Fires In The Night—book review

My review of Fires In The Night by Matthew Wolfe, about the northwest members of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) a radical environmental movement of the 90s. Up now at Splice Today !

https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/the-fire-inside

 

 

How To Think Like A Woman by Regan Penaluna

My review of Regan Penaluna's book How To Think Like A Woman now up at SPLICE TODAY!

 

A Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness: The Novels of Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba

My review of Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba's 'triptych' of novels set in the Quebec forests originally appeared in Denver Quarterly, Vol 58, No 4, 2024.  

A Voice Crying Out In The Quebec Wilderness

The Novels of Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba

Encabanée, 2018 in Quebec, 2021 in France, Folio/Gallimard

Sauvagines, 2019 in Quebec, 2022 in France, Stock

Bivouac, 2021 in Quebec, 2023 in France, Stock

by Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba

Gabriëlle Filteau-Chiba has exploded out of Quebec with a “triptych” of bestselling interconnected novels, translated from the French into six other languages, including English. Her second novel Sauvagines appeared in the UK this August 2023 under the name Feral. Her own story is as interesting as her fiction: fed up with city life in Montreal, she left to live in a cabin in the woods in the Kamouraska region of southeast Quebec. No electricity, no running water, for three years, emerging from the forest with three manuscripts, ranging from a fictionalized account of her own experience in her cabin, to a larger narrative about saving the Kamouraska region of Quebec from corporations intent on exploiting the timber and mining resources. Following the tradition of other North American writers like Mary Austin, Edward Abbey and most recently Richard Powers, Filteau-Chiba uses fiction—stories—to communicate her concerns to a larger audience about a region dear to her.

Encabanée, Filteau-Chiba’s first novel, is short—a novella or even a long short story. Readers don’t have to start with this book, the other two novels (especially Sauvagines, in translation as Feral) stand on their own. Encabinée helps though set the tone for the ‘triptych,’ as the narrator Anouk—like probably most of Filteau-Chiba’s readers—is a city person, throwing herself into a rural (very rural) setting. Literal translations of “encabanée” would give ‘locked up’ or ‘imprisoned,’ though Filteau-Chiba is having a little fun with the French and English words ‘cabine’ and ‘cabin’—Anouk is ‘encabined,’ which would make a great title for the English translation. This book invites readers into the Kamouraska woods, and language, and shows us around. Anouk has—like the author—left thirty-something city life in Montreal to live in a cabin without electricity or running water, and her story takes place in the middle of a Canadian winter. The novel reads more like a diary, which could have been not interesting, but Anouk (and Filteau-Chiba) has a sense of humor about the situation, especially in her ability to write lists (all translations mine):

List number 118

Qualities required for living in the woods:

—Self-mockery while you walk in snow shoes.

—Determination to chop wood until the end of time.

—Acceptance that there will never be too much wood inside.

—Optimism before the winter as long as Nature.

—Tolerance towards mediocre hygiene techniques.

—Patience filling the snow bucket to make it melt.

—Perseverance in shovelling the neverending snow.

—Economy in the use of candles and lamp oil even if your book is amazing and the night, infinite.

—Meditation in the the silent black about what possessed you to encabin yourself so far from everything.

—Observation of the fresh traces of your superiors in the food chain.

—Controlled release of urine in order to mark your territory around the cabin.

—Morality of concrete.

—And once again, that I still haven’t learned anything. (61-2)

Encabanée feels like a mix of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, though for Anouk, leaving the city is almost a matter of life and death—she sees her female friends in essence killing themselves in order to be the good women society expects, dependent on and living for their husbands and jobs. In her cabin, Anouk has no one to answer to but herself, and that’s a lot—getting water from the icy river nearby, chopping wood, shoveling paths in the snow to be able to do these things. Her car, buried in snow in 20° weather, could amazingly start and could take her back to civilization, but she chooses not too, using her free time to write and draw and generally think. Not that she’s not lonely, not that she’s without desires—her lists sometimes end up including a handsome man to share her sleeping bag:

List number 115

My three wishes for the genie in the lamp:

—Logs that burn until morning.

—A nightgown made from polar bear hide

—Robin Hood knocking at my door. (35)

And, one morning, as if summoned from her journal, à la Galatea, he appears. Here, Encabanée shifts to this new relationship, though more about Anouk’s cabin life would have been welcome—there are more cold months ahead and the book could have been a fictional funny Walden, or a sedentary Wild. Thoreau was fine being alone, or at least writing about being alone, while meanwhile going into town to hang out chez Emerson. And even Wild has moments of human contact. Filteau-Chiba too feels that the ‘wilderness experience’ goes better with other people around, which is always what Romantics like Wordsworth thought.

For all her independence, Anouk throws herself into relationships, and love, quickly, when the opportunities arise. She would find the old Earth First! rule—to never engage in radical environmental activitism with someone you haven't known for at least seven years—to be anathema to her personal philosophy, which seems to be that, if we’re going to defend the earth, we’re going to need to love and trust implicitly. Good thing the FBI doesn’t infiltrate environmental groups in Canada. Cough.

Sauvagines, the second of the ‘triptych,’ is the most engaging of the three. If Encabanée is the Thoreau-like ‘living in nature is awesome’ perspective on rural living, Sauvagines is a thriller with the perhaps more realistic concerns of a single woman living on her own in the woods. This book’s narrator, Raphaëlle, is not a city girl: she grew up in rural Quebec, farther to the east on the shore of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, though she too—like Anouk, who appears later in the book—has escaped—perhaps even is still escaping—from an extremely religious family, with whom she now has no contact. She has been working in the Kamouraska area as a game warden in the Canadian version of a national forest and, although she’s been there for a few years, people familiar with smaller rural towns will know that she’s still very much an outsider. Especially as a worker for the federal government—everyone in town knows who she is, but she has almost no friends besides Lionel, an older father-figure and retired game warden.

Like the national forests in America, Raphaëlle’s territory is large and understaffed, with corporate logging and mining rampant. There are recreational opportunities, and trails, like the one to the local landmark, Gros Pin, the oldest and largest white pine in the area but mostly it’s fishing and hunting. Raphaëlle’s job mainly to check tags from annoyed-to-angry truck-fulls of hunters, with only her government rig, uniform, and sidearm as her authority. After rescuing her dog from an illegal poaching trap, which she then destroys, she discovers that the poacher is already aware of her, has been stalking her and, after she destroys his traps, is angry. Sauvagines then becomes a mix of Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone and Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon Series. Raphaëlle’s detective work, and retaliation, are outside of the law. She uses her work resources and legal power to perform field and online research, but she knows the government won’t help her, or any women caught in this situation: her stalker, we soon learn, comes from a powerful family, with relatives in the police and local government.

The French title Sauvagines is untranslatable, though related to ‘savage’ or ‘wild’: the word “sauvagine,” as Raphaëlle explains to Anouk in the book, refers to wild birds, especially waterfowl, and/or smaller mammals (“mustelids” from the Mustelidae family, from otters, beavers to wolverines) hunted or trapped for their fur. It’s an older French word—Anouk doesn’t know it—but it’s tied to the trapping culture of North America, which is tied, too, to the colonization of North America: European trappers pushing west into the continent in advance of white settlers. Raphaëlle sees herself and other women as sauvagines, as part of the general class of creatures dominated by men. For her, it’s no surprise that the man poaching and indiscriminately killing off coyotes and lynx is the same one stalking her, nor that he has a history of violence against women in the area. She situates his behavior in the tradition of men who colonized North America, the ones who hunted and trapped species to extinction and near extinction, committed genocide against First Tribes people, and logged and mine dthe land down to dangerous levels. Her anger erupts later in the book in the following mental rant directed to a general ‘you,’ which soon narrows to some specific male you’s, like those in government:

Yes, I’m crossing the line of what our country thinks is right, and I’m disobeying the Criminal Code, but I’m much more scared of the poaching of the last great animals than of a life in a cage. Sometimes, history shows, disobedience and rebellion have permitted progress.

I’ve been behind bars ever since I started this job...registering animals whose heads are the targets of a post mortem shooting game, to realize that this practice seems like normalized slaughter...

They’ve always told me that the important thing is to never put a stick into the spokes of this regional economy. No, you’re wrong Mr. Governor. You have a romantic picture of the wild northern forest full of animals hanging in your office, but really, in this land, we’re witnesses to a destruction in all directions. The huge beautiful wild territory that dazzles and awes and captivates the imaginations of tourists or even Canadians when they talk about northern Canada or Kamouraska is going to be a thing of the past very soon....I can’t take part in this charade with a clear conscience anymore. I can’t any more, can’t, just like as a woman I can’t be silent about the violence in cities....

And here the ‘you’ shifts to her poacher/stalker, who piles poached coyotes on his family’s farm:

Rage has grown in me for years. I’ve swallowed it and swallowed it but it won’t go down this time. Whatever happens, I know about you, those hundreds of bodies piled on your family farm, the warnings of some women and the whispered confessions of others, your disdain faced with the Nature which as given you so much, that no, I can’t stand it anymore. (287-8)

First mentioned in Encabanée, and returned to in the Filteau-Chiba’s third novel Bivouac, are two incidents which happened before her triptych began—involving “écoguerriers”—ecowarriors, radical environmentalists involved in acts of sabotage in defense of the earth. The first is them dumping a dead beluga whale on the steps of the Quebec government in Montreal, to raise awareness about how resource extraction (mining) in and around the Kamouraska region is affecting the birthing grounds of belugas in the southern most tip of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where most of the rivers in the Kamouraska ‘Haut-Pays’ or High Country drain into.

The second incident backfires, or has unintended consequences: activists attempt to stop a train full of bitumen bound for Alberta, by placing (or falling? unclear) trees across the tracks. They post warning signs miles ahead in order to warn the train conductor to stop in time, but for some reason he doesn’t, and the train to derails, killing him. One of these activists is Rio, the same man who stumbles on Anouk’s cabin in Encabanée, on his way to a new identity in America. Rio resurfaces in Bivouac and becomes a third major character. Haunted by the train incident, he nevertheless remains more haunted by the continued decimation of the Kamouraska region and returns to help organize a protest camp, Camp Bivouac, to call for the government to declare the area a national park.

Like Abbey and Powers, Filteau-Chiba uses multiple perspectives in Bivouac. The scope of the novel goes beyond any one character’s perspective, and this range of points of view shows how and why people have different reasons for being “écoguerriers.” The novel depicts different levels or responses, different comfort levels in how to resist, from peaceful demonstrations to sabotage to in at least one case, a willingness to commit violence against another human. These levels force readers to consider what limits or lengths they themselves might go to in the defense of the Earth, though the one thing all Filteau-Chiba’s characters share is an understanding that being polite doesn’t work—writing letters and donating to The Sierra Club (or the Canadian equivalents) accomplishes nothing when the government is owned by corporations. At the very least, civil disobedience (à la Thoreau) is called for—thus the Bivouac camp.

Bivouac feels most indebted to previous novels about bands of ecowarriors, such as Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (plus its sequel Heyduke Lives!) and the more recent and also excellent Overstory by Richard Powers. Bivouac leans toward the more serious storytelling of Powers—there is none of the winking self-aware humor of Abbey, whose characters are more like caricatures. The Monkey Wrench Gang is satire, comedy. Overstory is a tragedy—I can’t remember a single funny line, not even of dialogue, in the whole book. In Bivouac, even Anouk’s humor from Encabanée is muted: no more funny lists. That said, Filteau-Chiba definitely wants readers to see the larger situation of the decimation of the land as something serious, sad and angering, but to remember our humanity and connection not just to the land but to each other, the pleasure we feel from connection and love. Anouk and Raphaëlle love each other intensely (and quickly). At the beginning of Bivouac they’ve spent a whole winter living together in a yurt—that’s a lot of intimacy. But they’re Romantics. The first half to two-thirds of Bivouac are more about working out of relationships among other larger communities in the area, like a commune, and the Bivouac Camp. With Rio’s return, instead of Anouk having to choose between her two lovers, polyamory ensues.

At times, Bivouac can feel a little bogged down with this working-out of relationships, be it long discussions between characters about their relationship status, or long sections of characters wondering to themselves whether someone likes them. Filteau-Chiba would argue that this is just realistic, that that’s what people do. But sometimes two or three chapters about relationships feel like they could be summarized in, say, one. There are larger themes being explored, bigger things at stake. Of course, Filteau Chiba’s whole point of Bivouac is to show how relationships are the defense of the Earth. Loving and trusting another person is the microcosm of loving and trusting the larger community, and the planet.

The emphasis on relationships in Bivouac emerges out of Filteau-Chiba’s playfulness—there’s a lot more dialogue, and the opportunity to see characters playing with the ‘franglais’ of Quebec and the border country, where everyone on the Quebec side knows some English and people in northern Maine know some French. There’s some unique mixed language going on that will be difficult for a translator. (And in fact even the French editions of Filteau-Chiba’s books have glossaries with definitions of Quebecois words.) Standard translations from France-french, like Marguerite Duras or Michel Houellebecq, seem to simply translate everything, turning a simple ‘bonjour’ into a ‘hello,’ when keeping the bonjour might help readers feel the novel’s world more, like how Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy slip whole sentences of another language into their novels—understandable by context and the authors’ belief that their readers are smart enough to figure it out.

Here’s one example from Bivouac, fairly easy to understand with a basic knowledge of French. In a chapter from Anouk’s perspective, when she’s expressing her doubts to Raphaëlle (whose pet name for her is Nounoush) about living on a commune:

—Mon amour, je sais pas si j’ai ce qui'il faut pour vivre en commune...

—Tu seras peut-être tentée de partager ton lit, blague-t-elle.

—Ça, crains pas, chus folle de toi.

—Moi-tou, Nounoush.

My straight translation:

—My love, I don’t know if I have what it takes to live on a commune...

—Maybe you’ll be tempted to share your bed, she jokes.

—Don’t be scared of that, I’m crazy for you.

—Me too, Nounoush.

The “chus” is Quebecois-slang for ‘je suis’. I don’t think there’s anyway to capture it in English, unfortunately, other than “I’m.” More interesting is the franglais phrase “Moi-tou,” the ‘tou’ being a frenchified form of the English word ‘too.’ I translate it here as ‘me too.’ Which is fine, but loses the feel of the local, and intimate, slang. I’d keep it as “moi-tou” or even ‘moi-too’—most readers will know ‘moi’ means ‘me,’ and if they don’t, they’ll understand the context, and it’s a playful reminder that we’re in a (mostly) francophone country.

The larger tension—which at least Raphaëlle (and Filteau-Chiba) are aware of—is that they and most of the Bivouac Camp protesters are outsiders. People in the commune, some of them, have lived in the area a long time, but they feel cut off from even the nearest town. When ‘locals’ do appear in any of Filteau-Chiba’s novels, especially the men, they tend to be bad—more than willing to kill off all the coyotes and lynx, to clearcut the forests and mine the hell out of what’s left. A more sympathetic look at the locals—their needs and fears, their economic dependency on timber and mining—might have created an even bigger tragedy. For example, having someone who actually works for the logging companies might at least have given readers a sense of what rural life is like there. Is it realistic to create a national park to replace resource extraction? Should—could—a logger really change his or her life and shift to a career in tourism? What drawbacks does tourism create to a community tied to it?

Filteau-Chiba, one senses, would still vote for the national park, as would most readers, but people living in rural areas aren’t raving MAGA fanatics, or the Canadian equivalent. They have lives, lifestyles, cultures, which they want to protect. They may not like corporations coming and destroying the land, but neither do they want a bunch of écoguerriers from the big cities coming in and telling them what to do. Unfortunately, people—men especially Filteau-Chiba argues—who feel they’re going to lose their jobs to a bunch of college-edumacated hippies—can get angry, and maybe dangerous. Thus, in Bivouac, tragedy ensues.

Abbey and Powers recognized that their novels would mostly be read by a bunch of college liberals from the coasts, or places like Montreal (which is, after all, technically on the Atlantic coast). As readers, we do want the écoguerriers to win, and we think anyone who wants to clearcut trees and frack is evil, even as we read our books and drive our cars and use our smartphones and eat our chocolate. But, do people (American, Canadians, anyone) not have the right to intervene when the land is being plundered? The obvious answer for anyone reading these novels is yes, the land needs protecting, from corporations and governments (Canadian, Quebecois, American) and corporations that control governments.

The success of Filteau-Chiba’s novels, along with the success of Overstory, and the continued sales of The Monkey Wrench Gang, show the power of fiction, of stories, to build love for, and connection to, the land, even for readers living in big cities. Abbey, and Mary Austin before him, wrote essays—good ones, with the same message or intention—but it was the stories that reached a popular audience. Abbey can be credited, at least in part, with the explosion of radical environmentalism in the 70s and 80s up to today.

Filteau-Chiba knows this legacy. She could have emerged from her years in the woods like a humorous modern-day Thoreau, with essays about living simply and protecting the planet. But she knows that relationships inspire people—and where there are relationships, there are stories. Networks of relationships are what support the environmental movement—people’s stories. We’ve seen recently how the media and government can create narratives (or, a Narrative) out of any facts, true or not. Stories are the best way to fight Narratives.

 

This Is Not A Book Review

My "This Is Not A Book Review" in which I review the book Afterword, by David Markson: a book by [name of author] from Inside The Castle Books, up now at Splice Today!

https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/this-is-not-a-book-review

 

In The Desert by Barbara Byar

My review of Barbara Byar's novel In The Desert from Cowboy Jamboree Press, up now at Splice Today:

https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/something-wicked

 

Baby Driver by Jan Kerouac

My review of Jan Kerouac's memoir, Baby Driver, now up at Splice Today . Recently re-issued on New York Review Books.

"I might have been more responsible, less happy."

 

 

Exit Opera by Kim Addonizio

My review of Kim Addonizio's new poetry book, Exit Opera, is now up at SPLICE Today.

Sometimes writing feels so stupid I think I should get out into the world & do something

like repairing fountain pens, milking snakes, something useful—...

 

 

Wilderness Tales, edited by Diane Fuss: a review

My review of Wilderness Tales: Forty Stories of the North American Wild, edited by Diane Fuss, now up at EcoTheo!

 

Review of the movie and book Nomadland

My review of the movie Nomadland (with the always amazing Frances McDormand) and the book by Jessica Bruder now up at Splice Today:

The Day of the Triffids by David Wyndham

This review-essay appeared in 2015 at Word Riot, which is now gone, alas.

I would be surprised if anyone reading this remembers The Day of the Triffids, or has even read it—it was out of print in American for many years. The copy I found in the late 70s was an old paperback already, in my parents' eclectic collection—probably my mother's, though maybe actually my father's, from back when he still read books and hadn't yet succumbed to the great god Television. The Day of the Triffids was the first 'adult' novel I ever read, which, I think, was what attracted me to it—certainly wasn't the Hardy Boys or Old Yeller, though, like a lot of science fiction, neither was it inaccessibly difficult for a ten or twelve-year-old—not one of my mom's eastern religion books, or The Brothers Karamazov. Maybe it's because you always remember your first, but in the deluge of sci-fi and fantasy books I read in the years after, I never quite forgot Day of the Triffids, and after reading a crop of recent dystopian novels, all now mostly classed at YA, like The Hunger Games, World War Z, Divergent, Feed, and others (there are a lot of dystopian YA novels nowadays), and having discussions about formative books with my friend Jen, I had to go back and see if 1) Day of the Triffids still held up, and 2) I could learn anything more about myself, and my younger self, from what I was reading back then.

The story begins with the main character and narrator, Bill, waking up in a deserted hospital, after being unconscious for a while, and learning that while he was out, most everyone in the world has gone blind, and that not only that, what everybody took for non-sentient genetically modified plants have pulled up their roots and begun to hunt. I know, I know, in these days of zombies and vampires, the idea of killer plants doesn't sound so killer, but if one is willing to suspend their disbelief about zombies, a killer plant dystopia is at least as plausible. I couldn't have told you then why Triffids imprinted itself on me—the immediate thrill was imagining what I would do if I were one of the lone survivors of the destruction of human civilization—which is still true with the current crop, but as anyone who has thought about science fiction (meaning, I guess, trying to justify it to myself) will tell you, those dystopian worlds are stand-ins (not quite metaphors) (maybe fables) for our own world. In fact, those worlds do not seem so different to us readers than our own world. I read Triffids maybe at age eleven or twelve, not entering a new world but no, feeling that the world had changed. With puberty, I felt like I was waking after being unconscious for a long time, into a mostly deserted world run by things I'd thought of as weird and harmless (adults, and humans in general) but who were in fact scary and dangerous. Also, the people like me, the left-over puberty survivors, were mostly blind and helpless and, if I wanted to survive, I very quickly needed to find others like me, who could see. Also, once I realized that I liked what was called 'science-fiction,' I had a place to go, that I belonged somewhere: in the science-fiction section of the bookstore. Once I started carrying science-fiction books around at school, I began to find the other survivors—kids, mostly boys (though girls, I sensed, weren't killer plants)(or mostly not—cue Newt from Aliens: “Mostly....”) who were reading similar books, and these texts gave us a 'secret language' that the triffids couldn't understand.

The Day of the Triffids was written by David Wyndham, real name John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (!), a British science fiction writer who's other works I've never heard of. He was apparently quite well-known in the 50s and 60s, and though he died in 1969, some of his posthumous writing has been published as recently as 2009. Still popular and read in England, his books went out of print here in the States, until recently, when Triffids and his other most popular novel, The Chrysalids, were re-issued, by The Modern Library, both under the label of a “20^th Century Rediscovery.”

What I didn't remember, and maybe just didn't consider back then, was how much the novel is less about the weird evil flesh-eating triffids, than about humans, and Wyndham's thoughts on how exactly humans in a post-disaster world would re-form and survive. Most dystopian books present one form, one way, that the author thinks humans will govern themselves, or, usually, be governed. Wyndham presents many, using the structure of the book, with Bill traveling around England to various groups of survivors, as a way to present different philosophies about the best way to survive: Some as anarachic/communal groups, some as smaller family-sized units, and some (the really bad guys) going back to a form of medieval feudalism, with sighted people ruling estates of blind serfs (who will be fed on ground up triffid gruel). What I like about the novel is that Wyndam's characters have some actual intelligent conversations about the pluses and minuses of each form of government, though, interestingly, the increasing number of triffids force Bill and his fellow survivors to opt for larger groups, with larger areas of protected land.

What the few sighted people do, or don't do, with the now blind rest of the population becomes the big question. Do they take the truly compassionate route, and try and help everyone? Seemingly impossible, and endangering everyone, especially, as if blindness and carnivore plants weren't bad enough, with some kind of sickness, which may or may not be typhoid, or the result of biological weapons, ravaging London and other larger cities. Or, cut their losses and regroup in smaller groups with other sighted people, knowing that the blind people left behind will suffer and die? Not easy decisions, and no decision any character makes in the novel is without some dialogue with another character about its feasibility and morality. Even the 'best' guys (there are no real good guys) that Bill and crew join up with are not without some disturbing new rules, and in any case, in any variation of post-disaster re-organization, the general lot of women seems to always end up as baby-makers, which is the one conversation Wyndham avoids, by having even the main female character, Josella, an independent and intelligent woman before the disaster, and a writer of a novel that seems to be the equivalent of Shades of Grey (ultimate male science-fiction nerd fantasy: to be trapped in a scary new world with a hot female porn writer), happy and willing, and even looking forward to, having babies.

Re-reading Triffids now, I'm just struck at how seminal it was: its influence shows in all kinds of books and movies now, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to Stephen King's The Stand, to José Saramago's Blindness. One of my favorite zombie movies, 28 Days Later (screenplay by Alex Garland, another brit, who wrote The Beach) begins with the same premise of (and I take as an homage to) Triffids: a man waking up in a hospital after an overnight disaster, to find himself one of the few survivors). In fact, I think the whole zombie genre premise (ie zombies spread over the world, small groups of humans survive) comes from Wyndham's novel: just substitute killer plants for zombies. Or apes, say, in Planet of the Apes. Apes and especially zombies seem to make for a better metaphor (for example, racism/slavery, capitalism, AIDS, the invasion of Iraq) though who knows, with the now almost common, though still scary, genetically modified foods, care of the Monsanto cabal, maybe the triffids' time is close at hand! Maybe not even as metaphor!

And what did I learn about my younger self? Well, obviously, the world was full of metaphorically helpless blind people, and metaphorically evil triffids, and I was on my own, surviving the disaster called 'growing up.' And some of my fellow survivors might not be the nicest people either. Nor did compassion for the blind seem to be enough. In fact, it might have been too much: That, to have compassion and try to relieve the suffering of all the metaphorically blind people in the world would make me triffid food. No, best to withdraw, with a few like-minded souls, if I could find them (and especially with a woman who writes porn) and live on an island, where we could survive, and (maybe) figure out how to rid the world of triffids, and repopulate it with our metaphorically non-blind children.

Nothing has changed. I still feel this way.

The Palace of Illusions by Kim Addonizio

This review originally appeared in 2015 at Word Riot, which is now gone, alas.
 

The Palace of Illusions

by Kim Addonizio

Soft Skull Press 2014

ISBN: 978-1-59376-542-2

Kim Addonizio's writing goes for the guts—punches of raw common american language, about raw common human relationships, that are also, at times, funny and sexy, with touches of all her street-level poet heroes, like Charles Bukowski, Frank O'Hara, Anne Waldman and (early Satan Says-era) Sharon Olds. I have up to this point mostly thought of Addonizio as a poet, though she has written some novels, and her first collection of short stories, in the box called pleasure, is as unapologetically in-your-face as, say, Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, and I love it. It gives her room to work even more in the lower-class blue collar divey world that other underground writers like Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr. make, if not beautiful, then interesting and sympathetic, and Addonizio, like them, may be showing her (unconscious or not) street Buddhism by showing how beauty can be found anywhere, that the lotus grows in mud.

But now I've shifted how I think of her, as not just a poet, but a writer in general, like Bukowski, because because of her new collection of stories, The Palace of Illusions, out through Soft Skull Press. Some of the stories, like “The Other Woman” and “Blown,” are similar to those in in the box called pleasure—short, fast, and powerful, from the POVs of trashy young women involved with trashy men (some not-so young) the results of which we readers know are doomed, and that they're bad choices. Actually, even the protagonists seem to know that they're making bad choices, and yet seem powerless to choose otherwise, which is how you might determine whether you'll like Addonizio or not: Is that how Real Life feels to you? Kinda out of control, at least temporarily pleasurable, and full of suffering?

Importantly though: even as bad choices are made, none of the young women protagonists refuses to accept responsibility for their actions, which they could in some cases very easily do, like in “Intuition,” when an older married man is breaking up with fifteen-year-old Faith, she briefly thinks about what would happen if she just went public with their affair, and how she could destroy him:

“I sit there, turned away from him on the swing, holding the knife I my lap. I cold turn, before he gets up, and stab him in the heart, and then he really would be dead. I could get away with it. I could say, He touched me between my legs. He forced me. He took me to the Tip Top Motel, and he said he would hurt me if I ever told. Everyone knows what men to to girls; people would believe is was self-defense. No one would know the truth.” (183-4)

But, she doesn't, which is why I like her—or, well, at least sympathize with her—and other Addonizio characters. It's not so much about ethics—Faith, obviously, doesn't like the man anymore, and has lost respect—but 'owning' your actions, realizing the inevitability of effect, from a cause that she, less than he, put in action. Which might horrify some readers, or make them go tsk tsk, but whatever Addonizio's characters are, they're not victims, or they don't think of themselves that way, and her stories are not about being politically correct.

“Intuition” is my favorite story in the collection. It's got the gutsy darkness of earlier Addonizio stories, but it's longer, and more in depth. If earlier stories (and, again, some in this collection) are more similar to her poems—capturing a short moment in time—this story has time to build, and has great passages like this:

“The thing is, you keep hoping. With each boy, you think maybe it will happen: he'll look at you a certain way, he'll get you, and your search will be over. I've been searching since I was thirteen, with one boy after another.” (163).

Hard to remember maybe (though funny too) that that's a fifteen-year-old-girl speaking, and yet Addonizio's talent (and this goes for her poetry too) is that she can write something in plain american speech that sounds easy to articulate/write/say, but isn't, and yet captures how anyone, fifteen to fifty, really feels, even when they're fucked-up messes: they still capture very human situations and feelings.

Other stories in The Palace of Illusions are more along this tone and strategy. Some would say they're more mature, but that would imply Addonizio's shorter pieces aren't as good. They're just different. Still, she is experimenting with a more formal, controlled, style. What these stories remind me of is City of Boys, a collection of short stories by Beth Nugent, which I thought was one of the best books of the 90s, though Nugent dropped away after that, and it's out of print, so I'm not sure many readers will get that comparison. But Nugent was coming from Hemingway's darker short works, and Marguerite Duras, and Joyce Carol Oats, as is Addonizio.

She's also experimenting with different ages, both younger—with the poor girl from “Beautiful Lady Of The Snow,” who you just want to hug and take far away from her mother and life—and the nameless woman in “In The Time of the Byzantine Empire,” the middle-aged academic that proves making bad choices is not just the domain of young people. And there's an older character, Ruth, in “Cancer Poems,”dying of cancer and taking a community college poetry class in order to maybe write a book she can leave behind for her granddaughter.

Addonizio is also, in a few stories, experimenting with fairy tales, and one vampire. These interest me less, though I acknowledge that other readers might find them preferable to the punch-in-the-guts stories. And even whe Addonizio writes about seven dwarves, say, her narrator still talks/sounds 'street smart'. The vampire is a teenager in college. Or, she's half-vampire, her dad is full vampire. The details are less important than the effect, of an insecure young woman with low self esteem, who can still, with (dark) comedic effect talk about stalking people to drink their blood.

Addonizio apparently being Addonizio, none of the characters in The Palace of Illusions (with the exception of Ruth, the cancer non-survivor) is what we'd call likeable. Relatable, yes: we've all done things in our lives that we regret or are not proud of (ie, we're fuck-ups just like everyone else)(or we feel that way)(or I do—if you don't maybe this collection isn't for you and you can just renew your subscription to The New Yorker). So, sympathy, yes. Pity, definitely. Interesting, for sure. And these types of characters can be harder to stay involved with beyond a short story. The one Addonizio novel I've read, My Dreams Out In The Street, I found difficult, not because of the style but because of the two main characters, and the awful choices they make in their lower-class lives. They're interesting, yes, but following them for two hundred pages and continuing to feel any kind of sympathy is a hard ask, though it apparently has a cult following.

Addonizio also written two fairly popular and well-received 'how-to' books on the craft of poetry, Ordinary Genius, and A Poet's Companion, co-authored with poet Dorianne Laux (another street-ish poet, though more interested in the erotic than the rough) both of which include short essay-chapters on writing as a process and way of life, as well as exercise-prompts that could be used on one's own, or in poetry workshops. What I would love is to read some critical essays from her, in maybe the style of Tony Hoagland, just to see how she thinks about other poets and poetry, though the truth is I'd just love to read anything by her.

Actually what I'd really love to do is jam with her sometime, since she also plays blues harp (harmonica) in a band and at open mics, and this seems perfectly fitting—she's not pop (too shocking and rough-edged for the prudish mainstream) and she's not jazz  (though she has an improvisatory fun feels at times, her subject matter is too dark) and neither is she heady classical (no 'too many notes' texts here—stark versus ornamental). No, her writing is from the bars, from the blues that come from real human working class relationships—the sadness and sexiness and fucked-up-ed-ness of things never quite working out, as all relationships never really ever quite work out, even when they do (and they don't).

After reading the last installment Best American Short Stories, I feared that I was losing interest in short fiction, period. But Addonizio restores my faith and interest. Good edgy fiction is out there, with publishers like Soft Skull Press, we just may have to search a little harder. That said, I don't know why The Palace of Illusions wasn't picked up by a bigger publisher. For all that I love Addonizio's underground feel, that's me being like those music listeners who like their underground bands to stay underground, when really it feels like she's about to explode.

—John Yohe

www.johnyohe.com

Scarstruck by Violet LeVoit

My review of SCARSTRUCK by Violet LeVoit, from King Shot Press, now up at ENTROPY!

American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes

My review of American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes now up at EMPTY MIRROR:

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

Scribner 2018 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-4767-5655-4

Three main threads weave through The Mars Room. One follows Romy Hall as she enters into prison, for life, for killing her stalker. The other two go back, one from around childhood to early teenager-hood, the third with Romy as young adult, leading up to he crime (The Mars Room is the name of the strip club in where she works). These three threads come in collage form, at least for the first part of the book, jumping around as a person's thoughts, especially as she's on the bus to life in prison, must do:

I had learned already not to cry. Two years earlier, when I was arrested, I cried uncontrollably. My life was over and I knew it was over. It was my first night in jail and I kept hoping the dreamlike state of my situation would break, that I would wake up from it. I kept on not waking up into anything different from a piss-smelling mattress and slamming doors, shouting lunatics and alarms. The girl in the cell with me, who was not a lunatic, shook me roughly to get my attention. I looked up. She turned around and lifted her jail shirt to show me her low back tattoo, her tramp stamp. It said

Shut the Fuck Up

It worked on me. I stopped crying.

It was a gentle moment with my cellmate in county. She wanted to help me. It's not everyone who can shut the fuck up, and although I tried I was not my cellmate, who I later considered a kind of saint. Not for the tattoo but the loyalty to the mandate.

Eventually the smaller pieces lengthen out into more vivid scenes, which Kushner writes equally as well. She is of course showing us that, despite what the prison guards seem indoctrinated to say (especially to themselves, so as to maybe be able to live with themselves) that these women are not in prison because choices they've made, but because being poor in America almost makes it inevitable.

Kushner weaves a fourth thread in with Gordon, an English Lit grad school dropout who teaches at the prison. He both gives us another, more outsider, point of view of prison life but also serves as a stand-in for the reader: he's not with the prison guards in thinking prison is a result of mere choices, but neither can he bring himself to entirely to trust the women he's teaching. Nor should he—they are lying and manipulating, but that's just survival, that's just how you get by when you don't have anything (and Romy realizes that being an exotic dancer was good training for prison life in how to get things from men). Gordon is torn—the women are obviously in pain in an obviously unfair system, and at least at first thinks he can help. But does he really want to help, or just make himself feel good by trying to help, and does it matter when he's just seen as a privileged middle-class nerdy white guy who can be manipulated by a little flirting.

There are a couple other threads, or chapters, from other characters' points of view, but though they don't take away anything from the story, neither do they really add anything, especially since they're not developed, and appear after readers have already latched on to Romy and Gordon. Really, it's Romy's story. Kushner makes her life so vivid that I just wanted more. Even Gordon remains mostly, though maybe necessarily, flat—we learn almost nothing of his life before the prison.

Kushner was recently featured in The New Yorker, so maybe now officially is a literary darling, but I suspect New Yorker readers might not be interested in reading just about Romy's lower-class life, pre-prison. I would—Kushner was influenced by two of my favorite writers, Charles Bukowski and Denis Johnson, both of whom get mentions in The Mars Room, and both of whom wrote almost exclusively about the lower-class/under-class life, though neither were featured in The New Yorker. But I fear that, as with the book (by Piper Kirman) and tv show Orange Is The New Black, but also with, say, Stephen King's The Shawshank Redemption, that there's a 'prison porn' fascination that middle-class readers and viewers (including me) have, which is like driving by a car crash: we want to watch and see how bad it is, but then drive on and forget it. That's not Kushner's (nor King's, nor Kirman's) intention, and in fact Kushner uses Gordon as the way to comment on how our prison system is a symptom of a larger problem, as when he's thinking about another inmate, Button Sanchez:

The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.

The implication being that the prison system is part of a larger war, which never ends. In this case, a war on poor people, especially poor people of color (though Romy is white). What I would hope, and I'm sure Kushner would hope, is that reading a book like The Mars Room builds both empathy and sympathy in readers and would lead to involvement in prison reform (Kushner volunteers at a womens prison). That aside, The Mars Room is just a good book. It's more like a book of horror, except the monsters are human, or the system is the monster, created by humans. You won't feel good after reading it, but this is life in all its gritty awfulness.

If interested in prison reform, or in helping in some way, here's a list you might try:

https://centerforprisonreform.org/prison-reform-organizations/

The Courage of Hopelessness by Slavoj Zizek

My review of Slavoj Zizek's The Courage of Hopelessness: A Year of Acting Dangerously, now up at ENTROPY:

Mortal Trash by Kim Addonizio

My review of Kim Addonizio's new collection of poetry, Mortal Trash, up now at Empty Mirror: