hathcock otherwise expresses admiration for Baker’s work and has intelligent things to say about Baker’s fiction, even if he does disapprove of House of Holes.

Lost in the Woods (Richard Powers)

The Overstory displays some of the formal and stylistic ingenuity we have come to expect from a Richard Powers novel, from his acoustically adventurous prose to his multiple, intertwined narratives (even more multiple in this novel), so characterizing it as purely “agitprop” would be neither fair nor accurate, although the novel is certainly transparent enough in its effort to promote environmental mindfulness. And since Powers has always been willing to take on the weightiest of subjects, generally treated in an earnestly sincere manner, it would go too far to call The Overstory sentimental, although the passages invoking its characters’ often rapturous appreciation of the trees that threaten to replace the characters themselves as the novel’s true dramatis personae are surely full of passionate intensity.

Still, if The Overstory doesn’t stake all of its possible interest to readers in a mawkish story that often veers into melodrama and that doesn’t bother to hide its didactic intent, it comes closer to doing so than I, for one, hope any future Powers novel ever comes. If Plowing the Dark and other early novels took on subjects that could suggest political and social critique but avoided crudely didactic gestures, the books Powers has published since then, beginning with the novel that appeared immediately after Plowing the Dark, 2003’s The Time of Our Singing, gradually began to seem less artful, designed more obviously to “say something.” I was concerned that the aesthetic formalism of Powers’s early fiction would wear out its welcome with readers more insistent that a novel provide direct emotional engagement; as it turns out, it is apparently to those very readers that Powers now most wants to appeal, as if he too has come to agree with the criticism of his early work as too emotionally detached.

As The Overstory continues to illustrate, it is not that Powers has abandoned his stylistic explorations or his intricate braiding of multiple narrative strands, both of which in his best work embody “theme” indirectly and suggestively through juxtaposition and implication rather directly communicate meaning through the usual symbolic devices supplied by a linear story. The Time of Our Singing shows Powers bringing this formalist approach together with a theme—the racial history of the United States in the 20^th century—it complements only uneasily. However much Powers wants his unconventional structure to support and extend his kaleidoscopic survey of the struggle for civil rights, the theme itself inevitably overwhelms the structure, prompting us to wonder why this manifestly important subject should require such an overwrought design. Moreover, other themes that Powers has often provocatively treated, such as the nature of music and the place of “high art” in general, though present in The Time of Our Singing (its brother protagonists are both musicians), are ultimately overshadowed by the larger, more politically resonant subject.

In the immediate follow-up to The Time of Our Singing, 2007’s The Echo Maker, Powers more or less abandons both the synthesis of ideas and the multi-strand narrative strategy, except insofar as there are three main characters and one of them is a cognitive scientist. The story is essentially unitary, however, as the scientist is brought in by the ostensible protagonist’s sister to help diagnose her brother’s brain disorder. The third-person narrator employs conventional psychological realism to bring together the perspectives of these three characters as we learn that the brother’s disorder is Capgras Syndrome, the exposition of the nature and symptoms of which is the novel’s primary focus, supplemented by an accompanying mystery plot as the brother tries to recall the automobile accident that induced his disorder in the first place. Although the character’s dilemma allows Powers to raise interesting enough questions about the fragility of human perception, The Echo Maker is otherwise a disappointingly monophonic novel that seems to show Powers partially surrendering to those critics who have demanded he write novels with more readily apparent plots and more emotionally engaging characters.

Much the same could be said of Generosity (2009) as well, but in this case the characters do not as directly solicit our emotional response. Indeed, the main character is deliberately presented as an enigma, someone whose motivations are the object of analysis and debate among the other characters because her unremitting good nature otherwise seems so implausible. But ultimately the novel is an “examination” of its subject—human personality—in the same way The Echo Maker concertedly inquires into its protagonist’s medical condition, an approach we would not have expected of the author of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance or Prisoner’s Dilemma. And while Orfeo is in many ways the most satisfying of Powers’s novels published in the 21^st century, as the third of his books to take music as subject, it, too, is more conventionally structured—a present narrative with flashbacks—than those works that initially signaled Richard Powers might be an important successor to the initial generation of postmodern writers that rose to prominence in the 1960s and 70s.

Orfeo shows, like all of Powers’s best fiction, that the supposed divide between art and science is spurious, gainsaid not only by his own novels, which depict how the latter can creatively accommodate the former, but by the very convergences between the two his encyclopedic narratives reveal. Orfeo’s composer protagonist takes his explorations of the possibilities of musical expression to an extreme than lands him in very big trouble, but in sensing that music might be an emergent phenomenon at the microbiological sources of life, Peter Els follows up on the intimations first offered in The Gold-Bug Variations that life might be organized according to processes just as inherent to art (music being a particularly pure form of art) as to “science” narrowly understood as a collection of facts about the world. Powers’s most essential work is at least as much about art- and fiction-making (explicitly so in Galatea 2.2) as science or ideas or advanced technologies.

We might initially assume from its title that The Overstory could also be metafictional in this way, but while the novel does exploit the nomenclature that includes both “overstory” and “understory” as descriptions of forest growth, Powers uses them merely as an organizational conceit that works effectively enough to bring a broad order to a fragmented narrative that ranges widely in time and place and that includes an unusually large number of important characters (unusual for a Powers novel). Thus the “understory” introduces us to these characters—and to the obvious importance of trees in their stories—in a sequential fashion that at first almost conveys the impression we are reading a series of discrete short stories. Eventually these stories begin to link up, however (some more directly than others), and the remainder of the novel represents the “overstory,” relating the ways in which the characters in some instances literally join forces, in others intersect from a distance, in their actions and attitudes toward the novel’s encompassing subject (the splendor and importance of trees).

It might seem condescending or reductive to say that finally The Overstory is a novel about trees and the people who love them, but the novel does little to persuade us that such a description is inaccurate. Although subsidiary themes inevitably arise through the accounts of the characters’ various activities—the consequences of zealotry, for example, as one group of characters take their environmental activism too far—that the novel is ultimately conceived almost exclusively to evoke our current state of environmental degradation and make evident the need to halt and reverse it seems undeniable. Powers has been accused in the past of subordinating his characters to his formal devices and his big ideas. In The Overstory they have so plainly been subordinated to the novel’s polemical purpose that over the course of a 500 page narrative it becomes very difficult to find much interest in them beyond their roles in the author’s epic attempt to sanctify trees as symbols of the wonders of life beyond purely human enterprises, roles in which they function as humans able to come to some nascent awareness of the grandeur and resourcefulness of trees in their adaptations to circumstances.

Granted, the large cast of characters doesn’t really allow us to witness much development in them individually, which is not inherently a flaw in a work of fiction, but in this case it only exacerbates the novel’s most serious, ultimately debilitating, conceptual flaw. Aside from some perfunctory attempts to flesh out the characters through their personal relationships (love affairs and marriages), Powers so obsessively focuses on the characters’ raised environmental consciousness it often becomes difficult simply to sustain interest in the incessant expository passages and extended reveries. Passages that might otherwise remind us of the aural and rhythmic effects of Powers’s prose come to seem just more verbal underbrush in a novel-long thicket of exposition and rhetorical exaltation of trees:

            There are trees that flower and fruit directly from the trunk. Bizarre kapoks forty feet around with branches that run from spiky to shiny to smooth, all from the same trunk. Myrtles scattered throughout the forest that all flower on a single day. Bertholletia that grow piñata cannonballs filled with nails. Trees that make rain, that tell time, that predict the weather. Seeds in obscene shapes and colors. Pods like daggers and scimitars. Stilt roots and snaking roots and buttresses like sculpture and roots that breathe air. Solutions run amok. The biomass is mad. One swing of a net suffices to fill it with two dozen kinds of beetles. Thick mats of ant attack her for touching the trees that feed and shelter them.

This passage occurs on page 390, but by the time I had gotten to it (and other passages immediately following that depict one of the characters on an expedition to Brazil), the repetition of such wide-eyed evocations throughout the novel had already induced  a state of sufficiently weary impatience that I wanted simply to skip over it. Suffice it to say that I have never before experienced such a reaction while reading a Richard Powers novel.

If this novel has a dramatic “arc,” it is in the movement toward the ill-fated act of sabotage carried out by five of the character once their lives begin to converge and they find themselves participating in Earth First!-like protest against clearcutting, its aftermath a denouement of sorts. One member of the group (its leader) is killed when an explosive device detonates accidentally, and after the four survivors scatter to face whatever fate awaits them (for a considerable period of time they appear to have escaped discovery), we follow them separately until one of them is revealed to the FBI through an unlucky encounter with a young woman who happens upon his diary of the events. He, in turn, is persuaded to identify one of the others, and so he chooses the one he perceives to have been the least committed to the cause and has gone on to have the most successful post-tragedy career. Powers attempts to bestow some belated dignity on this latter character through his refusal to snitch on anyone else, but since the character’s motivation to join the group in the first place was never made very clear, this seems an essentially empty gesture that only makes Powers seem to equivocate about whether we are to deplore the group’s act of violence or feel satisfaction that some of those involved got away with it.

Some of the characters exist outside the orbit of this band of militants who give the novel its most extended action: a forestry scientist who makes an important discovery about how trees communicate with one another, whose life is chronicled from her original research as a student (which is at first rejected, then celebrated) to her apparent suicide at the lectern while making a conference presentation; a lawyer and his wife, who, after the husband’s stroke, are ultimately reconciled to each other through a fascination with the trees in their own yard; a builder of video games, who suffers from a disabling injury after falling out of a tree as a teenager but who takes inspiration from the genetic code of trees in devising his own computer code.

All of these characters reinforce the central emphasis on the marvel of trees, but the computer scientist, Neejay, fits most uncomfortably in the novel’s overall scheme. Neejay’s circumstances and his idealist belief in computer programming arguably make him the most interesting and well-developed character in The Overstory, but his story seems largely detached from the others, as if it belonged to another novel on another subject. At the book’s conclusion, a force of inchoate “learners,” apparently self-organizing as emanations of the coding activities of people like Neejay, manifest themselves in what seems to be an evolutionary move away from human beings and their destructive habits. It is a peculiar device that seems intended to provide a happy (or at least hopeful) ending in circumstances that otherwise do not appear to permit one. It is not reassuring.

I share all of the concerns animating The Overstory and agree with its implicit arguments, as well as the explicit arguments Powers himself has made, often eloquently, in interviews regarding the subject of this book. But I do not read novels to have my already existing beliefs affirmed; if anything, I read fiction hoping to have my unexamined beliefs challenged, fiction that compels me to view those beliefs from a productively skeptical distance. Most essentially, I want to read works of fiction that offer an aesthetically abundant reading experience, that remind me there are still unfamiliar practices and undiscovered forms to encounter in fiction. Until recently, I was able to find all of these things in Richard Powers’s novels, and it is the greatest disappointment of The Overstory that it suggests they may no longer be available there.

Language Games

The Resourceful Accumulation of Sentences 

If currently there is a writer whose work represents the cutting edge in advancing the art of fiction beyond prevailing conventions and stale assumptions, in my view that writer is Gary (now Garielle) Lutz. Lutz’s short stories indeed question the presumption that the inherent goals of fiction are to tell stories and communicate “themes” by establishing instead that the core element of fiction is the sentence and that the art of fiction consists of the resourceful accumulation of sentences–in Lutz’s case the accumulation of singular, surprising, and painstakingly constructed sentences. These innovative sentences in turn give rise to the larger discursive and aesthetic order that can indeed be found in Lutz’s stories, but Lutz first attends to the aesthetic integrity of his fiction at this more fundamental level, such that “content” and “form” become inextricable.

Lutz has himself described the method by which he builds his sentences in some detail, most notably in the essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” but also in numerous interviews he has given over the years since Stories in the Worst Way, his first book, was published in 1996. Most of his stories, he explains, are conceived as sentences, or the gradual development of sentences, without relation to character or a plot. He describes his interest as being almost exclusively in placing these sentences together in the most resonant way he can devise, resonant literally in how words reinforce and echo one another and how the sonic and grammatical relationship between those sentences maintains and magnifies such echoes. Assonance, consonance, and alliteration play an important role in this process, as does manipulations of grammar, odd juxtapositions, unusual word choice, word combinations and neologisms. We don’t have to get very far into the first story in Divorcer, the title story, to find a passage that immediately illustrates many of the typical features of Lutz’s prose:

The afternoon welcomed me into its swelters. An hour went by, then cleared the way for another. I had found a bench near the store and stood in quiet beside it. Others came and sat: unfinished-looking men, a pair of proudly ungabby girls I took for lovers done for now with their love, a woman graphically sad in ambitious pinpoints of jewelry. Then a man so moodless, I could see all the different grades and genres of zilch behind his eyes. The city flattered these people who in the country would have been flattened fast for all to see all the same.

The reader is immediately invited to pause and consider the first sentence as a self-contained linguistic unit. Why this unorthodox figure—“welcomed me into its swelters”—with its verb made into a noun? The second sentence also draws attention to itself, this time through the strange and arresting use of personification, reinforcing the conclusion that Lutz wants us focused in at the sentence level. Indeed, to fully appreciate Lutz’s singular sentences, we must be willing to restrain the impulse regard them as links in a discursive chain, to in effect merge them into a kind of verbal stream that carries us headlong not only from sentence to sentence, but through all the story’s verbal formulations and devices, regarding them all as simply the transparent means to the ultimate goal of narrative development and resolution. In a Gary Lutz story we must on the contrary pause to contemplate what “unfinished-looking men” might actually look like, to judge the fitness of the phrases “proudly ungabby girls” and “a man so moodless” in leaving an impression of these briefly mentioned figures. We must note not simply the wordplay of “flattered” and flattened” but also that each word separately produces its own distinct connotations, while in this syntactical pairing the two also work together to give the whole passage additional meaning uniting the particular details, as does the following repetition of “for all to see all the same.”

For readers willing to accept Lutz’s redirection of our aesthetic interest, it is perhaps tempting to conclude that Lutz’s art is indeed an art of the sentence, considered in isolation from narrative, character, or setting. Thus almost all reviewers and interviewers who express admiration for his fiction concentrate their attention on Lutz as a unique stylist, ignoring the way his stories do in fact retain these other elements. The formal patterns that emerge are both a result of and a natural aesthetic complement to the singular sentences that constitute his work. If individual sentences in a sense leave us suspended in their word twists and serpentine syntax, the stories in which they appear do something similar, accumulating these sentences to create a kind of layering effect that gradually expands our sense of character and situation without making them secondary, mere vehicles for advancing a conventionally developed plot. The stories work by linking sentences to paragraphs to episodes, establishing a relationship of mutual resonance and reinforcement, creating from character and situation an impression of depth and breadth that might seem static, but that finally works as an aesthetically coherent alternative to the notion that “story” entails movement forward.

“Divorcer” introduces us not only to this alternative strategy, but also to the theme that pervades the work and allows Lutz to expand his technique beyond the bounds of what would be possible in an individual story. Like all of the other pieces in Divorcer, it is composed of marked fragments, each one adding a layer to the narrator’s account of his short-lived marriage. The sections move freely around the narrator’s recollections of the marriage, each of them capturing a moment or arriving at an insight that illuminates the circumstances of the marriage and its ultimate failure, but by no means suggesting that human relationships can be explained by representing them in a “story.” As one would suspect, the reality of failed marriage is most memorably evoked in the most bracing sentences:

Marriage had not worked out to be a doubling of each other’s life, though there were  duplicate juicers and sources of music.

My penis might have had reach, maybe, but it never increased itself for her.

My wife: she was the active one in the marriage, mixing other men into it.

Both through sentences like these and through a formal arrangement that reproduces for the story as a whole the poetic suspension in which such sentences are designed to hold the reader, “Divorcer” allows us, in effect, to inhabit the experience of divorce rather than simply read about it.

The other stories in the book expand and enhance this effect, approaching the experience from different angles, augmenting it through depth of treatment, their characters compelling precisely because they seem to blend into each other, their shared predicament conveying a powerful sense of pain, confusion, and loss, as well as, frequently enough, self-hatred. In “The Driving Dress,” the narrator loses weight in order to begin wearing the clothes left behind by his ex-wife, coming to terms with his (second) divorce by fleeing his own identity. In “Fathering” and “Middleton,” no actual divorce is involved, but each introduces us to a marriage at a point when its failure is implicit. In the former, a father focuses his attention on helping his daughter through school, after which his job as a father will be mostly done. Meanwhile, he arranges trysts with other men for his wife, as if acknowledging that the marriage itself is now past its usefulness. In the latter, a husband’s wife has died, and as the husband briefly relates to us the events of the funeral, it becomes clear the marriage had become perfunctory: “There had in fact been talk of divorce, but we talked about it the way other people talked about getting a pool or maybe just a pool table, even just the miniature kind that rests atop a regular table, even a card table.” That the marriage was inadequate to the husband’s needs is confirmed when shortly after the funeral he begins a sexual relationship with a man.

Two additional stories, “To Whom Might I Have Concerned?” and “I Have to Be Halved,” widen the focus to include same-sex relationships as well, although they are portrayed as just as subject to disillusionment and dysfunction as their heterosexual counterparts. Thus sexuality in Divorcer is not shown to make a significant difference in tempering the fragility of intimate human relationships. All human beings are prone to the same blindness, indifference, and casual cruelty, all human love accompanied by an expiration date. As the narrator of “Womanesque” explains his failures, “It’s just that I was born, grew some, started differing, didn’t stop.”

These are certainly not original insights. What is original in Gary Lutz’s fiction is the especially powerful way in which these insights are expressed, emotionally affecting without resorting to traditional narrative devices. He does not narrow the possibilities of “literary” language to the usual sort of figurative flourishes that too often serve mostly as linguistic decoration, nor does he rely on typical notions of plot or of “well-rounded” characters or any of the other established elements of fiction that draw attention away from language. If much experimental fiction is primarily experiment with form, Lutz’s innovation is in paring back form in order to reconceive the purpose of the sentence as the truly essential element of prose fiction. In the way they reinvigorate the English sentence, Lutz’s stories in Divorcer ought to inspire other writers to consider how close attention to the shapes and sonorities of sentences can in turn bring a satisfyingly new kind of organization to fiction.

A Dreamy Look 

If flash fiction potentially appeals to a new, attenuated attention span among some readers, Diane Williams’s stories reward expanded attention and encourage rereading. One could spend as much time lingering over her brief fictions as reading much longer stories by more conventional writers, too many of which require too little of the reader’s close attention.

“My Defects,” the first story in Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, might serve not just as an introduction to this book but also to Williams’s work as a whole:

I’m happy at least to do without a sexual relation and I have this fabulous reputation and how did I get that in the first place? I am proud enough of this reputation and it stands to reason there’s a lot that’s secret that I don’t tell anyone.

I want to end this at the flabber, although I am flabbergasted.

I opened the cupboard, where the treats are stored, and helped myself and made a big mess, by the lakeshore, of the food, of the rest of my life, eventually.

Michelle, the doctor’s nurse, showed me a photograph of her cats. The smart cat opens the cupboard, Michelle says, where the treats are stored, and she can help herself, and she makes a big mess!

I crossed the street to survey the lake and I heard crepitations–three little girls bouncing their ball. I used to see them in perspective–my children–young people, one clearly unsuitable. She can’t help herself–she makes a big mess.

With my insight and skill–what do I search for at the shore?–the repose of the lake But sadly, although it does have a dreamy look, it is so prone to covering familiar ground.

On first encountering Diane Williams’s fiction, readers are likely to puzzle over the classification of such a condensed and often enigmatic work (“My Defects” is quoted here in full, and it is typical Williams in its length) as a short story. Short, yes, but story? Prose poem, maybe? Prose fragment? Surreal reverie? Williams’s stories have characters, but they hardly “develop” in any conventionally recognizable way. Sometimes a story seems to be advancing a plot only to abandon it or veer off in an apparently new direction. Most of the stories are too brief to evoke many details of setting, and while Williams does return to particular themes– especially sex–the stories are generally too elusive for the reader to conclude they are attempting to “say something.”

In “My Defects,” we are introduced to a character whose identity seems continuous enough but who is never really developed beyond her initial assertion that “I am happy at least to do without a sexual relation” and her accompanying puzzlement that “I have this fabulous reputation and how did I get that in the first place?” It could be said that the story is essentially an illustration of the narrator’s declaration of her circumstances in the first paragraph. To adequately discern the nature of the story’s portrayal of the narrator’s situation, however, we must understand the extent to which her initial words are both completely truthful and disingenuous. She doesn’t tell us why she is without a sexual relationship or why she is happy about this, nor what precisely her “reputation” is. (Perhaps she speaks for the author, who certainly does have a “fabulous reputation” among her admirers?) Yet at the same time, the narrator expresses in the first paragraph what surely does seem to her a literally accurate account of her life’s circumstances, however elliptical the reader might find it.

In a sense, the narrator tries to clarify what she means by this initial statement in the following paragraphs, which at least appear to present a semblance of plot and action. As is usual in a Williams story, the transition is abrupt, the connection at first obscure, facilitated only by some characteristic Williams wordplay. We might all along think that the narrator is speaking from her kitchen, except for the abrupt shift to the doctor’s office, which suggests that these scene changes may just be arbitrary. However, the parallel invocation of “a big mess” encourage us to find continuity after all, naturally enough inviting us to wonder what the mess might be. (Are all references to the “mess” just versions of the narrator’s?)

That the next paragraph finds the narrator watching children at the lake, imagining her children, “one clearly unsuitable,” along with a general air of regret perhaps unavoidably leads us to suspect that the narrator’s visit to the doctor might have been to seek an abortion, although the visit could be simply an implication that she is pregnant. The syntax and transitions are opaque enough that perhaps neither of these scenarios apply, however, and we are probably best advised not to try pinning down the story to its particulars at all. The unanswerable questions persist in the final paragraph. Is the narrator being ironic or sarcastic in referring to her “insight” and “skill,” since she ultimately gives us little reason to think she believes herself to possess much of either? Does the “dreamy look” of the lake coincide with the “repose” she seeks there, and wouldn’t “familiar ground” actually contribute to repose? And we should again be attentive to the wordplay: a lake by its nature covers unfamiliar ground, although it could also be just a continuation of the ground the narrator currently finds frustratingly familiar.

 A story like “My Defects” seems designed–and both its radical compression and its oblique structural devices certainly appear to be products of design–to unavoidably provoke the reader into looking for coherence and continuity while also frustrating any attempts to collapse the story into a too-facile coherence or to find continuity too readily. Like many of Diane Williams’s stories, it suspends the reader in its own dreamlike shifts and playful language such that the most satisfying response may be to relax the demand that the story yield up its meaning immediately, to perhaps be willing to tolerate indeterminacy. This would not really mean conceding the story is meaningless, a conclusion reached by too many readers when encountering “difficult” fiction, but rather accepting that its meaning (even at the level of “following” the plot) is suggestive rather than certain, including even the possibility of overlapping, multiple meanings.

Not all of Williams’s stories are as compressed as “My Defects” (although some are even briefer and more compressed). The title story provides a character study of sorts of Vicky Swanky, who, “years ago,” was a beauty. Now, “her breasts were flat. Her hips were flat. She looked older than her forty years.” The first part of the story offers a reasonably cohesive portrait of Vicky Swanky, whom the male narrator announces as an “old friend” who is “going through a divorce” and who invites the narrator over to her house. What the two do together is suggested in typical Williams ambiguity: “In connection with sex, we lightened up a little then and we dumped some of it off the edge at a minimum.” The second half of the story introduces elements that seem to develop the situation: the narrator brings over a dog; it snows; Vicky Swanky serves food. The narrator expresses his own uncertainties about the situation: “It was getting busy concerning the basic meaning, the degree, and the quality.” In the story’s final paragraph, a plumber arrives and indicates that he will need “to remove everything from the nipple in the wall to the toilet.”

“Vicky Swanky,” although still very short, is nevertheless characteristic of Williams’s more extended fictions. Such stories appear to progress by accumulating incidents, but these incidents lead the reader on paths that inexorably wander in uncharted directions, sometimes changing tack altogether. This is especially true in the novellas Williams has written, such as On Sexual Strength and Romance Erector. In these longest stories, something like a narrative does develop, but the reader should not expect its episodes to be related through their logical coherence, even if they do unfold in what seems a kind of progression. The narrative is built up out of the same sort of accumulation of smaller units of exposition and “action” we find in the briefer fictions, but if anything the effect over the course of the story is even more digressive than in the flash fictions, as the narrative oddities have more space in which to proliferate.

Thus Romance Erector tells the kind of story, about love and sex, the confusions in the former caused by the latter, one would expect from the title, but while it does feature recognizable characters experiencing those confusions, their actions are sufficiently ambiguous, at times almost arbitrary, that the reader might share their confusions. But the practiced reader of Williams’s signature short pieces will surely note the metafictional implications of the narrator’s words in Chapter 7, which opens with the narrator telling us “The real story begins on Thursday—pungent, warming—the translucent tale.” At the end she admits, however, that “I have storyish ideas but no story in me. This is the row of empty marks. These are the signs of what is next.” This of course applies to all of Diane Williams’s fictions—they embody “storyish ideas” but relate stories only in the sense that things seem to happen, even if we don’t quite know how or why.

In both her longest and shortest fictions, Williams fashions a kind of “story” that proceeds entirely from the “empty marks”—words—that are made into the “signs” that determine “what is next,” the sentences that in the intricate process of their unfolding work to shape narrative and character development. The result is indeed “translucent” prose compositions with enough of the familiar features of a “tale” to be recognized as a story but also cloaked in enough shadow and distortion as to remain mysterious.

Sentencing 

Although the influence of Gordon Lish as editor and teacher has extended to a wide range of seemingly disparate writers, one group seems to be especially sensitive to Lish’s influence. Writers such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and Noy Holland palpably employ, in somewhat different but observable ways, the strategy Lish calls “consecution,” the focus on constructing and linking sentences by considering sound and rhythm as well as sense. Indeed, these writers no doubt take the strategy farther than Lish himself even envisioned, at least in their intensive focus on the sonic qualities of language, resulting in short stories (all but Schutt work almost exclusively in the short story, but her best work may also be her short fiction) using an alternative  mode of composition through which “character” and “story” are not abandoned but emerge as the afterthought of the movement of language, the characters and plots subordinated to the autonomy of that movement.

From this shared commitment to more fully exploring the linguistic resources of the sentence as a literary device, each of these writers draws on those resources in their own way, with different stylistic signatures that also create divergent larger-scale formal effects. Although all four writers work in narrative fragments, Williams’s stories are both the most highly compressed and the most elliptical. Her brief fictions especially require very close attention to the materiality of their sentences (including their sound), each one of which might be an episode in itself, the interval between them a leap in time or place. The same is true of Lutz’s early work, although more recently his stories have gotten longer, even if Lutz’s sentences are more notable for their utterly singular wordplay than for advancing clearly discernible plots. Lutz is perhaps the writer among this group who has most assiduously developed the strategy of consecution taken from Lish, while Christine Schutt might be described as the most “lyrical” prose stylist (although her prose is ultimately not so conventional in its carefully cadenced lyricism, which in its way is as sensitive to the intricacies of sound and syntax as Lutz’s more unpredictable sentences). Schutt’s novels in particular come closest to fulfilling traditional expectations of plot and character, but the reader who approaches her fiction simply for its narrative interest and who fails to appreciate what Lutz, in his essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” calls the “page hugging” appeal of Schutt’s writing will surely miss out on a significant element of its achievement and effect.

The stories in Noy Holland’s, Swim for the Little One First, are not as brief as Williams’s pieces, although they do have something of their enigmatic quality; they are not as verbally adventurous as Lutz’s stories, which does not mean they are less scrupulous in their attention to language; they do not develop plot and character as transparently as Schutt’s fiction does, but Holland incorporates linear narrative more than either Williams or Lutz. While such short pieces as “Blood Country” and “The Last Doll Never Opens” could be described as closer to surreal fables (or even prose poems), the most evocative and most compelling of the stories in Swim for the Little One First are the longer ones, generally both more extended in time and more specific to place. In these stories, a cogent narrative generally does emerge, unfolding as well in a recognizable setting, often the American West. However, because they are developed through extremely truncated fragments (sometimes only a single sentence), containing little in the way of direct exposition, the stories can seem impressionistic and elusive. With some, it is only after coming to the end of the story that one realizes Holland’s individually arresting sentences have told us a story after all.

The book’s first story, “Pachysandra,” works in this way. We track the narrator as she returns to her girlhood desert home to care for Rose (presumably her sister, although the relationship remains somewhat oblique). While there, she begins a sexual relationship with Rudy—“the help”—by whom she becomes pregnant, but subsequently she terminates the pregnancy (“I went to the hospital and had them scrape what Rudy gave me out”), even though at the beginning of the story she had been trying to become pregnant with her boyfriend, Tonto. We are not likely to forget this introductory episode, since the narrator’s activity is presented to us in an especially memorable formulation:

Rose called.

I said, “Hello, Rose.”

“You sound funny.”

I was lying on my back with my legs in the air trying to make a baby with my mister. I had his seed in there. My poor egg had stepped out to meet it.

By the end, the narrator has changed her mind about this effort:

I would not have been much of a mother. I went for shitbags. I liked to sleep late. I liked people who could work their own spoon.

While sentences like these do not exhibit the breaks in logic or continuity that frequently make Williams’s sentences so startling, or lead to the radical linguistic transformations that make us stop and linger over Lutz’s, they are surely not submerged into the ordinary flow of expository discourse characterizing most conventional narratives. They indeed ask us to pause and appreciate the way they avoid familiar phrasing and routine idioms in favor of a directness of expression both trenchant (“I liked people who could work their own spoon”) and almost ingenuous (“I had his seed in there”) but that also encompass unorthodox but quite satisfying figurative turns (“My poor egg had stepped out to meet it”). Because it does seem the expected sort of invisible prose has been deliberately avoided, passages such as these can seem odd or eccentric, but upon reflection they are in fact quite precise and evocative, fully coherent, if self-enclosed, in their fidelity to the isolated moments they attempt to invoke.

Since they provide us with more such moments, the longer stories afford us greater opportunity to appreciate what such passages are up to, as well as the way Holland assembles them into narratives in which much of the story occurs in the gaps between these articulated moments but are if anything more powerful because of that. “Luckies Like Us” ultimately relates the story of a family that has suffered devastating misfortune, focusing on the aftermath of an automobile accident that has left a son in a vegetative state. The story alternates between moments centered on the perspectives of the mother (who feels responsible for the accident), the father, and a daughter. The overlapping of perspectives allows us to integrate the characters’ ongoing attempt to cope with their situation with the “backstory” that has produced it, a strategy that, along with Holland’s stark and pointed language, makes what could be a potentially sentimentalized, emotionally facile story resonate through an emotional restraint that is ultimately all the more effective in conveying the family’s desperate plight. Indeed, Holland’s stories do not indulge in easy emotions, even if the bleak emotional atmosphere in many of them can be chilling. The characters face difficult circumstances and often suffer grim fates, but they neither struggle heroically to overcome their difficulties and thus inspire our admiration nor merely succumb to them passively and provoke mere pity. They do what they can, which more than anything else also makes them seem intensely human.

“Merengue” presents a decidedly non-sentimental portrait of a senior citizen community in Florida whose residents once led vital lives, but

Now they went about on tricycles and wheelchairs, the want to drift still in them. The old women played bridge and bickered by day and by nightfall slept with the louvers pinched shut. The old toms howled on the beach at night. The old men fished with kittens.

The area itself has seen better days as well. Once “starlets arrived in gold lame with their hair heaped up on their heads,” but then “the young went elsewhere. The sea ate the beach. Hotels were looted, emptied out but for squatters with their shopping carts and rags.” Two wandering lovers, Jack and Mary, arrive “from the land of head-high corn.” Mary is pregnant, about which Jack is, to say the least, ambivalent. Jack eventually becomes impatient with his new surroundings as well, which seem to him “like a nursing home without nurses,” but Mary is taken up by the old men, on whom she does seem to have a softening effect. Mary is subsequently gang-raped by local teenagers, and not only loses her baby but is told she will no longer be able to have children (her fate inviting a contrast with that of the narrator of “Pachysandra”). The story is the longest in the book, and it shows how Holland’s sentence-based fragments can very effectively expand over a larger canvas, creating an ultimate depth of character and situation that, in this case, makes the story’s somber conclusion affecting without descending into melodrama. “Merengue” has the length of a short story, but some of the scope and density of a novel.

The best story in the book, the title story, has a similar scope and density, although it is about half as long. It is also the most formally interesting work in this collection. At first we are tempted to think the narrator is addressing us in the story’s first few lines:

How nice you could come to visit. See our home, how we live, how the leaves sweep down. The fields green still.

We turned out clocks back. I brought squash in, tossed a sheet across the withering vines. We’re to expect a frost once the wind quits, wind from the north, flurries. A chance.

We’ll move the rabbits in the morning, light the stove. Chicory in your coffee, honey how you like. On the radio the news.

It becomes apparent, however, that the narrator is addressing her father, who has come to live with her. The story continues to be told as a direct address to the father, during which his frayed relations with his family are revealed to us, including a troubled relationship with his only son, the narrator’s brother, which culminated in the son’s suicide. In the compressed time of its telling, as the father is moving in, we nevertheless learn much about the family history and especially about the brother’s suicide, the details of which seem irrepressibly to emerge as the narrator speaks on, showing the father around the house. The family’s life is nicely captured in the story’s final lines:

If there is anything you want — someone will get it for you.

My daughter will. Your wife will, or I will. Somebody always has.

Even as the narrator summons up the past and evokes the present, her words come to us shaped by Holland’s attention to the rhythms her sentences set up both within and among themselves (and to which she clearly pays great attention), as well as to such auditory qualities as alliteration (“Chicory in your coffee, honey how you’d like”) and to rhetorical devices such as repetition. Swim for the Little One First confirms Noy Holland to be a writer who can start with this sensitivity to language and use it to build formally intricate fictions that are also a great pleasure to read.

Silences 

Dawn Raffel is now probably best known for her 2012 book, The Secret Life of Objects, an unorthodox memoir in which the author invokes her past through reflections prompted by various objects she still possesses. While this book succeeds on its own terms, offering a concise but affecting account of the writer’s relationships with family and friends, it would be an injustice if its relative success came to overshadow the accomplishments of her fiction, which are numerous and distinctive.

If Raffel’s fiction is in danger of being overlooked, this admittedly might be due to its rather infrequent appearance. Her first book, the story collection In the Year of Long Division, came out in 1995, her first novel, Carrying the Body, was published in 2002, while a second collection of stories, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, appeared in 2010. The long intervals between books apparently comes not from wavering ambition but an overabundance of care, as Raffel has spoken in interviews of taking up to a year on one of her stories, most of which are seldom more than a half-dozen pages long.

Although Raffel is a former student of Gordon Lish, and thus could loosely be grouped among those current writers influenced by his notion of “consecution” (writers such as Gary Lutz and Christine Schutt), the care that she takes is as much with the intervals and silences between sentences as it is in the construction and linking of sentences, the strategies for which have been adopted by most of Lish’s acolytes. Certainly Raffel takes pains over the rhythms and tonalities of her sentences, as we can plainly see in the very first story of In the Year of Long Division:

Fishing was the only sport in our town. How it was. Pick. Any house in our town was any house in our town. Any wind in our town was the wind in our town. Down was down. Queasy was a way of life. Bored to crackers, snap, kerplunk. (“We Were Our Age”)

If some readers might find Raffel’s prose “difficult,” its difficulty arises first of all from primacy of sound over sense. The stop-and-start rhythm, the strategic repetition, the assonance modifying into outright rhyme (our-house-town-down)–these are the most immediate qualities of a passage such as this, and whatever narrative or descriptive work they also do must accommodate itself to the intonations of Raffel’s language. That language does indeed perform this other work, however, in its own unorthodox but ultimately compelling way. “Any house in our town was any house in our town” tells us almost all we need to know about this town, making any further sensory description superfluous. “Down was down,” in addition to providing Raffel’s signature wordplay, also clues us in on the type of wind pervading the town, the kind ensuring that “Queasy was a way of life.”

But Raffel’s attention to the lacunae between and among these sentences, to what needn’t or perhaps even can’t be said, is just as painstaking. So ruthless is she in eliminating the unnecessary, in fact, trusting in the reader to bridge the gaps and to acknowledge the unstated, that some readers might feel disoriented from the lack of expository directions and situational detail. This feature of Raffel’s fiction is perhaps what has encouraged the view that it is a version of “minimalism” (for example, in John Domini’s review of Restless Universe reprinted in his book The Sea-God’s Herb), but while Raffel’s work does to some extent recall the similarly reduced fictions of Mary Robison, her stories rely even less on narrative than most minimalist fiction, in which conventional “drama” is often missing but things happen nevertheless. Raffel’s stories convey something closer to a literary impressionism, a blurry but distinguishable evocation of a scene or episode, often, as in “We Were Our Age,” an exercise in memory more than storytelling.

A more conventionally recognizable feature of Raffel’s fiction is her extensive use of dialogue, which is in fact the dominant mode in some stories. (Perhaps reflecting the influence of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, whom Raffel has identified as among her earliest inspirations.) One of the stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, “The Myth of Drowning,” is entirely a dialogue set-piece, and its development is typical, as a man and a woman before sleep talk about a story the woman had told:

“How was it that she drowned?”

“Who knows,” she said. “She couldn’t swim. Or cramps. Maybe undertow. The undertow was wicked”

 “You know what I mean.”

 “No, what do you mean?”

 “I mean people were there,” he said. “That’s how you told it. A crowd on the shore.”

“That’s what the myth is: Drowning is noisy. It isn’t,” she said.

“It isn’t,” she said.

“I heard you the first time.”

“Tired, I said.”

“Broad daylight,” he said.

“And shallow,” he said. “No one could see her?”

Although by the end of this brief exchange (around two pages long) we can piece together what must be the context of the conversation (the couple have had a tense evening, the man believes the woman sees herself as the drowning woman), the absence of authorial assistance is made even more acute by the abbreviated, discontinuous nature of the dialogue itself. But that comes not from a distortion of human speech patterns but an affirmation of it, an attempt to capture the way we actually talk to each other with fidelity. As David Winters says of Raffel’s dialogue, “This is speech as it is spoken in life, not in literature: shorn of explanatory apparatus, driven more by conflicting agendas than by semantics, and, in its resultant asymmetry, rife with abrupt about-faces and non sequiturs.”

Consistent with the strategies of her prose style more generally, Raffel’s dialogue calls on the reader’s capacity to infer the not-said from the said, the encompassing context from the fleeting clues we do get. In asking us to read closely and carefully, she also suggests that reading fiction is not merely the registering of the words on the page but also remaining alert to their subtler intimations, the discursive and aesthetic reverberations created by the tension between what those words signify and what they leave unexpressed. The reader’s experience will be incomplete without this sort of attentiveness, but this doesn’t make her work truly difficult or inaccessible. Only readers who close themselves off to the possibility of a more expansive reading experience, expansive in the sense that reading is more than gliding along the surface of words but can be provisional and recursive, will find Raffel’s fiction perplexing. Patient readers will find it enlivening.

It might seem that Raffel’s aesthetic strategy would work best in short fiction (and some of her stories are short enough to be called “flash fiction”), but her only novel, Carrying the Body, is also quite good as well. It shares with Raffel’s stories a focus on family relations, although where many of the stories focus on relationships between parents and children, Carrying the Body portrays family drama more broadly, beginning with a pair of estranged sisters, one of whom left home young to experience life more fully, while the older sister remained in the home to care for their debilitated father. The younger sister returns to the home with her young son and eventually leaves again, abandoning the child, who becomes increasingly ill, to the ministrations of the older sister, a job for which she is clearly not prepared. The novel traces the development of the relationship between the older sister (referred to throughout as “the aunt”) and the child, using the same elliptical methods as in the stories, which prove to work very well in evoking the hesitant, tentative growth of the aunt’s concern for the child, as well as her increasing desperation about her own inadequacy in dealing with the situation she finds herself confronting.

Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (2010) is the most recent fiction (in book form) Raffel has published, and while the stories in this collection are generally similar in approach to those in her first book, a few of them, such as “The Air and Its Relatives,” although still fragmented and conducted largely in dialogue, are arguably somewhat more conventional. The focus is even more resolutely on parent-children relationships. “The Air and Its Relatives” is a memory story about the narrator and her father, framed by a series of scenes in which the father is teaching the daughter how to drive. The fragmentation of the story serves to emphasize the episodic quality of memory, so that the story coheres in a readily perceptible way. The story’s elegiac tone is consistent with many of the other stories in the book as well, and the book is further unified by a motif provided by the book’s title, itself a reference to Max Born’s The Restless Universe, which is explicitly identified in “The Air and Its Relatives” as a book the daughter and the father would read aloud together. We live in a “restless” universe of change and ineffable mystery, not least in the human experience of love and loss this book explores.

Further Adventures in The Restless Universe begins with an epigraph from Born that not only applies to this book but could also serve metaphorically as an apt description of Raffel’s fiction as a whole: “Visible light covers only about one octave, speaking in musical terms.” It is certainly appropriate to think of Raffel’s work “in musical terms,” even if it is a music, like that of, say, John Cage or Morton Feldman, that keenly exploits absence and quiet as part of its musical scheme. And if visible light is only one part of the spectrum, and not the largest, so too does Raffel’s fiction make explicitly visible only a sampling of the world in which its characters act, talk, and subsist. With the reader’s help, it manages to strongly illuminate, nonetheless.

“How It Came to Me to Say”: Gordon Lish” 

(This essay originally appeared in The Quarterly Conversation.)

If, as Jonathan Sturgeon has suggested, we have entered an era dominated by “autofiction,” in which “the life of the author is now the novel’s organizing principle,” then in the search for progenitors of this literary phenomenon we might consider the fiction of Gordon Lish. Indeed, a common reaction to Lish’s books, at least since Peru (which may be his last work of fiction to predominantly feature a main character who can, to some degree at least, be separated from “Gordon Lish”) is to question whether Lish is writing fiction at all rather than some sort of free-form (some would say self-indulgent) autobiography. However, the wary reader would be just as mistaken to trust Lish’s writing to provide reliable accounts of the author’s actual experiences as to expect his “stories” to bear much resemblance to the traditional well-made short story.

That Lish’s fiction is not at all the sort of thing we would expect to emerge from most creative writing workshops, or most conventional short fiction anthologies, is perhaps surprising to readers, given Lish’s prominence as a creative writing teacher and as an editor of writers known for their short stories (most prominently, of course, Raymond Carver). It may in fact be the case that this gap between pre-established expectation and Lish’s own actual practice is wide enough to partly explain his relatively small audience, small even for avant-garde writers. Lish has published eight novels and seven collections of short fiction, in addition to his Collected Fictions (published in 2010 at a hefty 546 pages), but it is likely most readers are familiar only with Dear Mr. Capote (1983), his first novel, and Peru (1986), although occasionally reviewers have taken note of one or another of his subsequent books, mostly to remark upon their oddities, revisit the Ray Carver editing controversy, or rehearse gossip about Lish as a teacher and publishing figure. What this focus on Lish’s public persona obscures is that over the last 30 years few writers have as consistently challenged both the formal and stylistic assumptions that still govern American literary fiction.

Happily, for readers curious to at least sample Lish the experimental writer, his most recent book, White Plains, is one of his best and most adventurous collections of short fiction. Although Lish identifies the selections in the book as “pieces and witherlings,” taken together they are substantial fictions that now make the Collected Fictions seriously incomplete. Since 2014 Lish has in fact published, in addition to White Plains, two other books, the story collection Goings and Cess: A Spokening (a mostly indescribable hybrid of novel and a kind of verbal puzzle) that would seem to represent a late renaissance in Lish’s attention to and inspiration for writing fiction. They could certainly be identified as “late” in their concern with the hardships and limitations of old age, but they exhibit no diminution at all in the boldness of Lish’s repudiation of conventional form or the consistency with which he pursues his fundamental stylistic strategy, the strategy for which he has become well-known through its influence on many of his students, some of whom, such as Gary Lutz and Christine Schutt, have themselves become among the most accomplished current American writers in the way they have adapted the strategy for their own audacious purposes.

“Consecution” is a concept probably best known through its iteration in Lutz’s essay, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place.” Lutz quite cogently explicates the general principle behind the notion of consecution—that the writer’s philosophy of composition should begin with sentences and the consecutive effects to be created by the linking up of sentences throughout a work of fiction—and explains his own use of the strategy, primarily for its sonic effects. Lish as well is attuned to the sounds of his sentences, and views the consecution of sentences as the essential aesthetic precept of fiction, but as well takes consecution as the source of form and theme more broadly, arguably using it more comprehensively than most of his acolytes. In his fiction, consecution frequently prompts recursion and repetition, so that the story or situation (often the former never quite departs from the elaboration of the latter) seems to remain static or to encircle itself (Lish’s own favored description of his method). No doubt readers expecting “normal” narrative development are frustrated by what seems to be Lish’s refusal to get a story told through anything like a conventionally efficient narrative, but those readers are missing the alternative story he is telling: the story of the story’s own composition as it comes into being.

In “Unstory,” a dialogue set-piece included in White Plains, one of the speakers responds to the other speaker’s comment “I thought the idea of speech was to get something said” by replying: “God gave man speech to give him the means to get himself lost. Whereas you stay on track, you run smack into death.” Lish’s fiction has been death-haunted since his first novel narrated by a purported serial killer, but this caution against running “smack into death” perhaps reveals to us that Lish has not only depicted characters obsessing about or confronting death (Peru depicts a man convinced that when he was a child he killed another child), but the literary strategy Lish has long employed itself embodies the imperative to get “lost” as the way to avoid the “death” represented by conventional fiction. Thus what some critics have taken as indulgence or merely antic provocation in Lish’s fiction is actually a profoundly serious—though never solemn—project in which the artistic stakes could not be higher.

Both Dear Mr. Capote and Peru effectively integrate Lish’s focus on the literal proximity of death and its representation in their formal and stylistic methods. In each case, the narrator-protagonist both wants to tell his tale (in the former he wants to sell it), but also simultaneously wants to withhold the story, to circle around the important events, to retreat and advance. In each as well we can’t ultimately be certain that the deadly events around which the narrators’ confessions are organized actually happened: the unnamed killer may be imagining, or just fabricating, his crimes, while the narrator of Peru is convinced that at age six he did indeed kill a neighbor child while the two were playing in a sandbox, but there is sufficient ambiguity in his account that we can finally doubt the extent of its accuracy. Still, if these two narrators could be called potentially unreliable, this effect cannot be attributed to the ease with which they relate to us a story that is too transparently suspicious. Indeed, both of them struggle to bring their stories together in a way that prefigures Lish’s later work, as they pause and backtrack, caught up in their own semantic webs, not in an apparent effort to conceal but to find the right language to express their experiences.

The narrator of Peru is named “Gordon,” but this character is not so obviously a version of Lish himself as we find in the later fiction. By 1991’s My Romance, the narrative voice has been turned over fully to a persona that seems as closely identical to the novel’s author as it is finally possible to be  while still making a claim on the readers as a fictional device, the means to creating a work of fiction. One of Lish’s most unfortunately neglected works, My Romance announces itself as a transcription of a reading given by Gordon Lish, who begins by noting, “What a difficulty it must be for us all that it was destined to be such a long walk and, as you can now hear, applauseless walk for me to make it up here at the lectern.” The difficulties invoked certainly don’t end with this initial perception of some tension in the room as the narrator begins his presentation. Indeed, this will not at all be the kind of reading his audience no doubt expects, despite the books that he has carried with him to the lectern, as almost immediately Gordon begins to divert attention from the literary matters at hand and to relate a series of his own personal travails, starting with his drinking problem but focusing mostly on his father’s death (for which Gordon believes he is responsible), his wife’s crippling illness, and, most centrally, his lifelong struggle with psoriasis, and the extreme measures he must take to protect his skin.

Although we can see even in the brief passage quoted Lish’s sensitivity to the sonic, sensory qualities of language—the assonance of “applauseless walk,” the alliteration of “difficulty” and “destined, the homophonous rhyme of “hear” and “here,” not to mention the additional repetition “up here to here”), the effects of consecution are much broader in a work like My Romance. The underlying conceit, that this is a novel in the form of a spontaneously composed lecture, of course allows Lish great latitude for digression, but the digressiveness is not random but associative, united most immediately by a set of brief cues Gordon tells us he has written down on four business cards, while also cogently braided together through a few in-common images or motifs, illness in particular connecting many of the episodes. Thus Lish’s method of correlative seriality determines not only the character of Lish’s prose—how things are said—but also the content of his fictions—what ultimately gets said. Such is the artistic strategy at work in most of Lish’s stories, before and after My Romance, and the reader encountering Lish’s fiction for the first time with White Plains will find a very worthy representation of the strategy. Although in many ways this book has the same sort of coherence we find in a book like My Romance, in its focus on the life circumstances of “Gordon Lish” White Plains does offer more variety in its realization of the strategy.

Such variety is provided, for example, by the several stories composed mostly or entirely in dialogue, stories in which it might seem that the sort of consecution possible in conventional prose would be less achievable or apparent. Yet in a story such as “Naugahyde” presenting a series of phone conversations between a man and a woman, the conversation that unfolds seems unmistakably Lishian:

            He said, ‘You know what I think of when I think of us?’

            She said, ‘Tell me.’

            He said, ‘The chair.’

            She said, ‘Us in the chair.’

            ‘You with your leg up,’ he said.

            ‘My left leg,’ she said.

             He said, ‘Right. I mean your left leg—right.’

             She said, ‘I’ll think about this tonight.’

             ‘The chair,’ he said. ‘Our time in the chair?’

             ‘No,’ she said. ‘The way you said it,’ she said.

             He said, ‘How I said it was how it came to me to say.’

              She said, ‘Nothing just comes. It’s all rehearsed.’

Because of the relative brevity of the talk, the chain of associations animating this conversation are clear enough: After the repetition of “think”/“think of us,” echoed in the woman’s second comment, we move through the introduction of the chair and the woman’s leg, the two dominant images in this initial part of the exchange, the counterpoint of left and right, and the final ostinato flourish on “said” (with the fortuitous rhyme of “right” and “tonight” as a bonus). Both of these voices emerge from this story as belonging to separable characters with distinct personalities, but at the same time they both speak in recognizable Gordon Lish prose.

            It is also true that Gordon Lish’s prose frequently sounds like someone speaking (and not just when used as a trope as in My Romance), especially when Lish’s narrator seems to be obsessing about his present circumstances: “Okay, granted, granted, I’m sitting here horsing around a little bit. Guilty. I’m pleading guilty—so sue me. Because, buster, I’m leveling with you. I’m taking you into my fucken confidence as a person I can go ahead and open my heart to. . . ” (“Jelly Apple”). Still there are times when this “spokening” effect is possible only in Lish’s version of expository prose, not actual dialogue:

            So Father (the father in the unwriteable—unwritable?—piece), he, the man, decides (in his mind) the fish shall be taken from their habitat and placed indoors, this in a tank (a pretty biggish ‘object’) brought into the house for said purpose, conveyed (the fish, that is—or, viz. the fish) thereto or therein, as it would turn out, if it were, or was, to turn out, by means of many family-sized mayonnaise jars, or by one such jar, several trips (circuits?), from the far reaches of the backyard (back yard? yard out back? rear-yard?) to inside the house, therefore required. (“Make Night: Heidegger”)

If such a passage does evoke a process of thinking aloud, of going over a memory in the presence of a listener, the full impact of its radical digressions, diversions, and asides can really only be registered as writing, as words read. Certainly this is not a conventionally lucid prose style, but Lish writes prose that resembles the writing of no one else, and it is not as frivolous or capricious as its surface eccentricities might make it seem.

In my view Lish’s critics overlook the extent to which he is attempting to create a certain sort of comedy, a particularly outrageous sort that burlesques the very notion of linearity and unity that ordinarily predicate our expectations of fiction. Readers who are impatient with this element of Lish’s work ultimately are rejecting the implication that these expectations should be held in abeyance, that works of fiction can offer aesthetic satisfactions that do not depend on previously fixed conceptions of narrative continuity or formal unity. Yet if Lish’s fictions are often funny, and can simply be appreciated for the audacity of their execution, there is also something very earnest about Lish’s compositions, an impression that all the hesitations, reiterations, sudden reversals, and insistent clarifications are a sincere attempt to get it right, to find the words and formulations that will signify what his narrators seek to express. Of course, in the end they don’t quite know what they want to express, sure only of the need to express it and an ineluctable sense they can’t elude what’s already been said.

As if to underscore the slippage between speech and writing characteristic of Lish’s work, “Mr. Dictaphone” purports to be the testimony of one of these machines, but of course the dictaphone is surely the voice of the author of the story in the process of creating it (Mr. Dictaphone calls him “Georgie”). The story is relatively brief (as are many of stories in White Plains), and so we are able to enjoy the humor of the conceit before it perhaps wears out its welcome, although the story also affords us the opportunity to consider explicitly the fundamental assumptions behind Lish’s strategies, as the story essentially records Mr. Dictaphone’s reflections on the conditions of his own existence (“One is trapped in the trap of the trap,” he says near the end of the story, “lest one not speak.”) “Levitation, or, My Career as a Pensioner” is one of several stories that seem straightforwardly autobiographical, in this case relating the particulars of Lish’s firing from Esquire magazine, but like the others, it finally serves more to reinforce an overarching contemplation of decline and old age, a theme that emerges from White Plains with a clarity and consistency (beginning with a Wayne Hogan cartoon included in the book’s front matter) that could presumably satisfy the most traditional of readerly expectations. The longest story in the book, “Begging the Question,” shares with “Levitation” a depiction of the circumstances of Lish’s life as an elderly man living alone—in the latter case, the streetwork going on outside his building, in the former, conflict with his neighbors—again a palpable setting that ought to act as a kind of perceptual anchor for readers who might feel lost amid the stylistic eccentricities of the stories in this book.

In other stories we learn more about Lish’s stays in mental hospitals (brought on by the powerful medications he takes), as well as details about his wife’s illness and death. The final story in the book, “Afterword,” is a surprisingly touching (if not without some of those eccentricities) tribute of sorts to his first writing teacher, whose influence set “Gordon Lish” onto his journey in literature. Lish even gives the man the book’s final words, quoting from his short story that, we are told, is the only work of fiction to ever make Lish cry. Suffice it to say that if the more accessible elements of tone, setting, character, and subject in White Plains were to be found in a book more easily identified as “literary fiction,” most readers would likely find it altogether familiar. It is the singular and, in retrospect, revolutionary departure from the norms of prose style in fiction that makes Lish’s work seem, to some, alien and peculiar. But without the alien and peculiar, fiction as a form would stagnate and die.

Language Always Prevails 

The “novel in stories” has become an increasingly common form in current American fiction, so while Pamela Ryder’s Paradise Field is recognizable enough in its use of the developing conventions of the form, it expands the possibilities of this hybrid genre just enough to warrant publication by a press (FC2) that is one of the longest-lived publishers of “experimental” fiction, and illustrates that the “story novel” still might hold some potential for surprising us.

The overarching narrative to which the individual stories contribute (although not necessarily sequentially) concerns the final decline and death of the protagonist’s father. These two characters (the protagonist is referred to throughout simply as “the daughter”) and their at times problematic relationship emerge as the book’s primary focus, but not every story in fact directly concerns them. Still, even the stories set elsewhere (France, in “The Renoir Put Straight”) or apparently about other characters (“Arrow Rock”) depict experiences universal enough (a young child observing the behavior of the adults around her in the former story, for example) that they might surely echo the lives of the daughter and her father, or may in fact refer obliquely to these two characters even if they are not directly identified (the characters in a motel room in “Arrow Rock”). “Badly Raised and Talking With the Rabbi” apparently takes place at the father’s funeral, but in this case the daughter is identified only indirectly through a one-sided conversation carried on by the woman who may have been the father’s live-in girlfriend.

This latter character makes a couple of appearances in the book, although her relationship with the father is not much developed. Since this is finally a collection of stories, however, such development is not a generic requirement, as “unity of effect” properly applies first to the discrete story and its self-sufficient aesthetic needs. This gives Paradise Field as a whole a more impressionistic surface quality while at the same time preserving the distinction between “story” and “novel,” the tension between the two helping to sharpen our sense of how a “novel in stories” might be defined as a category of fiction in its own right, not simply as a series of stories with in-common characters or setting, or as an “episodic” novel. How far beyond the sort of unity we expect to find in a novel can such a book as this go, it seems to ask implicitly, and still have a broader coherence that transcends the separate goals of each particular story?

The book’s impressionism is further reinforced by the variety of technique employed in the individual stories. The first, “Internment for Yard and Garden: A Practical Guide” takes the form of an instructional pamphlet for the “suburban Jew” on the proper disposition of the recently deceased, which begins to periodically blend together with specific details about the case of the daughter and her father, thus introducing us to this situation as the book’s subject. The second story, the title story, takes us back to the daughter’s childhood and narrates a series of phone calls between father and daughter that seems to establish the father’s frequent absences from home as the source of the daughter’s ambivalence about their relationship. Other stories emphasize the father’s nostalgia about his days as an air force pilot, while eventually attention focuses mostly on the daughter’s efforts to care for the father in the last stages of his old age.

Many stories rely substantially on dialogue, but others, such as “The Song Inside the Plate” and “Irregulars” consist of long blocks of prose. Similarly, some are more fully developed narratives that could be called “stories” of the conventional kind, while others, such as “Recognizable Constellations and Familiar Objects of the Night Sky in Early Spring,” rely more on juxtaposition and association, while still others are very brief scenes that might qualify as flash fiction. Most of the stories are told in the third-person, with the viewpoint staying very close to that of the daughter (although without much attempt at “free indirect” psychologizing), but “Mitzvah” (about the father’s stay in a nursing home) brings us even closer to the daughter’s perspective by instead employing a second-person narration, the references to the daughter as “you” giving us an even more immediate appreciation of the daughter’s troubles by implicating us in her actions. In the book’s final story, “In Other Hemispheres,” the daughter visits with her father’s spirit one final time as his coffin is being taken to the cemetery, where the image of his body being lowered into the ground merges with one final reverie returning him to the cockpit of his airplane as it falls to earth.  

While Paradise Field is formally interesting, however, what finally commends this book most to readers interested in something other than the customary sort of literary fiction is its way with language, a style that seems perfectly suited to the subject and methods of the book but that also seems reminiscent of the more adventurous prose of writers such as Noy Holland or Dawn Raffel. These are writers influenced by Gordon Lish (who indeed provides a back cover blurb for Paradise Field as well), and Ryder’s fiction does feature the kind of sentence building and sonic effects identified with Lish’s approach to writing:

They went to where there would be canyons, where the daughter had once walked in her younger years, had traveled along the bluffs and ledges, had seen those vast regions of sage and mesa cleft with chasms of stone and the rivers of their incisions–and now wanting the father to see–while there was still time, while there was still breath and sense and flow through these most turbulent of tributaries within his fisted heart–wanting the father to see again what he had already seen, though long ago and largely from the air. (“As Those Who Know the Dead Will Do”)

In an interview, Ryder says of style in fiction that “Language always prevails over content. You’ve got to let the language win out, even if it changes what you think you want to say” (“Through the Viewfinder: Pamela Ryder with Peter Markus”). In the above passage (the first paragraph of the story), we can see a sentence in the process of “winning out.” It seems to continually extend itself, adding detail and changing direction, not simply to accumulate information but to seek out the possibilities of its own prolongation and potential associations, through such devices as assonance, consonance, alliteration, and repetition. These stratagems are applied lightly, so that the wordplay doesn’t distract from a story’s expository and descriptive imperatives, but almost every story offers passages that might prompt us to pause and consider the dexterity with which the sentences take shape, making Paradise Field a consistently pleasurable and rewarding reading experience.

Living in Language 

Voices in the River 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

If Melanie Rae Thon is a writer less widely read than might be expected, given her skill in creating vivid characters and evoking an equally vivid sense of place, among the reasons for this would surely be the sheer intensity of her work, which can at times seem unremitting, even claustrophobic. Not only does she typically focus on distressed characters often facing the direst circumstances, but her compressed yet urgent prose so insistently attempts to encompass these characters and their situations, to describe, summarize, and account for their states of mind and being, that the reader either becomes captivated by the lyrical pulse of Thon’s language, or it can start to seem oppressive. This effect is especially pronounced in Thon’s most recent fiction, including her new book, Silence and Song, in which lilting language takes on much of the role assumed by plot in more ordinary fiction.

Thon’s 2000 novel, Sweet Hearts features the character Flint Zimmer, a troubled boy just released from a juvenile correctional facility. “He’s smashed enough windows and been in enough houses,” we are told

to know the strange places people hide what’s precious. In unlit rooms, he’s smart as a blindman: he finds one loose brick with his fingers, hears the single board that wheezes beneath him. People on vacation stash jewelry in the freezer. An emerald ring with tiny diamonds, there wrapped in plastic behind the corn and carrots. He feels it. Long guns lie quiet between towels under folded linen. Do you think he won’t smell them?

If Thon’s style can be called “lyrical” or “poetic,” it is not because it casually spins off decorative phrases or floats on a cloud of figurative language. Its effects are more subtle, including parallel phrasing (“finds one loose brick . . . hears the single board”), deftly timed assonance (“strange places,” “wheezes . . . freezing,” “tiny diamonds”), and unobtrusive alliteration (“brick . . . board . . . beneath,” “corn and carrots”). Thon’s prose is pervasively rhythmic, achieved through tonal modulation of both sentence length and sentence types, modulations that give the prose its kinetic quality.

This kinetic quality is mirrored in the narrative structure both of Sweet Hearts and Thon’s next novel, The Voice in the River (2011). In each novel a story is told — in the former, the story of Flint Zimmer’s ultimate, desperate descent into murder, in the latter of the search for a missing boy, feared drowned trying to rescue his dog — but in both it is as if the story eventually just happens, emerging not from “storytelling” per se but as a consequence of shifting perspectives and circumstances, supporting and tangential characters providing a kind of narrative counterpoint that echoes on a formal level the tonal patterns of Thon’s prose style. Her fiction is attuned to “the voice in the river,” but it is the reverberations of that voice as it resounds among those who hear it that Thon’s writing attends to, not the river’s current as it rushes forward.

If this de-centering of plot is characteristic of all of Thon’s fiction, even the earliest, which is the most conventional in its use of character, point of view, and narrative sequence, Silence and Song is Thon’s most radical experiment in form and lyrical expression. Composed of two novellas, “Vanishings” and “Requiem: home: and the rain, after,” and a brief interlude between (titled “Translation”), the book is as full of lost souls as her previous work — immigrants wandering the desert, a runaway boy, a drug-addled killer and his suffering sister. But the purpose of telling their stories, however obliquely and discontinuously, seems less to simply give attention to otherwise marginal characters, or even to create sympathy for such characters, than to view them all as part of a living continuum, a continuum on which pain and suffering occupy their place in the enduring order of existence (as does redemption from that pain and suffering occupy its place). Orlando, one of the undocumented immigrants, nears death from thirst and exposure:

Stars pulsed: amber, orange, turquoise, violet. White flares and red implosions. Now, tonight, while the dead watched, whole galaxies popped in and out of existence. Never had Orlando known the names of stars, but he knew them now as he knew their colors. This sphere of broken light was the mind of God, and they were small and dark inside it.

A kind of spiritual animism or pantheism informs much of Thon’s work, but this effort to reveal the connectedness of all Being becomes especially central in Silence and Song. It comes off least effectively in “Vanishings,” which in its portrayal of the reality behind the impersonal headlines — “Illegal Immigrant Deaths Spiral to New High in Arizona” — threatens to sentimentalize the migrants and their plight, making it difficult for the reader to discern the broader theme separate from the pathos of the situation. Some readers no doubt assume that invoking such pathos is the author’s goal, an impression reinforced by the novella’s narration by a teacher of children with special needs, who can especially identify with the “disappeared” in the desert because her own infant sister “vanished” in a desert car accident (consumed by the ensuing fire”), an accident that also claimed the life of her older brother. The story of the narrator’s family, including her brother as a “ghost” roaming the desert, alternates with the scenes of suffering among the border crossers, such as the misfortune of a man who voluntarily leaves supplies of water for the immigrants who is shot and killed by a 14 year-old boy while attempting to help the boy after he has crashed a stolen car, as well as briefer scenes evoking nature — bears, honeybees, the saguaro cactus.

This is all done quite seamlessly, and the echoes and parallels among all the episodes bring coherence to the novella’s interlacing form. Yet finally “Vanishings” sacrifices aesthetic pleasure to an overindulgence in too-facile emotional effects, which also obscures its own enabling vision. “Requiem: home: and the rain, after,” is a much more effective realization of this vision, as its formal design, if anything even more adventurous than “Vanishings,” more successfully balances an intrinsic aesthetic interest with the underlying theme it is intended to communicate. Narrated by the sister of a young man who commits a convenience store murder that is captured on videotape, the novella relates the story of the murder and its aftermath, its roots in the man’s troubled past, interspersed with scenes from the after-effects of the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, an event that took place on the heels of the murder and, for reasons the narrator makes evident, became linked with the family’s attempt to assimilate the brother’s action and its causes.

The most immediately conspicuous feature of “Requiem” is its use of what seems a poem to begin the narrative exposition. The device is continued on subsequent pages as well, apparent poems juxtaposed with prose passages providing us, for example, our first glimpse of the crime scene: “The video stops and starts and plays again. Doesn’t show the girl’s face, the girl too stunned to move, the speed of a bullet leaving the gun . . . .” But when the sister recalls a visit from the police, we get a verse rendition:

Please, the policeman says, as if

he loves you. Dark hands flutter

open and close, exposing

pale skin of the palm, soft

pink skin of the fingers, everything

strange, hands too big, fingers flexing.

It is as if the lyrical impulse animating all of Thon’s fiction has here finally literally expressed itself as lyric. While the writing in these lyrics and the writing in the ostensible prose passages are not notably dissimilar in expression or cadence, the effect is to keep the reader suspended above the presumed narrative “flow” of a story that might otherwise seem well-suited to a dramatic — even melodramatic — treatment. Instead, the reader is made constantly aware that language, not story, is the irreducible medium of fiction, that “what happened” is only the beginning of the explorations a work of fiction might make. Thon is interested in the long reach of events, the mental afterimages they leave, the attempt to reckon with their consequences. If for the narrator of “Requiem” these events and their indelible influence return as poetically heightened fragments, such would only seem in its way an accurate representation of the character they assume in retrospect and reflection.

This free interplay of prose and verse also itself puts into question the very distinction between the two, between “poetry” and “fiction.” I do not believe that Thon wants to turn fiction into poetry, nor simply to write “poetic” fiction. Instead, she works to erase the boundaries altogether, leaving only the act of writing, which through its aesthetic ordering (whatever name we want to give it) can make us briefly aware of the potential consonance of existence. It is an illusion, of course, although in the process of “making poems of the words” within our reach, as the final lines of “Requiem” have it, we might momentarily imagine that at the end “we will need no more words ever.”

Incrementally Further 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

If we would expect a novel written by an accomplished poet to exhibit a gift for language beyond what we find in most fiction, then Joshua Corey’s Beautiful Soul certainly meets our expectations. Indeed, this gift is apparent literally from the novel’s beginning:

Black screen. A flicker. The letter:

In the heart of the night the new reader lies awake with the lights turned off listening to the rain tapping on the skylight. If she opened her eyes she would see the darkness above her, a rectangle gradually reorganizing itself into a gray filmy gleam, glassy surface blistered by streetlamps, and the little shudders of water whose shadows she can feel moving across the bedspread, her husband’s sleeping body, her own face, Like hieroglyphs or Hebrew letters they form and squiggle and dissolve almost tangibly before her closed eyes. The letters are falling on her roof and the roofs of her neighbors: they fall invisibly into Lake Michigan, that vast unplacid text, and coat metal and glass and asphalt from Waukegan down to the Indiana border. Others too are awake reading the weather, establishing degrees of correspondence between internal and external states of being, between the past and the present, what they expect from the day and what they are capable of anticipating.

This passage is precise and evocative without being overtly “poetic.” The figurative language is concise rather than elaborate (“blistered by streetlamps,” “vast unplacid text”), and does not obviously solicit the reader to respond to it as “fine writing.” In fact, Corey’s prose style throughout the novel does not employ its linguistic transformations and other syntactical devices as a kind of aesthetic ornamentation, of the sort we find too often in much “literary fiction.” Instead, language as transformation and illumination is inherent to the conception of prose at work in Beautiful Soul. There is narrative in this novel, but its verbal resources are not primarily dedicated to “telling the story” in the functional way most novels do, even those that seem more character than plot-driven or that are noted for their stylistic flourishes. (Which is not to say that Beautiful Soul is lacking in storytelling — the account of events relating to the Paris student riots in 1968, for example, is especially compelling.) Corey’s prose registers the sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the novel’s characters — primarily the protagonist — in truly the only way such characters actually come to life: they live in language, and to that end the writing in Beautiful Soul, in its scrupulous attention to phrase and image in almost every sentence, could be called an attempt to bring the characters and their milieu to life through the vigor of the words on the page.

If this kind of commitment to the generative power of language is part of what might lead us to consider Beautiful Soul a “poet’s novel,” we also find a keen attentiveness not just to the discrete phrase and the isolated trope but to the shape and rhythm of sentences, as well as the use of these sentences to form paragraphs that both provide narrative continuity and work as stylistic elements on their own. Corey’s sentences can be quite long, but they should be entirely accessible to readers who don’t always expect the “shapely” sentence, in which every part of the sentence (especially in longer sentences) is duly subordinated to a unifying, underlying thought, by which in turn the sentence is judged as a felicitous expression. Rather, Corey’s sentences seem to unspool or expand, through successive clauses and phrases much more loosely connected:

Our man Lamb leans forward with an appearance of desultory curiosity and speaks again in his flat American accent, the newscaster’s accent of imperial nowhere, clear and intelligible enough to bind us to him incrementally further, to further our investment in him, a narrow middle question mark of a man whose subjectivity, we understand, is to be viewed transparently by us and for us, as we might see a stranger approach the window of a café where we sit writing or talking and step across the invisible barrier to press his forehead against the window, shading his eyes, searching as if for us, and we stop our fingers on the keyboard, we stop the cup from reaching our lips, we half stop our breathing waiting for him to move toward the door, to become a destiny, a man in a long coat and a colorless expression, or else to drift past, to rejoin the long crazy stream of humanity past the intelligible, the acceptable, the corporate comfort of numbers in the darkened theater.

The internal rhythm manifest in sentences such as this is reinforced by their frequent modulation into much shorter sentences. All of Corey’s sentences work to move us “incrementally further” in apprehending the fictional world they are in the process of creating, as well as the characters in their own process of negotiating it. These sentences also incrementally develop often equally long paragraphs, whose length is determined not by the amount of information they contain or their role as links in a narrative chain (which usually require shorter rather than longer paragraphs) but by their capacity to accumulate the sentences in such a way that they are allowed their discursive freedom, the paragraphs also incorporating them into a larger structure that creates its own rhetorical and aesthetic effects, requiring us to read more deliberately, to appreciate the paragraphs as a formal element with aesthetic appeal, not just as the components used to construct a narrative in prose.

If Corey’s ability as poet is evident enough in the way he organizes language at the point where “writing” most fundamentally occurs, in the composition of sentences and paragraphs, one might still ask whether Corey shows equal concern for the broader formal design of his novel, in relation to the existing formal conventions of fiction. Certainly Beautiful Soul is not an entirely conventional narrative, although the novel could be described as primarily a character study using a central consciousness mode of narration (what is currently most commonly called “free indirect discourse”) that focuses our attention on the inner turmoil the protagonist, Ruth, is experiencing as she takes on the responsibilities of motherhood and seems to lose her professional identity (lawyer by training) in the process. At this vulnerable stage in her life, Ruth finds herself preoccupied with her own (deceased) mother, with whom Ruth had a troublesome relationship and about whom she really knows very little (including the identity of the man who fathered Ruth). This preoccupation gives rise to what turns out to be a secondary narrative, a noir-ish account of a detective who is charged with providing Ruth with information by traveling through Europe, where the mother (referred to simply as “M”), spent much of her life, her final years in the Mediterranean city of Trieste.

This secondary narrative is developed in great detail, but we are never certain that the story it relates is actually “real.” It emerges from the dream state into which Ruth falls shortly after we have opened on her listening to the rain. “Sleepwalking,” we are told, “she might rise and dress and drive in the dark to a wedge-shaped building in the heart of the city,” a building that holds the office of Lamb, the private detective. Thus the story of Lamb’s investigation of mysterious letters Ruth has received, letters apparently from M sent three years after her death, could be interpreted as a projection of Ruth’s inner struggle with her mother’s legacy and influence as she contemplates her future responsibilities, to herself and to her family. That the novel is finally to be taken as the story of Ruth becoming reconciled to her past and prepared for her future is confirmed by the novel’s conclusion. Ruth has herself traveled to Trieste, where she is depicted actually encountering Lamb in the Duino Castle, but upon her return flight we are told that “[t]he castle is behind her and the man she made.” Moreover, she begins to visualize the faces of “the daughter who needs her. The husband who waits for her.” She “opens the new book, the blank book, the book of home. . . .”

Duino Castle is, of course, the setting of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and we could certainly regard Beautiful Soul as also an elegy of sorts for M, as well as for the historical experience she represents as the child of Holocaust survivors. In this context, the story of Ruth’s rediscovery of mental and emotional balance is both persuasive and affecting, but finally it is still a rather familiar type of story. Even though the novel avoids narrating the story in a straightforwardly linear way, it finally does cohere as a recognizable story of transformation or discovery. Other devices that might seem departures from what is otherwise a variant of psychological realism, while they might provide some variety, are less successfully integrated into the novel’s aesthetic strategy. At times the narrative of Lamb’s activity is presented as if it were a movie, one that presumably both we and Ruth are “watching.” The parallel with classic detective films is relevant enough, but since Ruth throughout the novel is identified as “the new reader,” the cinema-style passages seem somewhat gratuitous, not really reflective of the way Ruth would be thinking about Lamb’s efforts (unless “new reader” is meant ironically). Similarly, the occasional metafictional interjections by the author of Beautiful Soul aren’t so much formally adventurous (such gestures have by now become almost commonplace) as they are formally (and thematically) superfluous.

In my view, a possible future for fiction, at least in its more forward-looking modes, might prominently include its partial merger with poetry (whence, paradoxically, it came), reconfirming fiction’s status as a literary genre, a form of verbal art. However, this would have to involve making the novel more “poetic” not just in its stylistic qualities, but in its extension of form beyond an exclusive dependence on narrative, however fractured or transfigured. Joshua Corey’s transfigurations in Beautiful Soul are compelling, and his skills as a prose stylist are well beyond those of most writers, but the novel doesn’t quite transcend the limitations of an approach still rooted in the recognized conventions of narrative-centered fiction.

Unsentencing the Sentence 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

Since the trifurcation of “Poetry” (roughly in the 18th century) into the three genres that in turn came to comprise the category of “literature” — poetry (primarily lyric poetry), fiction, and drama — the phenomenon of writers crossing the boundaries of these now three separate literary forms has not exactly been rare. Thomas Hardy was a great poet and a great novelist. Samuel Beckett was a great playwright and a great fiction writer. Edgar Allan Poe was equally adept at lyric poetry and short stories.

However, the divide between forms, especially between fiction and poetry, has arguably become even thinner, evident not only in prominent postwar writers who found success as novelists after beginning as poets (Gilbert Sorrentino, Denis Johnson, Sherman Alexie), or maintained parallel careers as novelists and poets (John Updike, Marge Piercy, Raymond Carver). It could be argued that the American fiction of the 1960s and 70s now considered “postmodern” was inherently a language-centered fiction that in disrupting conventional narrative forms substituted broadly poetic structures in their place (Donald Barthelme or John Hawkes), while some writers, nominally writing prose, were as gifted at figuration as any poet (Stanley Elkin or William Gass). More recently, writers who have been identified as the “school of Lish” (novelist, teacher, and editor extraordinaire Gordon Lish), including Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, and Christine Schutt, have brought attention to the sonic and syntactical effects of the sentence in a way that often compels us to regard one of their compositions at least as much as a poem as a “story” in order to fully appreciate its aesthetic character.

The increasing popularity of the prose poem among current poets has itself brought the two forms into closer proximity, through the confluence of prose poetry and what is called “flash fiction.” Not all writers of flash fiction, of course, regard it as a version of prose poetry, but rather as an experiment in the radical reduction of plot, character, setting, or scene to the minimum extent possible while still retaining some semblance of structure and coherence. Nevertheless, a number of such writers do blur the boundaries between prose and poetry, from both sides of the diminishing line between the two, and among those should be counted the Canadian Meredith Quartermain, whose book I, Bartleby is labeled “short stories” on its cover but surely does come close to making that line all but imperceptible, if not simply irrelevant.

This is especially true of the shorter pieces included in the book’s first section. Generally fewer than two pages long, most of these begin with a motif or image that is then developed through elaboration, association, or something like a brief narrative. “A Natural History of the Throught” riffs on color, beginning with violet, which is “opposite yellow on the color wheel.” “Out of the Dark” begins as a riff on light, but then light strikes someone’s hand (presumably the writing hand of “I, Bartleby,” introduced to us in the first story as a sort of metafictional stand-in for the author), bringing its corpuscles to life (who prove resistant to the effort). The story is at once both a lyrical reverie and an allegory of the recalcitrance of inspiration. In what seems a throwaway remark, “I” tells us in “A Natural History of the Thought” that “I’ve lost my train of thought,” but this assertion proves to be a kind of clue to the method Quartermain uses in many of these pieces, as the author/narrator pursues a “line of thought” in a way that produces less than a well-ordered story but more than disconnected utterances.

Other sections of the book offer longer pieces, although they too can’t really be called short stories in any conventional sense. The metafictional framework established by the initial short pieces is carried through the rest of the book, reflected in section titles: “How to Write”; “Scriptorium.” Several of the pieces directly concern writing and language, among them “If I prefer not,” in which “I,” transposed to the third-person “She,” attempts to write about a Chinese man she has passed on the street, “Cloth Music,” literally a story about Chinese calligraphy, and “If I noiselessly,” in which “She” is contemplating writing a manifesto:

. . . why not a manifesto of the sentence? Crossbreed every kind with another kind — twist and turn the thought shapes — so many butterfly nets. Une manifestation of clamouring motifs. Unsentencing the sentence. Smashing the piñata of complete thought to clouds of recombining viruses.

This story takes a more poignant turn when we discover that “She” has been reflecting on this projected manifesto as she is returning from a hike to a mountaintop to scatter the ashes of her just-deceased mother, “the dust that had been her mother clinging to her jeans and boots. Breathing the dust that had been her, had made her.”

Ultimately I, Bartleby does balance out the self-reflexive gestures and its more conventionally dramatized “content.” “If I, scrivener, print a letter” also focuses on the death of the writer’s mother (the woman is again “I,” telling her own story), blending a consideration of color imagery with recollections of her mother and with an interpolated episode in which she loses a job. Here “I”’s preoccupation with writing and the otherwise dispersed references to apparent memories and life experiences come together to more firmly identify “I” as the protagonist of the book, even if an unorthodox and sometimes elusive presence. In “Scriptorium,” perhaps the most conventional and straightforward story in the collection, the writer/protagonist recounts childhood memories of her artist father, but this leads not to a melancholy meditation on loss. Instead the narrator relates her eventual estrangement from the father, when she realizes they “don’t speak the same language.” Again “life” is unavoidably implicated in “language.”

Two other stories in I, Bartleby are noteworthy as well. “The Real Fictional House of His Imagined Film Director” tells the story of Canadian novelist Malcolm Lowry and his second wife, writer Margerie Bonner, via the overlaps and echoes among their lives, as Lowry is headed to his ultimate alcoholic breakdown, and characters in their books (Lowry himself being a notoriously autobiographical writer). “Moccasin Box” focuses on 19th-century Canadian/First Nations writer and actress Pauline Johnson, whose lingering presence in and around the Vancouver landscape the narrator tracks. The story’s most conspicuous feature is its incorporation of photographs as a narrative accompaniment. Each of these stories clearly shows Quartermain’s interest in situating her own work in the context of specifically Canadian writing.

 I, Bartleby is the kind of book some readers undoubtedly could find disorienting in its initial reluctance to provide those markers we most associate with “short stories.” By the end, however, the book has made its own alternative, less commonplace strategies sufficiently recognizable that going back to the beginning and re-reading, especially given the book’s relative brevity (118 pages), can be a highly rewarding experience, as Quartermain’s achievement becomes even more distinctly visible.

Staying on Message 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

Among all writers whose work might be cited as experiments in “hybrid” writing, Thalia Field is arguably the most deserving. Her first book, Point and Line (2000), is a more or less indeterminate synthesis of fiction, essay, poetry, and drama, a fusion of genre that becomes only more pronounced in subsequent books, which also add photos and graphic illustration. Her work still seems classifiable as fiction, but to call individual pieces in her collections “stories” or her full-length work Experimental Animals (subtitled “A Reality Fiction”) a “novel” also seems inexact, if not misleading.

Without question Field’s work can also justifiably be described as “experimental,” if we understand “experiment” in fiction to be the testing of limits: How far can the effort to find alternatives to conventional practice while still retaining a place within a form’s ostensible boundaries be taken? Not only does Field challenge conceptions of conventional literary elements such as plot, character, or setting, but as well the linguistic and notational presumptions of writing itself and the customary logic of reading. In Point and Line we find arrangements of words in almost every possible configuration except sentences organized into traditional paragraphs (including one piece presented horizontally across its pages rather than vertically). Incarnate is perhaps the book that most fully crosses over into poetry (many of the reviews discussed it as “prose poetry”), while Ululu (Clown Shrapnel) most explicitly invokes theater — a performance piece that can’t really be performed.

If in these early works the author seems primarily engaged with the exploration of forms, beginning with Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010), Field’s formal variations are more directly put into the service of a single subject, treated with a fairly obvious polemical purpose. However, while all of the pieces in Bird Lover, Backyard evoke the human relationship with animals (especially birds) and often destructive interactions with the natural world, the focus on animal welfare in this book is more restrained and unobtrusive than it would become later, in some cases secondary to other, more portentous concerns, such as the legacy of American nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands in “Crossroads” or the inflated reputation of the naturalist Konrad Lorenz in “A Weedy Sonata,” which focuses on the implications in his scientific work of his documented Nazi sympathies, which have largely been ignored.

Experimental Animals (2016), an examination of the controversies surrounding vivisection in 19^th century France, of course makes animal welfare the explicit subject, but the ingenuity with which this work is constructed allows it to avoid becoming too heavy-handed, although its sympathies with the anti-vivisectionists are clear enough. Moreover, the novel does not treat its ostensible antagonist, the celebrated French anatomist Claude Bernard, as a cartoon villain. While he is certainly haughty and self-absorbed and seems callous in his treatment of his wife (although we must keep in mind that this impression is created from his wife’s point of view, as her narration is the one completely fictionalized element of the novel’s discourse, the rest being an arranged collocation of historical documents), Bernard is not a wanton torturer of animals but a committed scientist who sincerely believes in the scientific importance of his work. His defense of experimentation on live animals is not the rationalization of a singularly cruel man but represents the collective ethical mindset of scientists (at least 19^th century scientists), which Field subjects to an exacting critique without sentimentality or rhetorical manipulation.

Field’s latest book, Personhood, like Bird Lovers, Backyard a collection of shorter pieces (but like Experimental Animals with some graphical embellishment), is her most accessible, but also most transparently didactic, the two qualities undoubtedly related. The first four stories in the book especially make the thematic emphasis on animal rights unmistakable. Perhaps if we could say that in this book Field has adjusted her hybrid approach more to the formal procedures of the essay, then the polemical weight of these pieces might seem less heavy. But this is not really the case. While three of the selections (“Unseen,” “Liberty/Trees.” and “Glancing Backward”) might be described as poems, the rest, although as anchored in “reality” as Experimental Animals (one piece is an arrangement of transcripts in a legal proceeding), in their artifice and deployment of point of view are best regarded as fiction. The formal dexterity displayed does provide some welcome variation in a book with an otherwise monochrome thematic character, but it is less formally adventurous than either Point and Line or Bird Lover, Backyard.

The didactic tone of the book is set in the first story, “Hi Adam,” a second-person narrative that follows a visitor to an exotic bird sanctuary around the menagerie. Individual birds (such as Adam, who turns out to be female) become the characters in the story, as we are provided with the parrots’ direct speech and much of their backstories (how they came to be in the sanctuary). The appeals to sentiment are quite strong in this piece: we learn of parrots’ complex emotional lives and the damage done to them by living in captivity as a companion to humans — even when they are ostensibly “well-treated.” The second story, “Happy/That You Have the Body (The Mirror Test)” restages the court case concerning Happy the Elephant, whom an animal rights organization has tried to free from captivity in the Bronx Zoo by having her legally declared a person because she is self-aware, having passed the titular mirror test, and is entitled to release via a writ of habeas corpus. The narrator directly declares outright, abstracting from the legal briefs:

Yet doesn’t the very will to autonomous life grant a right not to be deprived of it? Or suffering at the hand of another confer a right to be relieved of it? Don’t inflicted damages give standing, and once standing, doesn’t a form of law evolve along with every animal who stands in the shadow of those laws?

“Turns Before the Curtain” and “True Crime/Nature Fakirs” shift the focus somewhat from animal rights to the insidious influence of human activity on the equilibrium of the natural environment more generally. The former is a kind of meditation on the phenomenon of “invasive species” cast in the form of a theatrical entertainment, although gradually this conceit recedes in favor of a serial recitation of the history of such invasions: tumbleweed, fungi, feral pigs, rabbits. In all of these cases human intervention is the ultimate source of disharmony, making humans the truly “invasive” species. “True Crime/Nature Fakirs” is a variation of sorts on this same theme, in this case taking the form of an absurdist crime story — complete with invitations to the reader to fill in some of the details — about home invasions by wild animals. “Is it possible they still thought they lived here” asks the narrator at one point, highlighting the artificial conception of “home” employed by the human species, one imposed on all other animals to constrict their own natural rights.

Both of these stories surely employ lively and innovative forms, which again gives them an aesthetic interest that could stand apart from the appeal of the subject, but if anything the uniformity of theme we continue to find in Personhood almost makes the aesthetic invention Fields genuinely displays start to pall, as it seems to be employed as a kind of ornamental contrivance meant to serve the theme but otherwise superfluous. The remaining pieces in the book to a degree modify the prevailing subject — although environmental degradation and its malign effect on animals is still the abiding concern — and ultimately Personhood really does little to detract from Thalia Field’s achievements as an innovative writer. But in this book the unorthodox formal devices seem less adventurous, made more “readable” by subordinating them more obviously to the communication of “message.” Certainly writers can find their way to innovative forms because a subject has in effect compelled unconventional treatment. However, here Field’s already well-established formal virtuosity at times seems imposed on a favored topic.

Which is not to deny that some of the pieces in the book work considerably, even powerfully, well within the more limited play of form and content Field has allowed in Personhood. “Liberty/Trees” is a hybrid Whitmanesque poem/reality fiction organized around the image of the famous Boston “liberty tree,” but it also ranges more widely to relate the story of liberty trees more generally (several other revolutionary-era communities planted trees in commemoration of the Boston tree), and riff on the fate of trees over the course of American history. Most notably, we are given the details behind the spread of the Dutch Elm Disease, which wiped out so many elm trees across the world, as well as the longer-term effects on the environment this blight helped to produce. Neither is the association of trees with liberty dropped from the story, and it concludes in bitter irony with a consideration of a lynching tree:

            Men surround, again, a tree, to lose their wits
                                       to drink their brains, to lean against the trunk
                          to drag a boy over, and beat a man [two names, to cross
out, to map]
                          a mob enjoys a picnic on the designated day
                                        yelling, lemme see! at others
                           laughing. . . .

Perhaps “The Health of My Stream or The Most Pathetic Fallacy” best represents both the strengths and weaknesses of Personhood — strengths if you think that works of literature can bring descriptive and narrative specificity to a cause in a way that advances that cause beyond sloganeering, weaknesses if you note that in this piece Field’s formal idiosyncrasies have been smoothed out almost entirely, leaving only a fairly ordinary mode of fragmented narrative. The narrator of the story owns a property through which a stream flows. The narrator uses the stream for irrigation during the dry season, creating a luxurious, plant-strewn riverbank. Soon enough the narrator begins to observe the fish in the stream, deciding to intervene in the water current to create a more flourishing environment for them. This does not work out well, and the narrator learns about the well-being of streams and the dangers of human meddling with nature. The depiction of the ecology of river environments is vivid and engrossing, but, especially in a collection that takes up the same theme more or less repetitively, “The Health of My Stream” is also entirely predictable. Experimental fiction (or poetry) ought to be predictable only in being unpredictable. Most of Thalia Field’s books have indeed been characterized by their aesthetic ingenuity and variety. She is, in fact a writer about whom it is justified to say that her work so blurs the distinction between forms and genres that it could be regarded simply as an integrated practice of “writing.” But Personhood suggests that her audacious verbal imagination has started to become merely the available instrument for promulgating an increasingly familiar message.

Fabulators

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.

British and Irish Fiction

The Words for What I Would Say 

The Oulipian strategy behind Paul Griffiths’ short novel Let Me Tell You (Reality Street) is made plain on the book’s back cover:

So: now I come to speak. At last. I will tell you all I know…. These are the words of Ophelia at the beginning of this short novel: literally her words, in that her narrative is composed entirely of the vocabulary she is allotted in Hamlet.

If it is true that fictional characters are literally no more than the words they are assigned in the text that gives them “life,” Let Me Tell You illustrates that those words can go a long way. Through creative reshuffling and inconspicuous repetition Griffiths takes the fewer than 500 words Ophelia speaks (or sings) in Hamlet and fashions them into a convincing first-person account (with an interpolated play, several sonnets, and a soliloquy or two) of Ophelia’s life before the events portrayed in the play, although in the words following those quoted on the back cover, she in effect acknowledges the difficulties of being liberated from the script she has until now always followed and that has set the terms of her existence:

. . .I was deceived to think I could not do this. I have the powers; I take them here. I have the right. I have the means. My words may be poor, but they will have to do.

What words do I have? Where do they come from? How is it that I speak?

Very rarely do Ophelia’s words seem obviously contrived to fit the new circumstances of their utterance, and as the text unfolds Ophelia convinces us she has the right and the means to speak for herself and that the origin of her words is secondary to her often affecting repossession of them.

At the same time, one can never quite “lose” oneself in Ophelia’s narrative. Its origin in the recycling of a precursor text, one that is no doubt well known to most who might read Let Me Tell You, must remain a manifest reality in the experience of reading the novel; it has very little claim on our attention, in fact, independent of its source in Hamlet and in Ophelia’s role in the play. Admiration for the skill with which Griffiths rings changes on those 500 words is an unavoidable part of the reading experience. Indeed, the pleasure one takes in a work like Let Me Tell You is precisely the pleasure of witnessing in a particularly intent way the way a writer is using a structural device to bring character and event into existence.

In an interview with Mark Thwaite (Ready Steady Book), Griffiths himself comments on the utility of his structural device: “If you keep to some form—some command, if you like—you come up with things you could never come up with by yourself.” Griffiths’ initial decision to write under the “constraint” imposed by sticking to the text of Hamlet–what he has “come up with” by himself–allows him, or forces him, to invest form with the duty to produce “content.” This is what fiction writers who fancy themselves as having something “to say” are rarely able to do. For them, form is mostly an inconvenience, the bare minimal means to be enlisted in the grander act of saying something. Their work is thus formally unimaginative and, usually, thematically banal. In Let Me Tell You, Griffiths trusts that his form will effect its own kind of “saying.” That it results in a character with emotional depth and a narrative that plausibly develops a life story about which Hamlet is otherwise silent only validates the wisdom of the author’s commitment to that form.

Ultimately, Let Me Tell You seems to me one of those experimental fictions that straddles the line between narrative fiction and poetry, although by “poetry” we now mean only one of the modes that was included under that heading prior to the emergence of the novel as a separate literary form (“prose fiction”). Before then, “poetry” essentially included all modes of literary expression. If it is often the case that, as Brian Phillips has it, poets who write fiction often tend to exhibit a “powerful narrative impulse” that “refashions fiction with fiction’s own materials, not with transposed notes of poetry” (Poetry), writers of fiction who challenge what Phillips calls “narrative straightforwardness” often create works of “prose fiction” that remain more or less identifiably in “prose”–they are not “poetic” because they indulge in flights of figurative language similar to what is found in an older mode of lyric poetry–but that challenge the equation of “fiction” with narrative, refashioning fiction by aligning it with the structural imperatives of poetry but leaving the “lyrical” elements of verse aside. Such a move still puts more emphasis on language, as the reader must focus more squarely on the writer’s effort to turn prose to account for purposes other than “telling a story,” but it represents an approach to prose fiction that might re-establish it as a “poetic” genre alongside lyric poetry.

Near the end of Let Me Tell You, Ophelia, on the cusp of her fatal madness, laments to an absent Hamlet that “I cannot tell you what I most wish to tell you, for there are no words for what I would say.” This is at the same time a playful reference to the conditions imposed on Ophelia’s speech by the text itself and an honest statement of the unavoidable conditions imposed upon all poetic saying: the urge to express is quickly confronted with the actuality that all such expression will be incomplete, that the substance of what would be said is always escaping between the words. But, as Let Me Tell You demonstrates, what can be done with those words is sometimes almost sufficient compensation.

What Happened 

In what is unfortunately one of the few available reviews (The Independent) of Rosalind Belben’s impressive novel, Our Horses in Egypt, Stevie Davies calls it “a radical experiment in narrative.” I think this is probably an overstatement, but there is certainly more going on in this novel, both structurally and stylistically, than might at first seem apparent.

Its twinning of narrative strands, one chronicling the the experiences of a literal “war horse” conscripted into cavalry service during World War, the other narrating its owner’s attempt to track it down in Egypt several years after the war, is not particularly innovative, although it is brought off effectively. And while in effect assigning the role of protagonist to a horse does allow Belben to avoid several worn-out devices still being trotted out (so to speak) in so many contemporary novels, the notion of a story centered on a non-human “character” is also by no means especially “radical.” However, Belben’s novel does present itself in ways most readers are likely to find distinctive, even if they are otherwise primarily engaged by the emotion-laden story Belben wants to tell.

Most noticeable is Belben’s prose style, especially the pervasive, staccato-like dialogue featured in the sections of the novel dedicated to the quest by Griselda Romney, whose own husband was killed in the war, to find Philomena, the horse requisitioned at the beginning of the war who apparently survived it. Here’s a representative sample:

“In the old days, we managed.”

“These fellows you found. . .”

“They said they knew what they were about.”

“You’re so gullible.”

“I shan’t be again. I had to chloroform myself when Georgie was born.”

“It didn’t put you down.”

“How could it, a whiff or two! I was glad of it.”

“Poor Bunny.”

“Oh, oh, don’t!”

It isn’t that this conversation is disconnected or incoherent that makes it seem so elliptical. It undoubtedly makes perfect sense to the speakers, and careful reading can certainly establish the context in which these remarks are being offered, even if such context does become clearer and the subject of conversation somewhat more comprehensible in a retrospective reading of this passage. (In this way, Our Horses in Egypt encourages a more attentive and recursive kind of reading, which, in my view, need not be a burden and can ultimately enhance the reading experience.) The cumulative effect of this dialogue is a sense of thoroughgoing fidelity to the speech patterns of these characters as rooted in country, region, class, and time period. It is an actual example of “realism” unencumbered and applied with great rigor, and it is likely to unmoor the assumptions of those readers tied to a more conventionalized, less ascetic understanding of the role of “realistic” dialogue.

The second striking feature of Belben’s novel is perhaps best illustrated in the section narrating Philomena’s experiences in the Great War. While there is a narration of these events, it also comes shorn of rhetorical embellishment and narrative elaboration:

The Turkish machine-gunners played very freely across the Dorsets’ front. Major Sandley wilted in the saddle. The dust raised was shot through with rosy rays of sun. Burgess sailed through the air, and was himself winged like a flapper. Riderless horses heaved themselves up, and thudded on with the rest. Philomena was so distracted (she had a curious view) she didn’t hear the whump when, at four hundred yards, the files closed for impact and Corky was hit in the neck. She didn’t pay any attention to his snort. But she saw the white of his eye. He was stubborn.

All of the narrative/expository passages in the novel proceed in this way, almost as if story were being built by accretion, storytelling replaced by listing: then this happened, then this, then this. Perhaps because Our Horses in Egypt is a historical novel, such a technique seems only the more appropriate, more faithful to the historical “record” (even when incidents and interactions have been imagined) as simply what happened, the essence of the historical past without the unnecessary intrusion of the storytelling gestures so many historical novelists seem to need.

Belben’s listing strategy extends even to her sometimes idiosyncratic punctuation:

Nine yeomanry regiments had been withdrawn from Palestine. “The Bull” had lost, also, two infantry divisions; five and a half seige batteries; nine more British battalions and five machine-gun companies. He had been deprived of 60,00 battle-hardend troops. Infantry divisions arrived from Mesopotamia and India; and their transport drivers had to be trained. . . .

The semi-colons here seem to function not as a marker of sentence boundaries but as just one more way to extend the list of details associated with the withdrawal. Our Horses in Egypt, no matter how accurate its rendition of the British victory in Palestine, is finally still a rendition, its narrative method as much artifice as any other, but its triumph is perhaps in the way it skillfully employs its artifice while simultaneously appearing to conceal it. History seems to lie before us, however much it has been conjured up by a particular kind of verbal manipulation.

So skillful is this manipulation that, despite the deliberate poverty of means in the novel’s construction, Our Horses in Egypt still tells an affecting story, both in the half concerning Griselda’s finally hopeless effort to bring Philomena back alive and in that focusing on the Palestine campaign. And what could have been a smarmy resolution in which Griselda finally does find Philomena and spirits her back to England to live out her days in tranquility becomes instead a bitterly appropriate portrayal of a Philomena brought to ruin through overwork, beyond rescue and suitable only to be euthanized in a token act of pity. This is a novel that risks sentimentality at every stage in its development but that avoids it through unfaltering artistry.

Extreme and Disorienting Experiences 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

That The Unmapped Country, a selection of “stories and fragments” by the English writer Ann Quin not previously published in book form, is likely to give this writer a higher profile than she has until now enjoyed will unquestionably make its publication a worthwhile effort. Especially since postwar British experimental fiction is not exactly a celebrated phenomenon — many might express surprise that it is even a “thing” at all — to remind readers and critics that not only was Ann Quin during the 1960s and 1970s an avowedly experimental writer but that she was also, as Jennifer Hodgson points out in her editor’s introduction, part of a contingent of British writers defying conventional practice that also included B.S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, and others, surely provides a literary service, both to current readers previously unacquainted with either Quin or the movement to which she belonged, and to the legacy of these writers as it informs our understanding of postwar British literary history.

Whether this book enhances or alters Ann Quin’s pre-existing reputation as a writer of unconventional, adventurous fiction is not as conclusive. The book is a miscellany, including works of nonfiction and collaborative prose pieces, rather than a collection of short fiction per se, and while several of the stories that are included evoke subjects and strategies found in Quin’s novels (one was later transformed into a novel), readers unfamiliar with the novels will probably find them less compelling absent the context of their specific associations with the phases of Quin’s all-too-brief career, which ended with the writer’s suicide less than 10 years after the publication of her first novel, Berg. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t provide much editorial guidance that could help us place the included short works in such context (although this omission was most likely prompted by the publisher, lest the book become too “academic”), and thus to a large extent we are left with a series of discrete prose works that vary enough in tone and approach to make their chronological presentation seem more haphazard than sequential, the reader’s experience of the collection as a whole oddly disconnected, without some broader perspective on the writer’s assumptions and ambitions.

Jennifer Hodgson in her introduction does offer a useful signpost to Quin’s characteristic thematic emphasis when she observes that “Quin is often drawn to experiences of difference, extremity, and disorientation,” but this doesn’t finally encompass the way in which the extreme and disorienting experiences are represented in Quin’s fiction, which are as stylistically and formally extreme as the situations themselves. Berg is perhaps the most conventional of her four published novels, which is not to say that ultimately it is very conventional, as both its language and its use of point of view require an especially attentive reader to appreciate their more subtle effects. Indeed, a reader expecting the familiar expository and narrative devices found in most novels — even the most “serious” — would no doubt be disoriented by the general disregard in Quin’s work for not just conventional character or plot development, but the usual rules of consistency and continuity, the discursive rules that produce transparent prose, clearly delineated sequences of events or activities, as well as lines of dialogue clearly demarcated among the characters.

Three, the immediate successor to Berg, coheres as an account of a failing marriage during and after the married couple’s encounter with a third woman, who lives with the couple for a time before she ultimately commits suicide. But the story is told in an oblique way through alternating sections that focus on the couple in the present attempting to cope with the aftermath of the younger woman’s death (and of their experience during her stay), and that present selections from the woman’s diary, as well as tape recordings she left behind. Quin provides no expository passages allowing us to locate the story in its full context, and we are obliged to assimilate it in the sheer immediacy of its presentation. Passages does something similar, but in this third novel the connections are even more elusive, the ostensibly underlying story — a woman and man traveling in an unnamed Mediterranean country while the woman looks for her missing brother — even more opaque, although no doubt deliberately so. But the substance of Ann Quin’s novels are not to be found in their stories but in the ways in which Quin displaces the story without ever quite abandoning it, in favor of patterned language, abrupt juxtapositions, and a fluid treatment of perspective and point of view.

These qualities are perhaps most conspicuously evident in Quin’s final novel, Tripticks. Although ostensibly the story of a man being followed by an ex-wife and her new lover, the situation is otherwise the pretext for a phantasmagoric collage of surreal imagery, freely associated memories, and brief narrative episodes relating not so much the protagonist’s life as his hallucinatory perception of it. Presented as a first-person narrative, the novel uses the narrator’s point of view as a way of transgressing the boundaries imposed by the conventional novel while also giving this novel a more recognizable unity—the dislocations of plot, setting, and character (at times the characters almost seem to blend into each other) can be integrated as the metaphorical expression of the narrator’s experience of his life. Paradoxically, what at first seems Quin’s most radically disjunctive work may be her most cogent, and it inevitably as well prompts us to consider the extent to which it might also be the metaphorical representation of the author’s own increasingly displaced mental state.

In this way, Tripticks may be her most audacious novel, even if it could also be described as in part a recognizable sort of satire (it is Quin’s most explicitly comic work) lampooning modern American culture (the novel is based on Quin’s experience in the United States after winning a writing fellowship). But the absurdities of life in America are staged in what critic Philip Stevick in his essay on Quin’s work calls her invocation of the “theater of mind,” and in Tripticks the performance is especially frenetic, freed of inhibiting restraint. The novel’s underlying formal organization as a kind of road novel allows it to retain a fundamental coherence, however. Quin is able to summon the surreal imagery and fracture the perspective and chronology yet still maintain an inherent aesthetic unity, something that she seemed less concerned to pursue in her previous novels, where collage and fragmentation were adequate formal devices in themselves.

Perhaps because we cannot exactly know what Quin might have subsequently done to further extend her aesthetic reach, it is tempting to read The Unmapped Country in order to identify tendencies that might have been pursued into new forms or subjects. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t really offer many clues. “Tripticks” is the story that served as the seed for the subsequent novel, but the other stories published at around the same time finally seem relatively uninspired. “Never Trust a Man Who Bathes with His Fingernails” is composed in free verse, but the story it tells is a familiar enough (for Quin) study of tangled relationships and doesn’t really justify the formal device. ”Eyes that Watch Behind the Wind” is reminiscent of Passages in its focus on a couple traveling in a foreign country (Mexico). “Motherlogue” is a one-sided telephone conversation providing the mother’s side of a dialogue with her daughter that ultimately proves rather slight. Of these completed stories, only “Ghostworn” seems to share with Tripticks and Quin’s unfinished novel the shift to a more direct enactment of the manifestations of mental disorder. In this story, a woman engages in dialogue with the ghostly presence of her dead lover, apparently emanating from the container of his ashes in her possession. The story does not explicitly suggest the woman is hallucinating, but of course it is hard not to think the author could be drawing on an experience of this phenomenon.

In “The Unmapped Country,” the extant fragment of the novel Quin was working on at the time of her death, mental illness has apparently become the explicit subject. The first section of the novel follows “Sandra” through her day in a mental hospital. Paradoxically perhaps, this scene taking mental instability as its directly represented theme is the most conventionally rendered work Quin produced. A more or less traditional third-person narrator recounts Sandra’s interactions with the staff and her fellow patients at the hospital. A second section flashes back to a previous period in Sandra’s life, in this case narrated by Sandra herself. Presumably this alternation would have continued in the rest of the novel, although of course we cannot know for sure.

It is equally inconclusive just how satisfying this more formally familiar approach might have proven to be. Certainly this fragment promises more implicit drama and immediate character identification than we find in the published novels (save perhaps for Berg). This might have made the completed work more “readerly” in the conventional sense, but whether that would have been taken as a necessary step for Quin or a betrayal of the experimental purity of the post-Berg novels is no doubt an inescapable if now mostly superfluous question.

Configurations of Precious Data 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

Tom McCarthy’s fiction quite palpably poses a challenge to entrenched reading habits and subverts conventional literary practice, but its rebellious spirit is usually categorized as modernist rather than postmodernist. Even though most of the qualities found in McCarthy’s work that suggest the influence of modernism equally suggest the influence of postmodernism, and even though specifically the mark of such postmodern writers as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon is readily apparent, discussion of his work has largely focused on McCarthy as a kind of neomodernist.

The most obvious explanation for the way McCarthy’s books have been received, at least in Great Britain, is that British fiction largely skipped over the phase in 20^th century fiction generally labeled “postmodern,” instead renewing after World War II the British tradition of social and psychological realism (the latter supplementing the former as the only really lasting legacy of modernism). With a few notable exceptions — B.S. Johnson, arguably the early Ian McEwan, most recently Gabriel Josipovici — postwar British fiction has offered little in the way of “experimental” or “innovative” fiction of the sort associated with postmodernism in the United States (or, in a different way, continental Europe). This fact is what made Zadie Smith’s well-known essay, “Two Paths for the Novel,” seem rather curious. In it she praises Tom McCarthy for showing an alternative way forward for contemporary fiction, but her account holds McCarthy up as a singular figure, an experimental writer, almost as if a previous generation of undeniably experimental writers in the U.S. and Europe had not illuminated this path already, going back almost 50 years.

A more charitable reading of Smith’s essay would have it addressing primarily a British audience and proposing to writers and critics that British fiction should move closer to American and continental fiction in becoming more adventurous. Tom McCarthy’s fiction contests reigning assumptions both about the adequacy of realism and about the conventions of storytelling, but the real issue is whether it validates the premise sustaining experimental fiction (modernist or postmodernist) — that the art of fiction must remain open to change and replenishment — and extends the possibilities of literary innovation as least as persuasively as the previous efforts to affirm the spirit of modernism prior to McCarthy’s. I think it does, but it is more appropriate to think of McCarthy as continuing on a path made visible by his postmodern predecessors than blazing a new one on ground never before uncovered. McCarthy’s fiction has much to offer readers receptive to unorthodox methods and a different kind of reading experience, although its achievement is only enhanced and clarified if considered not in isolation, as a reemergence of modernism, but as a distinctive contribution to what can now only be called a tradition of adventurous practices by writers trying continually to renew the vitality of fiction as a literary form.

Remainder, the book that first brought attention to McCarthy as a novelist, certainly seemed more European than British, although the influence of DeLillo also seems especially strong in the extremity of the novel’s subject and the deadpan detachment of its style. Like most of DeLillo’s fiction, Remainder does not so far depart from recognizable reality as to completely strain credulity, edging into the surrealistic or fantastic, but the narrative pushes on the plausibly real hard enough that it takes on the atmosphere of the uncanny. Remainder’s protagonist is in such an extreme state of consciousness that he must reiterate “ordinary” experience obsessively in order to be convinced of its authenticity. He arranges for “reenactments” of that experience, so precisely and insistently detailed that they might embody the real exactly enough (more exactly than reality itself) to satisfy his brain-altered need for order (a malady brought on when, before the present narrative begins, he is struck in the head by an object “falling from the sky”). Although the plot of Remainder could be described as simply the working-out of the narrator-protagonist’s repetition-compulsion, the urgency and determination with which he carries out this compulsion nevertheless makes for fascinating reading.

The protagonist of McCarthy’s new novel, Satin Island, does not initially show signs of sharing such a compulsion, although as a “corporate anthropologist” he is someone who is trained to observe closely and discern patterns and hidden meaning. Calling himself “U,” he seems to be functioning well enough in his role as member of a team working on “the Project,” identified by name as “Koob-Sassen,” the ultimate details of which remain murky, even if its ambitions are clearly far-reaching and possibly sinister. Yet we also can’t help but note U’s descriptive rigor when recording his observations of the environments he traverses. Upon entering his employer’s offices he finds

Separated from each other by floor-to-ceiling glass partitions on which lower-case letters in the Company’s own distinctive font were stenciled, these compartments ran on one into the next, creating an expansive vista in which, sketches, diagrams, and other such configurations of precious data, lying face-up on curved tabletops, pinned to walls or drawn on whiteboards, or, occasionally (and this made the data seem all the more valuable, fragile even), on the glass itself, seemed to dialogue with one another in a rich and esoteric language, the scene conveying (deliberately, of course) the impression that this was not only a place of business, but, beyond that, a hermetic zone, a zone of alchemy, a crucible in which whole worlds were in the mix. . . .

This perception of reality in its “configurations,” interpreting these configurations as if they expressed a “rich and esoteric language,” is a trait U holds in common with Remainder’s protagonist, although he continues to act more as a dispassionate observer than a fully engaged participant in the active creation of the patterns and relationships that form his experience of the world.

U as well works for a company that itself seeks to assert itself by exploiting patterns and relationships, hence its need for someone like U to study structures and systems, “identifying these, prising them out and holding them up, kicking and wriggling, to the light,” assisting the Company in its ability “to contextualize and nuance,” to advise its clients, both private and public, “how to elaborate and frame regenerative strategies.” Koob-Sassen “involved many hook-ups, interfaces, transpositions . . . It was a project formed of many other projects, linked to many other projects — which renders it well-nigh impossible to say where it began and ended, to discover its ‘content,’ bulk, or outline.” Nevertheless, “there’s probably not a single area of your daily life that it hasn’t, in some way or other, touched on, penetrated, changed; although you probably don’t know this.” Satin Island thus differs from Remainder in embedding the story of U’s preoccupation with patterns, grids, and networks in the context of global capitalism and the control of information.

While a critique of neoliberalism and the hegemony of transnational capitalism is certainly implicit in Satin Island, the novel mostly keeps the Company and its workings in the background, aside from the occasional appearances of the “boss,” Peyman, the Company’s “public face and poster boy,” whose aphorisms act as the clearest indication of what Koob-Sassen likely entails: “What are objects? Bundles of relations.” “The end point to which [design] strives is a state in which the world is one hundred percent synthetic, made by man for man, according to his desires.” The realities of the new capitalist world order are graphically illustrated in the story U’s current lover tells of the abuse she suffered while participating in a protest at a G-8 summit, although this episode ultimately seems rather heavy-handed, too transparently a departure from the portrayal of the Company as an ominously mysterious entity whose tentacles reach everywhere but whose body remains in the shadows. This portrayal might be derivative of Pynchon and DeLillo, but even granting that the woman’s account is chilling enough, that account sacrifices the subtlety and provocative indeterminacy employed by these writers, making too explicit what might stay implicit in U’s process of self-examination.

While ostensibly U is narrating his attempt to write the “Great Report,” a text that will explain everything about the present era, his story eventually becomes the narrative of U’s disillusionment, not just with the prospect of writing this book, not just the very idea that such a book is actually possible to write, but with his own role in the larger Project, which he comes to see as anti-human. This process comes to its culmination after U has a dream in which he is flying in a helicopter over a gigantic complex that turns out to be a massive trash dump, a “glowing ooze, which hinted at a deeper, almost infinite reserve of yet-more-glowing ooze inside the trash mountain’s main body.” This is Satin Island. Realizing that the name must surely be a dream-filtered reference to New York’s Staten Island, when he finds himself in New York City for a symposium, U ventures to the Staten Island Ferry terminal, where he envisions traveling over to Staten Island, imagining it as “some other place where everything, even our crimes, has been composted down, mulched over, transformed into moss, pasture, and wetland for the ducks and coots to build their nests in. Maybe I could somehow nest there too. . . .” He does not get on the ferry, suddenly realizing that to do so would be “profoundly meaningless,” although not going “was, of course, profoundly meaningless as well.”

Finally Satin Island could be called the story of its protagonist’s psychological shift, from an initial state of reluctance to examine his commitment to “meaning” as a coherent concept whose fulfillment is possible to a willing acknowledgement of the essential meaninglessness of human activity, no matter how many patterns, connections, and orderly arrangements we think we see. It might be called a story about the loss of innocence, and as such the novel is finally not very formally adventurous. But McCarthy’s innovations are not at the level of narrative structure (events in his novels happen sequentially, however bizarre they might appear to be at times), but instead in the way he represents interior states not through conventional strategies of psychological realism (free indirect discourse, stream-of-consciousness) but by in effect exteriorizing state of mind in his first-person narrators’ preoccupation with spatial constructs and sensory configurations, as if they are projecting onto the world their irresistible need for perceptible reality to cohere, for things to add up.

This preoccupation is registered directly in the narrators’ language, their minute observations and often intricate descriptions. McCarthy’s prose style may be his most original achievement, its expository and descriptive powers compelling attention while also challenging common notions of “poetic” prose:

Staten Island was no longer grey, and it had grown: the sun was right behind it now, haloing it, transmuting it into a brilliant orange pool that spread across the harbour like a second mass of water, ones set on a slightly different plane that spilled across the first one when the two planes intersected. This pool of light was spreading right towards the ferry, swallowing it up, dismantling it, pixel by orange pixel. Its haze spread even further, past the boat’s still-discernible stern, turning the ferry’s wake, and those of other vessels, a metallic, silvery shade. There were scores of wakes, crossing each other in irregular and tangled patterns.

The essentially geometric figurations in U’s evocation of New York Harbor as he prepares to leave the terminal — superimposed planes, intersecting patterns — captures U’s way of apprehending the world while also providing us with an alternative perspective on what could be just another lyrically rendered scene. At the same time, immediately following U’s notation of the “irregular and tangled patterns,” he adds further: “Networks of kinship: the phrase flashed across my mind; I snorted in derision.” That the patterns now appear irregular and tangled, that he now dismisses his previous belief in “networks,” suggests that U has had a revelation of sorts, even if it is the revelation that the overarching explanation he seeks will not be revealed. In this way, the protagonist of Satin Island, unlike the protagonist of Remainder, is allowed to abandon his illusions. Whether this represents an advance in McCarthy’s art or a retreat to a more familiar sort of narrative device perhaps remains to be seen.

A Well-Worn Path 

In 2008, Zadie Smith somewhat unexpectedly seemed to declare herself partial to the experimental impulse in fiction (as represented by Tom McCarthy), as opposed to “traditional” realism (“Two Paths for the Novel”). This was unexpected because, while some critics had mistakenly identified White Teeth, Smith’s first novel, as somehow “postmodern,” both it and Smith’s two subsequent novels, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, were quite obviously themselves in the realist tradition, even recalling the very early stage of that tradition in 19th century novelists such as Dickens. Smith in her essay acknowledges her work’s commitment to realism, affirming that it belongs to the version she calls “lyrical realism.”

Nevertheless, readers might reasonably have expected Smith’s fiction subsequent to this essay to show the influence of her new thinking (if that is what it is) about both the present and the future of fiction. And, indeed, it would be hard to call her recent novel, NW, a work of lyrical realism. At the same time, it could hardly be called “experimental,” if genuinely experimental fiction should be expected to do more than simply imitate a mode of fiction that was at one time experimental, as NW in fact does in assuming the form of the modernist psychological novel, at times invoking specifically the stream-of-consciousness method associated with Joyce and Woolf. 90 years ago, this was indeed a new approach to the art of fiction, especially when applied as radically (and effectively) as we find it in Joyce and Woolf, but it hardly counts today as an innovation, however much it might show Zadie Smith moving from the surface realism and loosely structured Dickensian narrative of her first three books to the more tightly controlled interior monologues dominating NW.

The use of such monologues is not, of course, really a departure from “realism” at all. Although the modernists’ use of this technique was certainly disruptive enough when books like Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses appeared, these novels were at least as much an effort to enhance realism by adding the subjective perception of reality (analogous to our own experience of it) as an important factor in convincingly representing the world in works of fiction. It is in fact this brand of realism that is the favored mode of a critic such as James Wood, for whom the capturing of “Mind” is the supreme ambition both of fiction and of literature itself. Indeed, it is telling that Wood included NW as one of his “books of the year,” finding that it reveals a “steady, clear, realistic genius” that made him read it “with mounting excitement.” Of course, Wood had previously (and infamously) labeled Zadie Smith’s work as a  prominent example of “hysterical realism,” a designation Wood based on the perception that the kind of realism to be found in her earlier books was undisciplined and directed toward external actions and appearances. His newfound enthusiasm for her fiction can only now be based on an altered perception that the realism of NW has gone inward, validating the triumph of the “free indirect style” pioneered by Joyce and Woolf (and earlier Henry James) that Wood believes is the supreme expression of fiction’s potential as a literary form.

It seems to me that NW is not an effort to integrate new thinking about experimentation in fiction but to gain the approval of James Wood, to escape his declaration of her work as exhibit one in the case against hysterical realism. Among the criticisms Wood made of this purported practice as exemplified in Smith’s fiction (specifically White Teeth) was that it valued a superficial “liveliness” over psychological depth. If indeed Smith wanted to address this criticism by removing all such liveliness from NW, she has certainly succeeded. I have not recently read a less lively book. Although it incorporates a few equally superficial formal flourishes (alterations in font size, dialogue without quotation marks, irregular indentation, captioned fragments in the novel’s longest section), they are entirely random and do nothing to compensate for the slow slog we must make through the perfunctory passages of free indirect discourse, as well as for the unengaging characters and uninspired narrative structure. If NW does represent an attempt on Zadie Smith’s part to be more “experimental,” it’s the sort of experiment that ultimately gives experimentation in fiction a bad name by being so utterly boring.

I would myself resist James Wood’s critique of hysterical realism in Smith’s earlier work because I don’t find those books to be particularly “lively,” either. NW shares with White Teeth and The Autograph Man its setting in the northwest of London, the comprehensive portrayal of which is clearly an important part of Smith’s literary project. Like those two books, NW focuses in particular on the multicultural diversity of this section of London, and as a consequence Zadie Smith has been celebrated as a kind of urban-based local colorist bringing attention to London’s multicultural character (especially for American readers). While it certainly makes sense that if one of your primary goals as a writer is to make visible a cultural group or environment previously neglected in fiction, realism, hysterical or otherwise, would be your strategy of choice, but both “Two Paths for the Novel” and NW itself would seem to indicate that Smith takes interest as well in the aesthetics of fiction, in the formal/stylistic choices that confront the writer. NW attempts to embody different choices (more stylistically restrained, formally tighter) than those informing the first three books, but finally these choices provide mere surface variation on the same underlying objective to represent multicultural London with authenticity and on the same themes of identity and assimilation.

There are those, of course, who believe that this objective and these themes are worthy, wholly sufficient goals, that they indeed describe what has become one of the most important developments in contemporary fiction–what could be called multicultural realism. By this measure, simply by presenting her characters and her setting with convincing authenticity Zadie Smith is credited with an aesthetic achievement that is also a contribution to social progress. “Two Paths for the Novel” is a clear enough indication that Smith herself probably would not accept this as an adequate criterion for judging a work of fiction (certainly not as the sole criterion). She is not, of course, responsible for readings of her work that apply spurious standards or appropriate it for agendas that are at best tangential to the creation of literary art. Still, however much Smith wants her novels to be taken seriously as literary art, she has yet to write one that connects form to subject in such a way that the former becomes more than the well-worn path to recognizing the latter.

Even if one were to concede Zadie Smith her strategies of choice, despite a lingering impatience with those strategies, her realization of them in the four published novels does little to redeem their possibilities. Contrary to Wood’s classification of White Teeth as hysterical realism, I actually found this novel a pretty drab affair, its gestures toward a Dickensian amplitude in the characters falling completely flat. The Autograph Man is even more listless in its characterization, the characters so uninteresting in their supposed eccentricities as to make the novel almost unreadable. On Beauty is more reader-friendly, and is the best of the books Smith has so far produced. (Coincidentally or not, it  is also the only one not set in northwest London.) It tells a rather familiar story of academic rivalry, but the characters are not exactly of the sort we usually find in an academic novel and do add some interest to the story of scholarly warfare and its effects on the families of the combatants. NW, in returning to the setting of the first two novels, also returns to the prevailing tedium that unfortunately accompanies it.

That On Beauty, alone among Smith’s four novels, manages to hold the reader’s attention with relative consistency hardly seems to merit the critical approbation this fiction has generally received. I can think of few writers whose work has created a larger gap between the praise it has accumulated and what I am able to determine to be its actual quality than Zadie Smith.

Formally Restless 

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)

In her 2015 New York Times review of Joanna Walsh’s Vertigo, Heidi Julavits complained that the stories in the book “do not cut downward or inward, instead they move laterally until the energy simply dissipates.” On the one hand, this seems to signal an impatience with the stories’ resistance to the perceived need of psychological depth (“downward and inward”), reinforced by Julavits’s further charge that Walsh’s prose is “like a series of rocks expertly skipped across a body of water that maintains its surface tension,” but it also reinforces what is clearly a broader intolerance on the reviewer’s part of Walsh’s more unorthodox and adventurous narrative practices: “When does the reader feel vaguely ashamed for wanting more guidance” from the author?” Julavits asks near the beginning of her review, which pairs Vertigo with Walsh’s previous nonfiction book, Hotel. “Walsh’s formally restless approach,” Julavits avers, eventually “begins to seem less an inventive way to convey her story (and her mind) and more a fashionable evasion tactic — one that is intimidating and disorienting, so that common desires for sense, order, or the accrual of meaning are deemed moot, even foolish.”

While Julavits’s lament is a common enough expression of protest against formally or stylistically adventurous fiction, usually such full-throated objections are reserved for more grandly ambitious, conspicuously “experimental” works, not the kind of slender volume comprised of foreshortened stories offered by Joanna Walsh, which now include her new collection of stories, Worlds from the Word’s End. Julavits further charges Walsh with an emotional aridity: her books have “no platform for intimacy,” and her narrators use their discourse “to keep emotion at bay.” (Only one story in Vertigo manages to evade “Walsh’s emotional laws” of non-expression.) Is Joanna Walsh’s departure from accustomed practice judged to be even more unacceptable because she is a woman writer? If she must approach her subject — which to some extent could be described in terms that suggests a concern with women’s experiences and circumstances — from an oblique angle and a less expressly “intimate” style, should she not at least provide the sort of emotional resonance we might expect? To be sure, many reviewers of both Hotel and Vertigo responded much more favorably to these books, registering their ambiguities, their stylistic brittleness, and their distancing effects precisely as strengths of Walsh’s writing, not as manifestations of authorial bad faith.

Still, the sort of reaction exemplified by Julavits’s takedown in the New York Times Book Review remains as an illustration of the dissatisfaction that continues to be expressed among the keepers of common knowledge in the entrenched literary class with the questioning of that knowledge by writers apparently indifferent to it — perhaps in particular women writers who stray too far from the consensus about how a woman’s perspective ought to be represented in a work of fiction. One mode of anti-realist fiction has become favored by some more adventurous writers, what could be categorized as “fabulation,” of either the surrealist variety popularized by a writer like Aimee Bender, or the magic realist variety practiced by Kelly Link, and this mode has mostly received the endorsement of the literary establishment — at least insofar as these writers have achieved a significant degree of success, and other writers adopting that strategy continue to appear. However, although some of Walsh’s fictions might be characterized as reveries or fantasies of a sort, most of them nominally stay within the realm of a loosely conceived realism. Walsh’s challenges to expectation and convention can be seen more clearly in her fiction’s general avoidance of direct narrative. Even when narrative is ostensibly present, she offers an elliptical structure in which what is not disclosed is emphasized, and a prose style that abstains from the familiar sort of figurative language — “fine writing” — found in most mainstream literary fiction, instead frequently relying on devices such as repetition or the deliberate use of clichés.

To an extent, these strategies work to provide a kind of structural and tonal unity in Vertigo, as they reinforce the book’s perspective: all of the stories are narrated by a character who is unnamed but clearly enough the source of the experiences related throughout the book. The narrator largely observes and reflects, frequently alluding to her marital difficulties and attempting to come to terms with her feelings for her husband (from whom she eventually becomes estranged) and adapt to the conditions of a marriage’s dissolution. One could say that she finds herself in a perpetual state of vertigo under the circumstances she confronts, although in the particular story with that title the narrator indeed suffers from the physical symptoms of vertigo. This story is otherwise quite representative of the stories to be found in Vertigo, as well as some of those in Worlds from the Word’s End. The narrator is on holiday — a common setting in the book — in this case with her family. The story is highly fragmented, presenting the narrator’s brief observations of the activity around her, tinged with the awareness of her husband’s infidelities, at other times pursuing her observations into direct meditation on her circumstances or falling into a kind of internal dialogue. Near the end of the story, the point of view begins to alternate between the first-person and the third-person, as if her subjective processing has experienced overload and she must escape the confines of the internal perspective to gain more clarity.

But this escape from emotion, the attempt to impose distance on those emotions, a distance on herself through the disposition of language, is precisely what Heidi Julavits perceived as the weakness of Walsh’s writing. In a story like “Vertigo,” however, the delineation of this state of self-alienation is surely one of the writer’s goals. To admonish her for actually accomplishing this goal seems an odd critical judgment, to say the least. In Walsh’s stories, the reader is asked not to passively receive the account her narrators provide, not to “identify” with characters in the superficial sense we usually give the term in reflecting on the experience of reading fiction, but to inhabit the characters’ experience ourselves. By thus requiring us to occupy the narrator’s perspective, the stories paradoxically bring us closer to the character than a more conventional style or more casual treatment of point of view would be able to do. Clearly some readers resist assuming the perspective of characters whose response to their condition is an ambiguous mixture of stoicism and icily suppressed rage, who perhaps at times convey the impression that their doubts and disappointments are the opportunity to invoke and order language in unusual ways rather than to grapple with them openly. But while such readers may find themselves impatient with or judgmental of the behavior and attitudes of Walsh’s narrators — especially considered as a kind of composite narrator likely incorporating the author’s own experiences — this is an objection to the kind of character portrayed, not to the truthfulness of the portrayal.

Worlds from the Word’s End, unlike Vertigo, is not focused so exclusively on stories featuring a narrator we might directly connect to the author in this way. It is more formally varied, and could be called more recognizably experimental. Stories such as “Femme Maison” and the title story to an extent return us to the context explored in Vertigo — the dissolution of a long-term relationship — but each of them extend the subject beyond the still essentially realistic premise underlying its treatment in Vertigo. The former concerns the efforts of its female protagonist to adjust to living in her home alone, but, in a move that simultaneously imposes greater distance between author and character even as it elicits identification between character and reader, the story is related in the second-person. “Worlds from the Word’s End” begins in a familiar situation — a man and a woman with “communication” problems — but in this case the failure to communicate becomes part of a worldwide phenomenon in which communication more generally goes “out of fashion” and then disappears entirely.

Other stories depart from the paradigmatic approach of Vertigo altogether, introducing different sorts of characters and telling different kinds of stories, seemingly more purely invented. In the book’s first story, “Two,” an unnamed woman stands on the side of a road, offering two items to passersby. These items are never identified — they variously seem to be children, animals, and inanimate objects. “Travelling Light” tracks the progress of a “shipment,” the contents of which are never identified, in the form of a report by its shipping agent. Both of these stories seem to offer the possibility of allegorical meaning, but finally they appeal more as parodies of allegorical narratives, their “meaning” deliberately obscured. In the book’s final story, “Hauptbahnhof,” a woman has apparently taken up residence in a German train station and describes her activities waiting for a “you” who “may be in Edinburgh” but otherwise remains elusive. In stories such as these, Walsh relies more heavily on continuous narrative than in Vertigo, but still underscores what is not revealed, what acquires meaning only when unspoken. These narratives straddle the line between conventional storytelling in a realist mode (their details seem ordinary, recognizable) and a more suggestive kind of fabulation. If they seem slightly surreal, it is because ordinary reality has been made to seem incomplete, not distorted beyond recognition.

“Enzo Panza” achieves more with less through a radically expanded timescale, essentially the story of a life, executed via a compressed narrative (fewer than ten pages), while the story itself is not so much elliptical as straight-out surreal. “I was still a small girl when I decided to kidnap Enzo Panza,” the narrator announces, and the remainder of the story relates Enzo’s life in a kind of captivity, although he continues to live in the girl’s home even after she herself has left and married (and is there when the girl returns after her divorce). Not even the girl seems to know the meaning of her actions, or Enzo’s:

What has he spared me, this Enzo Panza? What, with his constant presence, has he prevented happening in my life, and what, if anything, has he caused to happen? Does he care for me, my mother, my children? Is he escaping something, or is he just biding his time? Why, when I invited him into my life, did he agree to stay?

While this is otherwise the story perhaps most dissimilar to what we might have expected from the author of Vertigo, the narrator’s words here could certainly also have been uttered by the narrator of the earlier book in her brooding on the direction her own life had taken. However much the stories in Worlds from the Word’s End are more formally disparate, the disabused narrative voice in most of them remains distinctively the voice both Hotel and Vertigo prepared us to expect, Walsh’s writing creating its “surface tension” that, Heidi Julavits to the contrary, is precisely the kind of tension such “formally restless” works require.

Still, in Worlds from the Word’s End Joanna Walsh doesn’t simply repeat the approach taken in Vertigo but develops the adventurous aesthetic sensibility revealed in the earlier book in ways that are arguably both more orthodox — more emphasis on narrative, less intense focus on a single character’s perception — and more experimental — a looser attachment to realism, more audacious use of narrative elision and indirection. The stories in both of these books are fully-realized creations, but they also leave us anticipating what the author might do next.

Illusions of Order 

(This review originally appeared in 22.)

In its way, Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child is a compelling read. Some readers expecting a conventionally linear narrative might certainly find that this book consistently defies expectations of sequential continuity and character development, but this does not mean it provides no story (it may provide too much) and no characters (there might be too many to keep track of). If we were to abandon the notion that plots must be unilinear and that the reader’s relationship to the plot must be mediated by “well-rounded” characters, one of whom serves as a protagonist with whom we may “identify,” we might perhaps come to appreciate the different kind of structure and more dispersed focus on multiple characters Ridgway employs in Hawthorn and Child.

The reader puzzled by this strategy might usefully regard it as the explicit reversal of the conventional expectations of what a novel will offer us. The effect is heightened by the fact that the book is initially presented to us as a crime novel or detective novel, a genre that especially relies on the kind of story that progresses, that answers the questions it implicitly poses. The first chapter of Hawthorn and Child introduces us to the title characters, a pair of London detectives, who are on a case in which a man has been shot but doesn’t really know where the shot came from, although he believes it was fired from a “vintage car.” Hawthorn begins to investigate, looking further into the victim’s background and attempting to identify the car, leaving us the impression as the chapter closes that this investigation (as well as Hawthorn’s state of mind, which, it is suggested, might be precarious) will be the focus of the novel.

As it turns out, however, we learn nothing more about this case. Hawthorn and Child themselves fade from view in subsequent chapters, appearing only as secondary or peripheral characters in episodes featuring new characters from the north London area where Hawthorn and Child work. These include a pickpocket turned driver for a local gangster, who eventually must run for his life when he fears the gangster has discovered he has become a police informant; a possibly psychopathic book editor in possession of a strange manuscript; an art-loving young girl (who also happens to be the daughter of Hawthorn and Child’s boss); a paranoiac who believes he suffers from an infection transmitted to him by Tony Blair; and a religious lunatic on the loose. Hawthorn and Child return in the final chapter, investigating a woman’s death that may or may not be a suicide.

Readers accustomed to the usual progression of the detective novel would understandably be disconcerted by a book that first seems to promise the pleasures offered by a crime story plot but then so thoroughly withholds those pleasures. But surely Ridgway wants such readers to be disconcerted, to reconsider what they require of fiction beyond the repeated iterations of this sort of plot. Even so, however, Hawthorn and Child fulfills many of the goals traditionally assumed by crime fiction. As in many crime novels, Hawthorn and Child conveys a strong sense of place, the questionable activities and behavior it depicts arising from local circumstances, while also allowing a perspective on the local setting that a focus on more conventional behavior would not provide. If the book does not feature a clearly delineated protagonist and antagonist, we are initially encouraged to take Hawthorn as the protagonist, and many of the other characters make a vivid enough impression on us as well. And while ultimately this novel does not focus on one particular “crime” carried through to its solution, it is still possible to regard the interlocked episodes as forming a crime narrative of sorts, at least if we allow that such a narrative is as much a mode of representation as it is a specific kind of plot.

Crime narratives work to portray the reality that is in a sense masked by “ordinary” reality, a reality where deviation from norms is the norm, a reality that reveals the disorder lurking beneath the thin veneer of order society attempts to apply in order to ignore it. If usually the plot’s resolution seems to restore a fragile order, the threat to its preservation remains, ready to take a slightly different form in the next story. Hawthorn and Child certainly offers us a perspective on this parallel reality, even though it doesn’t do so through the expected plot devices. There are criminals and other shady characters, but the focus on other sorts of marginal people collectively evokes the milieu that in this part of north London sustains the parallel reality, nourishing the problematic behaviors that arise from it. Hawthorn and Child don’t “uncover” the circumstances behind any one transgression of public order and civic peace, but the novel itself uncovers the ultimately illusory nature of such order and the always provisional status of that peace.

Furthermore, it is possible to read Hawthorn and Child not as a novel (as which it has nevertheless generally been described), but as a collection of stories with a common setting and with the title figures as recurring characters but not necessarily the exclusive focus of interest. This would mitigate our need for linear development, while the book would still provide the depiction of the urban underside I have described. Although the book’s first story would also still have tricked us into expecting a fully developed crime story with Hawthorn as the somewhat unstable protagonist, knowing that the ensuing chapters are meant to be read as formally discreet works that do reverberate nicely with each other but are not otherwise continuous would surely ease our frustration with its apparent lack of continuity. Yet to view the book this way is finally only to underscore that Hawthorn and Child is a fundamentally conventional work of fiction, with arguably the imposed tension between reading it as a novel and reading it a series of short stories the sole adventurous feature. And that the book in fact could be successfully read in both ways doesn’t so much mark it as original or innovative as indicate the extent to which it manages to incorporate enough of the familiar, in-common elements of both the novel and the short story to be accessible as either.

A few of the “chapters” would no doubt work less well than others if considered as stand-alone stories. “How to Have Fun With a Fat Man” focuses on Hawthorn, although it alternates between a memory from Hawthorn’s early days as a police officer when he was part of police line during a demonstration, a get-together with the rest of the Hawthorn family, and Hawthorn’s participation in group sex at a gay sauna. This piece mostly contributes to the portrayal of Hawthorn, giving us further insight into the troubled state of mind in which we find him in the opening chapter. Thus it gives support to the conclusion that this book ought to be judged as a novel, Hawthorne its unheroic hero. Ridgway does not depict his protagonist as a “gay detective,” although he is clearly enough struggling with his sense of himself as both. His sexuality seems just another unexpected twist on the conventions of the detective novel.

Hawthorn and Child is probably best appreciated as an extended twist on the detective novel, one with enough twists to maintain the reader’s curiosity and written crisply enough to move dubious readers past their doubts. Overturning or manipulating genre conventions is by now a rather familiar tactic, however, and I don’t think the book transforms this tactic into something sufficiently fresh that it fully escapes the specific genre conventions it parodies. It succeeds as an unorthodox version of a crime novel, but its interest doesn’t go much beyond that.

The Language of the Spirit

The most immediately visible characteristics that frequently seem to prompt both readers and critics to label a work of fiction “experimental” or “unconventional” (or perhaps just “quirky”) are the appearance of irregular sentence patterns, an apparent disregard for the expectations of realism (in literary fiction, at least) and a formal arrangement that can’t be described as simply identical with the narrative movement the work offers. By this measure, Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones can be called experimental, although any reader who gives the novel a chance to validate its strategies is likely to affirm relatively quickly that these more adventurous qualities of the novel — adventurous, but not conspicuously “difficult” — do not ultimately make it inaccessible except to the most passive kind of reading.

It is certainly the case that the prose of Solar Bones — ostensibly the narrative voice of the novel’s protagonist Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer from the west of Ireland — seems from the beginning especially fluid and open-ended, but eventually we become aware that it is composed of an unbroken, continuous sentence, an unfolding series of clauses (and the occasional list) loosely linked by simple conjunctions as time markers. Still, the sentence flow is modulated enough that the reader’s negotiation of their recognizable rhythms is really not radically different from assimilating a more rhetorically digressive style that nevertheless continues to observe the usual rules of punctuation. Likewise, the narrator’s account is mostly organized in something like conventional paragraphs, and while in this case the resulting units function almost more like stanzas and reflect the narrator’s heightened state of consciousness (for reasons made clear at the novel’s conclusion), they provide the reader with a largely unobstructed path through the narrative Marcus Conway relates, however meandering it does at times become.

Although Solar Bones is quite meticulously realistic in its treatment of character and setting (an effect that is only amplified by our retrospective discovery of the origin of the telling), its uninterrupted prose might seem the sort of nonconventional practice that suggests a rejection of realist narrative, except that a moment’s reflection on realism as a literary effect should prompt us to question any such association of fidelity between writing that adheres to standard syntax and life as lived, the evocation of its local circumstances. To think that ordinary prose is the appropriate way to portray ordinary life is merely to commit a version of what the poet-critic Yvor Winters identified as the imitative fallacy, since there is no plausibly coherent connection between a “plain” style and enhanced realism. Indeed, given our ultimate discovery that our narrator is not exactly Marcus Conway but his recently disembodied spirit (following a heart attack), wandering his empty house and recalling his life, it is manifestly the case in Solar Bones that McCormack’s continuous prose is well-suited as the narrator’s mode of expression; it doesn’t merely “reflect” but in this case actually embodies the character’s condition as a being whose existence has been literally transformed into a phenomenon of language, a being who subsists purely as a narrative voice.

Thus as well the novel’s kaleidoscopic formal arrangement finally seems the entirely natural result of the (supernatural) circumstances in which the narrator finds himself, not so much rehearsing the events in his life in their chronological sequence (as if assembling an historical record), but describing them as they appear now to his newly spectral consciousness. If Marcus Conway’s life is flashing before his (and our) eyes, it does so in discrete images and episodes, connected not by the narrator’s effort to reveal their meaning as whole, a composed narration, but by the narrator’s need to put them all together for himself, to come to some understanding of the situation in which he finds himself. In this way, the novel becomes a mystery narrative of sorts, although it is a mystery for the narrator himself to resolve, as the reader may not even be aware that there is a mystery to be resolved in the first place (no doubt many readers will suspect that there is more to the narrative situation than at first we are led to believe). Even so, the confirmation of Marcus Conway’s death at the novel’s conclusion doesn’t really bring clarity to a mystery story so much as retrospectively affirm the novel’s formal integrity.

To point out the ways in which Solar Bones might be described as effectively unorthodox but not radically divergent in its formal or narrative strategies (readers looking for a “good read” can find it in this book if they are willing to accept some initial uncertainty and indirection) is not to say that this novel is finally too conventional after all, or that readers who actually do welcome experimental fiction (without necessarily applying a narrow definition of what “experimental” must entail) would find Solar Bones too timid. Indeed, perhaps the novel’s greatest value is in demonstrating that unorthodox writing strategies need not make a literary work difficult for a patient reader, while also still engaging the attention of more adventurous readers, who might also appreciate that, in the long run, writers whose efforts help make the designation “experimental” less intimidating have made a worthy contribution. Presumably not all readers and critics who resist experimental fiction do so because of an unshakeable attachment to linear narrative and plain prose. Presumably they seek in a work of fiction a satisfying and rewarding reading experience, which finally can be found in most adventurous fiction as well, but the reader must be willing to find it in a less routinized way than that offered by most conventional literary fiction.

Readers looking for a character with whom to “identify,” however, could certainly find such in Marcus Conway. All of the novel’s stylistic and formal devices ultimately help to portray Marcus even more sharply, working to evoke his state of mind (or spirit, as the case may be) while also allowing us to consider his interactions with the other characters recorded in his account, often in conjunction with his work as a local government engineer. However ethereal we might have to judge Marcus Conway’s actual narrative presence to be, the encounters with politicians and crooked contractors are related quite materially through long stretches of dialogue that ring true to the talk of provincial officials and bureaucrats (although perhaps at times they become somewhat overextended) and that make Marcus’s presence in his daily encounters palpable indeed. His similarly corporeal talks with his son on Skype (the son is in Australia) reveal an apparently fraught relationship between father and son, while scenes depicting Marcus with his wife — including an extended episode in which he cares for her during a terrible illness — shows their relationship to be a strong but settled one, no romance for the ages but a successful and enduring marriage. Certainly Marcus Conway is not a heroic or “colorful” character. In fact, McCormack seems to be interested in him precisely as a more or less ordinary man whose life, and whose way of reflecting on it, is for that very reason worthy of consideration.

If Solar Bones is primarily a novel of character, it is also very much a novel focused on place as well. The setting in the west of Ireland — generally the setting in McCormack’s previous books also — is not mere backdrop but the enabling environment making these characters who they are. And because it is an environment whose presence always looms, all of the characters are inescapably aware of it, although Marcus Conway seems perpetually alive to it, often breaking out in rapturous descriptions:

with the sun high in the sky as the road ahead ploughed through the blue air, disappearing into the day’s depth along the lower slopes of Croagh Patrick on my right and the green sea to the left, such a vivid wash of light off the mountains that I recognised it immediately as one of those startling days when the beauty of this whole area is new again, the harmony and coherence of all its shades and colours washing down to the sea which was laid out like a mirror all the way across the bay to Achill Island and Mulranny, one of those days which makes you wonder how we could ever be forgetful of it because that is what happens, driving this coast road so often from Louisburgh to Westport, my morning route to work with its mountains falling through a chroma of blues and greens into the shallow, glaciated inlet of Clew Bay . . .

Solar Bones seems a consummation of sorts, a satisfying synthesis of the themes, settings, character types, and adventurous inclinations found in McCormack’s previous books, which include the novel Notes from a Coma (2005) and the short story collection Forensic Songs (2012). Those books are certainly worth reading (especially the pleasingly weird Notes from a Coma), but Solar Bones is now the work that might plausibly put McCormack in the company of his great innovative Irish predecessors such as Joyce and Flann O’Brien. If McCormack’s novel is more a consolidation, a reaffirmation, of the tradition of Irish experiment than a wholly original extension of it, nevertheless readers open to a different but not formidable kind of reading experience should find it entirely rewarding.

Our Smiles Are Grimaces

(This review originally appeared in Splice.) 

Although David Hayden’s Darker With the Lights On includes twenty stories, featuring a variety of character types and settings (albeit certainly associatively linked through recurring images, motifs, and tone), the book’s title seems especially well-chosen in suggesting to the reader that this trope might work to integrate a collection of stories that otherwise almost defies thematic coherence and formal stability. The phrase itself does not appear in the text until relatively late, in the very brief story, ‘Lights’. Brief as it is, however, the story is entirely representative of Hayden’s approach throughout the book. An old couple are in a “lower room”, apparently attempting to move a large crate out the door. Enjoying limited success at the task, the couple find themselves on top of the crate, where they start to dance “the moves that were old when our parents were young.” The crate breaks apart, “and there is our saggy old sofa, there are our children as they were in the long ago late evening: immaculate, content, watching cartoons in grey and white, a bowl of popcorn between them.”

In some of the stories we are immediately presented with bizarre or extreme situations — “My name is Leckerdam and this is how my children killed me” begins ‘Leckerdam of the Golden Hand’ — but ‘Lights’ begins with a believable enough premise, even if one could wonder exactly why May and Michael are so keen to get the crate outside the door (and couldn’t a neighbour come over and help?). Nevertheless, the story becomes decidedly stranger when they begin to dance, and of course turns fully surreal when the sides of the box fall away to reveal the childhood scene that seems to provide the story its climactic moment: Michael reaches to switch off the lights and May tells him, “It’s darker with the lights on” in the brief denouement — and it is one that surely invites an allegorical reading. Is this a story about the passage of time, the melancholy of remembering as this couple nears death, invoked though dreamlike distortion? Such an interpretation seems to fit, but what does that final line contribute to it?

Most immediately it would seem that Michael wishes to bring on the “darkness” in response to the distress caused by the scene confronting them but is prevented by May, who sardonically observes that the sight itself retains its own sort of darkness. Yet there seems to be a calmness about May — who, Michael tells us, “put her hand on mine, gentle, warm” — that belies the assumption that “darkness” is something to be avoided, as if she in fact wants the light to “see” the darkness. But perhaps approaching the story effectually requires that we ponder the various connotations of “darkness” in this context. If Michael is seeking the solace of darkness when the light reveals too much, May encourages him to face the darkness as the true locus of reality. And if it is indeed darker with the lights on, then darkness itself must have its own kind of light, unless the distinction between the two simply collapses and darkness subsists within the light, erasing all differences in a general scattering of meaning.

Which may, in fact, be the effect Hayden ultimately hopes to achieve: the paradox remains a paradox, the moment one to puzzle over but not to resolve in a conclusive interpretation that reduces the story to a fable-like allegory (however brief) that has discernible “sense” to be made of it. Clearly enough the story evokes a ruefulness about ageing and the loss of potential, but to go beyond the story’s way of evoking it — its formal and stylistic attributes — in order to subsume what the work does to what it means is to deliberately overlook the manifest qualities of the work itself, substituting some available paraphrasable point. But perhaps it could be said that the story in effect lures us into making this move, subsequently thwarting our attempt to find the “right” formulation of that meaning — and provoking us to consider why we are so eager to resort to this interpretive tactic in the first place.

It seems to me that the presuppositions animating ‘Lights’ are the presuppositions at work in the book as a whole, which more than anything else brings aesthetic unity to its various parts. Not all of the stories proceed exactly as does ‘Lights’, which in its scenic compression is especially effective in creating a kind of ersatz allegory. But all of the stories do seem to exist in an in-between state that, though askew from what we would consider ordinary reality, still seems to bear on that reality (many of the settings — trains, restaurants, dinner parties, the beach — are ordinary indeed) in an indirect way which might still be brought to a kind of sense. We might preliminarily call this atmospheric quality “dreamlike”, but while many of the stories do exhibit the associative logic and allusive distortion of dreams, to settle for this characterisation in accounting for Hayden’s effects is to be imprecise in describing their structure and their mode of representation, as well as rather nebulous about how a narrative modelled after dream imagery would in fact actually work. The same is true of the invocation of the “unconscious” as the possible source of the stories’ underlying method of representation. In each case, Darker With the Lights On evokes a filtering and transmutation of everyday reality, but these stories are at once both more purposeful and less insistently symbolic than dreams, more cogent than the Freudian unconscious, but less determinedly elemental.

The first story in the book, ‘Egress’, well illustrates both why such fiction might be called “dreamlike” and why this is an inadequate description of the approach at work in this story and, by extension, the other stories as well. The story’s first line certainly signals immediately that we are operating under a suspension of reality: “Many years have passed since I stepped off the ledge.” Our narrator-protagonist has walked off the ledge of his high-rise office building, but instead of plummeting to the ground (presumably to his death) as we would expect, he remains floating in the air, taking note of all that happens around and below him:

I began to observe the office building as if for the first time: the honey-coloured glittering skin of stone, the terracotta panels, smooth and grooved; the sheets of clean glass. My eye and mind moved with delight from the detail to the great mass of the building and back again. I felt joy to be outside forever.

The unbothered, even ecstatic, tone of the protagonist’s narration only heightens the story’s aura of unreality, which originates in a literal flight of fancy but subsequently sustains the fancy in a way that is quite deliberate in its effect.

The “jumper” at first seems surprised that he is not falling towards the ground — or at least falling faster: “I could see that the ground was farther away from me than I could have expected it to be and, what is more, seemed to be receding faster than the rate at which I was falling.” Night soon arrives, and the next morning our floating man begins to adjust to the situation (with no choice but to do his toilet business where he floats). He appears to enter into a timeless zone of sorts, as the scene below him seems to proceed through all four seasons in a single day. Time quickens further, its manifestation below suggesting perhaps a cataclysmic event, and the protagonist experiences an accelerated descent — “I find that I have dropped many floors and that the ground is coming up fast” — as the story concludes.

Perhaps we could say that ‘Egress’ invokes an elemental fear of falling, but it turns this potential nightmare into a seemingly whimsical fantasy more likely to disarm than to distress, only to reassert at the end the anxiety that the story has partially defused. Like the protagonist, we are left “hanging” at the end of the story, but the repetition in the final short paragraph of the lines with which the story began gives ‘Egress’ a kind of aesthetic symmetry that takes it beyond the act of mimicking a dream. The sort of irreality inherent to dreams is used as the fictive means to question our preconceptions about the logic and purchase of dreams, while instead incorporating the irreal in an entirely aesthetic strategy that doesn’t attempt to reinforce their ambient symbolism.

This aesthetic strategy is perhaps most radically expressed in ‘Golding’. This story certainly at first reads like its narrator’s account of a dream — in fact an almost endless procession of them, each morphing into the next from the perspective of a narrator without identity or even a stable gender. But, the narrator tells us, “There were no dreams. All happened. Senses came from nature but not sense, cause but not action, time but not story. There was only this voice. This, her telling.” The story is indeed strong on sensory detail — often taken from nature — but less concerned that those details add up to ultimate sense. It is extended to sufficient length that a series of actions do seem to take place, but they certainly do not connect in a way that could be called a story — the actions are resolutely linear, but seem only momentarily related, and could hardly be said to rise or fall. “Voice”, the uninterrupted telling, is certainly what leaves in ‘Golding’ the deepest impression. The transformations the narrator chronicles spin out imagery to be assimilated for their immediate, dynamic expression, not for their ultimate integration in an achieved unity of effect.

Numerous stories in Darker With the Lights On proceed in the way that ‘Golding’ notably exemplifies. ‘Memory House’ extends its initial conceit that the narrator’s “memory house is my mind” by doing a kind of inventory of the household items stored there, effectively blurring the distinction between “house” and “mind” as the dodgy qualities of the latter distort the former. ‘Remains of the Dead World’ depicts an old man named “Dada” speaking to a crow (and sounding more like a child than an old man) “in a dark declivity at the heart of a wood.” The story’s absurdist, fabular premise seems to draw on both the surrealist movement for whom perhaps the old man is named and Native American folk tales, although it is a fable that actively denies a “moral”. As the story nears its conclusion the old man asks what will happen next, to which the crow replies: “The seasons go on for ever and ever until the sun dies.” ‘Limbed’ follows a man as he travels to what in effect turns out to be his own execution by means of a gigantic axe (apparently autonomous) tearing everyone in the vicinity limb from limb.

Other stories in the book are less purely surreal, more recognisable in scene and situation (if still plenty weird). ‘Hay’ concerns a man named Andy, who is hired to stop the workers in a mine from flooding the works with their tears. He manages to mitigate the effects, but does not ultimately succeed in stopping the miners from crying. ‘Cosy’ is the closest thing in the book to realism, telling the story of a day in the life of George, who performs all of the ordinary actions of such a day (eating breakfast, napping), but suddenly at the end of the story says to Edith, who has just arrived: “I long for the suffering to end.” Immediately after, “laughter streams out into the close air,” but we don’t know whose.

Several of the stories seem to be, to a greater or lesser degree, if not exactly metafictional, certainly concerned to suggest connections between the notions voiced by the characters and the artistic approach taken in Darker With the Lights On. ‘How to Read a Picture Book’ depicts “Sorry the Squirrel” as he performs before a group of children, contrasting pictures and words: “A picture of an elephant means an elephant. … Words are just mute smudges until you know what they mean, and when you put them together they can tell all manner of things. You can fall through words down into a seething belly world of billions of objects and notions all shrieking and hiding.” ‘Play’ features a lecture by a professor who stresses the importance of play but who insists: “Play is not fun. It’s about what we must do to live. … Our smiles are grimaces.” In ‘Reading’, one of the characters proposes the theory that the human afterlife consists of waking up in the book we are reading before death. Whether this is something to be anticipated or avoided is not finally determined.

That Darker With the Lights On is itself both playful and grim, adept in language yet also at times seemingly tumbling through a “seething belly world”, perhaps helps to explain why the book hasn’t received as much attention in the United States since its publication in 2018 as it had previously in the UK. There are in fact numerous current American writers employing versions of fabulation and surrealism, but few of them are as relentless as Hayden in following out the logic of the surreal in order to in effect achieve its own undoing as a distinctive “strategy” pursuing definable ends. Hayden’s stories evoke situations that might promise whimsy, or a “quirky” social satire, but consistently prove elusive in their resistance to interpretation, refusing if not negating the expectation that a work of fiction will ultimately yield up its exegetical secrets, however obliquely.

Grotesque Physicalities 

(This review originally appeared in Splice.)

The publisher of Hugh Fulham-McQuillan’s Notes on Jackson and His Dead (Dalkey Archive) cites Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, and Edgar Allan Poe as touchstones in considering the influences on the stories collected in the book. But while Borges and Poe are plausible candidates, Barthelme doesn’t seem quite right. There are elements of the fantastic and uncanny in some of Fulham-McQuillan’s stories, yet they don’t have the casual surrealism of Barthelme’s fiction, nor his stylistic lightness of touch and colloquial directness. The prose is more ruminative, almost scholarly, and in this way indeed more reminiscent of Poe’s first-person narrators.

This cerebral quality of several stories — with numerous direct references to other writers and texts — also bears comparison with Borges. Stories such as ‘An Urgent Letter to the Reader Regarding a Moment from the Life of Fyodor Dostoevsky’, a metafictional meditation on that writer’s survival of the death sentence pronounced on him as a young radical, and ‘Gesualdo’, about its narrator’s wish to assume the identity of Carlo Gesualdo, the Renaissance prince and composer infamous for murdering his wife and her lover, seem perhaps the most Borgesian, with their quasi-learned (yet also unstable) narrators and their molding of a kind of fabular history. But, then, many of the narrators in the eighteen stories collected in Notes on Jackson and His Dead exhibit similar attributes. Seemingly self-possessed, well-read (and unafraid to show it), and at first expressing a strong enough sense of purpose, ultimately they reveal that their purchase on prevailing circumstances may be somewhat precarious.

In ‘Spiral Mysterious’, a detective is investigating a case in which an actor in an Irish soap opera is a victim of an attempted murder, which has been captured on video. The footage is juxtaposed with another video depicting a similar scene from the show, in which the actor played the killer. The detective finds himself racked with guilt in considering the first video, as if watching it has implicated him in the crime, and at the story’s conclusion (the crime is never solved) he realises that “this guilt… was borne not of the first-person views of these two scenes, not of all the killings I have witnessed in my life, but of my desire to witness the fulfillment of the murder in each of the videos. … The resolution was what I desired.” In ‘Entrance to the Underworld’, a narrator staying in a hotel (“for reasons I would prefer not to mention”) is subtly undone listening to a woman who is searching for her missing brother as she tells of his obsession with sinkholes and her belief that he has dug a “bottomless pit” and disappeared into it, not to be seen again. The narrator, much like the detective in ‘Spiral Mysterious’, wishes for resolution in the woman’s story, “to get to the bottom of this bottomless pit,” but concludes that reaching it “is an impossible task.”

In ‘The Art of Photography’, the narrator, drinking in a bar attached to a theatre, quite literally loses touch with reality while considering the photographs along the bar’s walls. Other stories cross the line into the outright uncanny, into Poe territory; at least three could perhaps be described as ghost stories. ‘Whiteroom’ is narrated by a man whose wife has died through means that remain mysterious (mysterious for the reader, at least), though her spirit lingers on and directs the husband to make white everything in the room from which the narrator speaks — right down to the couple’s books, the pages of which are painted over to hide the black print. In ‘The Fog’, the narrator’s house is overrun by fog which begins to induce eerie phenomena (the narrator senses unknown presences and phantom sounds), so he sells the house, only to return later, but by now the inhabitants of the house may be ghosts — as is, perhaps, the narrator himself. ‘A Tourist’ depicts a man ostensibly camping out in a valley holding a “ruin”, but he is actually “visiting the grief of his past.” He is haunted by his own memories, as well as others who remain invisible but visit his campsite nevertheless.

The title story (the first in the book) goes beyond mere suggestions of the supernatural to engage in a form of surrealism, as does a later story, ‘Relic’. ‘Notes on Jackson and His Dead’ is narrated by a filmmaker who is making a documentary about Jackson, a former orchestra conductor who sheds selves “like old skin, leaving dead versions of himself behind”. The situation, of course, delights the filmmaker:

We caught marvelous images of his anger. From high enough all those dead copies become little dark blotches — you can really understand the pattern of his mind without having to see the grotesque physicality that is its manifestation. There are aspects of cubism there, the geometricity, the distortion — he could be an outsider modernist. I could make him that. With this strange man and his forever-shedding selves as my paint. I could do that.

‘Relic’, meanwhile, tells us of “a vault deep beneath the Vatican”, where is kept the sacred relic of the title: a fragment of skin putatively belonging to the first pope. It is not only a piece of dead skin, however: it grows, apparently quite expansively, and thus the Vatican employs a cadre of workers to “manage” the growth, including the story’s narrator. One job measuring the growth of the skin is particularly dangerous, involving suspension from the vault’s ceiling, and at the story’s conclusion we learn that our narrator has been given this task.

‘Notes on Jackson and His Dead’ shares with ‘Spiral Mysterious’ and ‘The Art of Photography’ a focus on the ubiquity and influence of mediated images. Perhaps the most extended treatment of this theme appears in ‘Detachment’ (the longest story in the book), in which a peeping Tom (called “the voyeur” throughout) becomes appalled at the prospect of being peeped-on himself when he comes to understand the pervasiveness of surveillance technology. Whereas, in practising his own voyeurism, he at least “did not hide”, honouring a kind of contract with his victims that he would assume the risk of being caught: “The presence of these cameras on every street in the city in every public building — the thought made him dizzy, fragile with anxiety. … There was no fairness in that indiscriminate recording.” The voyeur becomes obsessed with surveillance cameras, acquiring an app that allows him to patch into closed-circuit systems, and as he begins to watch himself on the screen, he becomes dissociated from the image of himself that he sees, eventually splitting into two selves, the watcher and the watched. Finally the “real” self dies (he’s actually given a funeral), leaving the camera-created simulacrum to live on.

Here Fulham-McQuillan has drawn on both Poe (‘William Wilson’) and Dostoevsky (The Double) to fashion a paranormal fable that updates the earlier writers’ stories of psychological breakdown for the modern era of omnipresent technology and its threats to the cohesion of identity. These stories of the malign influence of current visual media might be the most effective in the book, employing their fantasy devices to create an atmosphere of disquiet, if not incipient terror, in a context in which terror might indeed be the appropriate response to the underlying conditions from which their themes arise. Such stories as ‘Detachment’ and ‘Notes on Jackson and His Dead’ don’t merely evoke the practices of previous writers of metaphysical or supernatural fiction but revise these practices to suit present circumstances. This does not reduce the other stories in the book to pastiche or simple homage; these depictions of the dominion of visual culture serve to show more distinctly that the practices associated with Poe (or Borges) continue to be a renewable resource for skillful fiction writers to draw on.

Not all of Fulham-McQuillan’s stories rely on the direct inspiration of tales of the uncanny or supernatural. One of the more quietly affecting is ‘Skin’, the narrator of which tells of an incident from his childhood, a trip to the circus, where he encountered a “freak” act, a man with skin so attenuated that “I could see veins crawl through his smiling face, his neck, his arms.” The experience has a traumatic effect on the child, a trauma that the narrator continues to revisit: “I am haunted by this man. I constantly relive his act, stretching what can only have lasted a few minutes into a horribly misshapen thing that has bridged all these years. These moments live inside me and refuse my understanding, and so I live with them.” In this story, the horror lies within — in the child’s and, later, the man’s inability to fully accept the reality of human imperfection, which the narrator can only regard as grotesque, even though this is a word he cannot utter.

A collection of eighteen stories without explicit sequential connections or in-common settings could certainly seem overly various, too disparate in subjects or strategies. But Fulham-McQuillan provides enough balance between an unobtrusive commonality of approach and a variety of narrative content that the book both hangs together conceptually and provides sufficient diversification. Commonalities of image and theme also emerge (sometimes through direct juxtaposition), but the book’s sequencing does not insist on them so strenuously that the reader can’t alertly discover them, making for a more active and satisfying reading experience. Ultimately, Notes on Jackson and His Dead doesn’t quite fit readily into prevailing dichotomous categories — conventional vs. experimental, realist vs. fabulist — but this is a strength, as the book pushes against convention by reinvigorating aesthetic strategies that remain recognisable.

If the stories in this collection do at times falter, it is due to a highly allusive and parenthetical expository prose style that also relies predominantly on abstraction. (There are few passages devoted to sensory description or other specific details, and most of the stories contain little, if any, dialogue.) Such a style is to an extent appropriate for the sorts of narrators we encounter in the book — especially the more cerebral and self-conscious — but the density of their recitals can at times be somewhat laborious to read. Surely, however, this problem is partly an artifact of the assembly of the stories into a published volume, as no doubt they were not written to be read in exactly this order or in a collection of precisely this scope. Regarded individually, most of the stories in Notes on Jackson and His Dead are intriguing in their inspiration and persuasive in their execution.

The Telling and the Tale

Since its publication in the UK in 2018, its capture of the Booker Prize, and its subsequent publication in the United States, Anna Burns’ Milkman has provoked sharply divergent responses. It has received numerous highly laudatory reviews, but also several high-profile negative reviews, most notably in The Times and the New York Times Book Review, the latter of which is negative indeed, accusing the novel of trying the reader’s patience with its needlessly diffuse and circuitous narration. Although this “problem” in Burns’ novel is framed by such critics as one of excessive “difficulty,” the criticism finally seems centred less on the formal and stylistic features of Milkman and directed more at the novel’s perceived failure to render its presumably weighty subjects — the Troubles in Northern Ireland, male dominance — in a suitably sober and straightforward way.

Milkman ultimately tells a story that is both cogent and eventful (although many of the events take place outside the narrator’s immediate awareness), but it is no doubt the narrator’s discursive manner of storytelling, full of circumlocutions and digressions, that most provokes these critics. Burns herself has speculated that some readers may have been bothered by the narrator’s practice of avoiding proper names, including her own — it is only as “Middle Sister” that we come to know her. But really this rhetorical habit seems reflective of the narrator’s more general wariness of immersing herself in her environment, which is not only inherently dangerous but characterised by the social pathologies to which such surroundings almost unavoidably give rise. This wariness is perhaps most obviously manifested in Middle Sister’s proclivity for reading while walking on the streets (only nineteenth century books, to take her even farther away from her immediate surroundings), although paradoxically this quirk makes her ultimately more vulnerable to these pathologies. Both her actions and her verbal strategies for representing those actions thus emphasise avoidance and indirection, qualities some critics clearly have not been able to appreciate.

However, readers familiar with Anna Burns’ first two novels, No Bones (2001) and Little Constructions (2007), would likely recognise that Milkman shares with them a foregrounding of verbal structure, an emphasis on telling as much as or more than tale, although this does not produce stories that lack a cumulative narrative power. No Bones especially acquires considerable dramatic impact over the course of its sequential chronicle of the Troubles and their influence on a particular Belfast neighbourhood. The formal structure of the novel is episodic, focusing on the maturation of its protagonist, Amelia, but its stark delineation of the damage done to Amelia, her family, and her neighbourhood registers with ever-intensifying force. The episodes are narrated from a variety of points of view and perspectives, although a majority are related in the third-person from Amelia’s gradually widening but ultimately benumbed viewpoint (literally benumbed, as she also becomes severely alcoholic). The final effect is created less through narrative tension (the novel tells a number of stories) than through a kind of chronological intensification of experiences (some incorporating moments of violence) that together create a compelling account of Amelia’s predicament.

Little Constructions is even more committed to an approach whereby the manner of the telling conditions the reader’s perception of the tale to such an extent that its mode of narration is almost as much the subject of the novel as the narrative itself. At first we are led to assume that the story is being told to us (in a very circuitous fashion) by a third-person narrator. Eventually, though, it seems that this narrator is either a citizen of the novel’s fictional town, Tiptoe Floorboard, who happens to be a bystander at most of the key moments portrayed (at the least an assiduous monitor of the community grapevine), or is a sort of composite character representing the town, a collective narrator as in Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’ (1930). Whatever the narrator’s ontological status, the narrative is related in an extremely recursive, elongated process that persistently calls attention to the act of representation itself, the narrator breaking the “fourth wall” to let us in on her narrative decisions:

Did you ever notice how people blend into the wallpaper? And drainpipes? Or how they hang, in anticipation — usually horrified — from twelve-storey buildings by the tips of their fingers? And just to be on the safe side, they do this from sometime around midnight up until midday the next day or more? That’s the sort of thing I notice. That girl was amazing. It must be a skill of many years standing to be able to mix yourself into all sorts of immiscible substances. I’d like to go on about Julie and her powers of disappearance but I think we should return, for it seemed Judas [Doe] had things relatively under control.

The novel chronicles the story of the Doe family, but it is a discontinuous chronicle to be sure, hardly a linear depiction of notable Doe deeds — or, more precisely, misdeeds. While the predominant focus is on John Doe, a career criminal, the narrator also follows many other members of the Doe family (all with “J” names — Judas, Jetty, Johnjoe, etc.), as well as a gun shop owner named Tom, ultimately depicting the undoing of the Doe family in a tale that is twisted in more ways than one. The narrative stops and starts, moves back and forth, seeming to progress according to the narrator’s associative habits of thought. It would not be altogether accurate to call Little Constructions a metafiction, but certainly the “constructions” of the title could include the narrator’s conspicuous construction of the narrative she is in the process of assembling.

Thus it is no surprise that in Milkman the narration calls attention to itself in a way that might distract from the narrative for readers expecting a more straightforwardly dramatic rendering of the Troubles and their immediate impact on the novel’s youthful protagonist (although she appears to be narrating the story from a longer perspective at some indefinite point after the events she describes). Burns’ novels surely demonstrate a deep-seated concern to reckon with the effects and repercussions of the Troubles for those survivors now attempting to live a semblance of a normal life, but, notwithstanding moments of brutality and other forms of dehumanising behaviour, she registers their difficulties not through direct depictions of violence or episodes of sectarian conflict, which can descend into melodrama and paradoxically impart a kind of overwrought sentimentality. Instead, Burns depicts her characters as people who do have lives, however warped by their stifling circumstances, and however horrifying the circumstances might seem to readers who have never borne them.

Middle Sister is somewhat more successful at achieving some integrity in her life than Amelia of No Bones, who ultimately succumbs to an extreme case of alcoholism and addiction bordering on psychosis after relocating to London in an attempt to escape her environment. She manages to maintain a relationship with “Almost Boyfriend” (together they have an agreement to not yet fully declare themselves to be boyfriend and girlfriend), who has successfully kept his distance from the sectarians on his “side” by obsessively involving himself in automobile repair and restoration. This relationship does come undone by the end of the novel, but not because either Middle Sister or Almost Boyfriend is drawn further into nationalist militancy or paramilitary violence: rather, Middle Sister discovers that Almost Boyfriend is gay. Middle Sister also has a closer connection to her family than does Amelia (whose family essentially disintegrates over the course of No Bones), even if she has a contentious relationship with her mother, who expects her to get married and raise a family in accustomed Irish fashion and bitterly rails against what Ma perceives as her daughter’s deliberate subversion of these wishes.

The primary object of Ma’s frustration is Middle Sister’s reported love affair with the titular Milkman — although, as it turns out, there are two men answering to the name. The one with whom Middle Sister is accused of consorting, nicknamed Milkman, is in fact a high-level IRA operative who does indeed take a fancy to Middle Sister but whose interest she does not return. The other is an actual milkman, a schoolmate of Ma’s, who will not defer to the authority of the “renouncers of the state” (the closest Middle Sister comes to naming the Provisional IRA) and suffers for it. To the extent that Milkman features a plot, it concerns Middle Sister’s attempts to forestall the moment she will have to either confront the former and spurn his intention to take her as his mistress — and face the unpleasant, perhaps deadly, consequences — or capitulate to him as an irresistible force. When ultimately she appears to have no alternative except to concede, it seems not a case of a strong-willed woman (which Middle Sister has certainly shown herself to be) losing her resolve, but an illustration of the way such oppressive social circumstances finally dissolve even a strong-willed woman’s self-possession and determination in the acid of the pervasive threat of mayhem and bloodshed.

Perhaps we can see Middle Sister’s narrative decisions — to stick with generic naming and to refrain from giving particular details about setting — as attempts to render her experience at this broader, more allegorical level as well, to avoid making her story too specifically about Northern Ireland’s anguish. (No Bones offers the specifics.) While of course few readers would fail to recognise the setting of Milkman as Belfast during the Troubles, the lack of particularised markers of both character and place lends the novel a more elemental quality, to an extent universalising Middle Sister’s story to one exposing the distorting pressures afflicting any distressed community. Similarly, the language practices exhibited by Middle Sister as narrator seem to impose a distance between her and the events related, but surely this could be both reflective of the real distance the actual narrator (an older Middle Sister) now has on the events herself, as well as her attempt to force some distance on readers all too willing to accept a sensationalised story of a young damsel in distress menaced by violent thugs.

Of course, the formal and stylistic qualities Burns has given her novel finally ask the reader to acknowledge that Milkman is first of all a literary work, not a disguised memoir or historical narrative, not a political thriller. It seems to me in fact that Milkman (as well as Burns’ previous novels) is an admirable model for writers who might attempt to treat an inescapably political subject — in this case one that transcends ordinary political differences — while refusing to sacrifice the potential aesthetic value of fiction. Few readers could finish Milkman without believing their appreciation of the fraught situation obtaining in Northern Ireland in the 1970s has been greatly enhanced, but at the same time the novel provides a memorable aesthetic experience: a formally intricate narrative that may seem rhetorically diffuse, yet whose discursive qualities both produce the mosaic-like formal structure and play the largest role in making Middle Sister a dynamic and compelling character.

One might wonder whether it is precisely Middle Sister’s dynamism and independence which, in the same way that they alienate many inhabitants of her own neighbourhood, also irritate some readers who want to see her as essentially a stand-in for the author, and Milkman itself as a book about the author’s experiences as a young woman in Belfast. Such a book ought to be direct in its emotional content and transparent in the language used to communicate it — oughtn’t it? But in the novels of Anna Burns emotional directness and rhetorical transparency would not be true to the way each of her characters understands their situation. To fully appreciate their predicament is to heed their perception and articulation of it, in all of their particularities, including the circumlocutions and digressions. In Milkman, Middle Sister responds to her situation not just by manifesting a degree of fearlessness — she persists in her habit of reading in the open, as if shutting out the world, even though she knows it makes others think her daft — but also by providing an account of her experiences on her own terms, in her own chosen voice. To reject that voice is literally to silence her.