Bickering as Courting: The Native Star

This was another insomnia read, picked up in the dark hours when no one but me is awake. Pretty much with an insomnia read I’m just looking for readability, which is one of those terms that is probably not that helpful. Maybe I should go onto Karen’s Reader’s Advisory group and try to define this readable beast.

Tone: light to medium
Pace: fast
Setting: not contemporary, possibly with magic, aliens, gadgets or other neat ideas that are fun to watch play out
Romance: light
Narrator: inobtrusive

Admittedly, these are just my criteria, but this is my insomnia and I’m sticking to it.

The Native Star by M.K. Hobson, on the dust jacket, is likened to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which I think works insofar as they are both mild alt-histories with magic as the alternate part of history, but the tone and pacing are very, very different. I would not want to read anything with footnotes, as much fun as they are in Strange & Norrell, in the odd hours. And as much as I love Strange & Norrell , the pace is glaaaacial. (And not to be be bitch, I think Strange & Norrell is a better book, by whatever odd metric I have for judging writing and content, fwiw. Just not better in the middle of the night.)

But! The other thing I like about likening this to Strange & Norrell is that neither one is steampunk, a label I see applied to this one. Forsooth, arguing about genre is a losing business, but just because something is an alternate history set in the late 1800s, that isn’t enough to make it steampunk. Magic ain’t gadgets, and a certain kind of fetishized retro-technology porn is an inextricable part of the (sub)-genre. But! I’m willing to concede that this is in the odd dash-punk edge of alt-history. I noticed some similarities between the sanguimages from this book and the warlocks in Bitter Seeds – indeed, both are termed warlocks, a nice double entendre on their need for blood to perform magic, and their usefulness in wartime. Tregillis’s book also has magic and something like steampunk – though maybe it’s more gaspunk? Sorry, Ian, wherever you are. I don’t know how to class your book, or this.

It’s like there is a cluster of dash-punk genres – alternate histories that keep coding and recoding history with various magics and the magics of technologies, pushing the true history to reveal itself. Mike has noted that most alt-histories have alt-histories written within them, and Native Star is no different: here, it is a series of pulp novels that comment on the magic-working characters, which is not dissimilar to the pulp novels in Raising Stony Mayhall. I have said this a thousand times before, but I do not care about originality, so if it seems like my comparisons to other books are intended to cut this one down, that is not my intent. This is a genre exercise, whatever that genre may be, and the parameters of the world and characters are individual enough to put down any talk of being a poor copy. I mean, points for a giant oil-soaked killer raccoon alone, if novelty is your bag.

So far, this is the worst book report ever, me blathering about things only interesting to me. So, to the plot summary:

The Native Star starts with a small town witch, Emily, with money problems putting the whammy on the town babbitt, in an move that backfires into zombies and some irate townspeople. She ends up with a magical stone lodged in her hand – don’t ask – and then the story is off and tumbling in a post-Civil War Old West. Her compatriot through these tumbles is a man called Dreadnought Stanton, which is possibly the stupidest name ever, and I never did figure why Emily was the only character with a non-stupid name. The beginning rankled a bit, what with the silly names and the poor characterizations – yes, Emily is smart but uneducated; yes, Dreadnought (ugh) is a stuffed shirt patrician type, but with seeeekrits. But – and this so rarely seems to happen for me – the characterizations completely tighten up as the book progresses, the stock characters thawing into something resembling humans. The action is well-written, and the banter ranging from not-distracting to super fun. I was expecting certain inevitable twists that ended up being different enough from my expectations to be satisfying. I’ll just say: fuck yeah, hubris!

I even came to peace with the names, which end up being often Dickensian and sly. There’s a lot of really funny hat-tips in this book, like the bounty hunter with an Italian accent who seems to have walked off the set of a Spaghetti Western. I found this delightful, especially because it was underplayed. And – this is going to be huge tangent – but can someone please write on of these dash-punk action thrillers in the Reconstruction South? There seems to be a lot of fictions that center on the myth of the Old West in narrating our American discomfort with Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, and – you know – all that blood let to forge the melting pot in the first place. And how the culture wars still rage along lines set down at the time.

The bestest of these fictions, to me, is the HBO series Deadwood, but there’s plenty more stories in that well, from Eastwood’s Unforgiven to the sublime moody weirdness of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. This book opens with magical carpetbaggers slitting the throats of conciliatory but angry Southern merchants, and, hot damn, I really wish there had been more of that, as much fun as the Old West stuff was. But the dash-punk genre seems to encode these anxieties into magic or gasmasks or whatever, so I guess I can’t expect them to take on the Reconstruction South, when pretty much no one wants to touch that live wire, genre or not. Hobson does take on Grant’s presidency and the war obliquely, in a way I haven’t completely teased out yet, so that is something. (And I’m shit for history, really, so it would be cool if someones like Eric or Matt read this and gave me a book report. I’ll totally mail this to you. Kthxbai.)

So. There are things I could bitch about (not excited about the Native characters) and things I could praise (excited by the proto-feminist characters), but what it comes down to is that this was the right book at the right time. And not just to sound like I’m faint-praising this book for being a pretty midnight tumble, I spent the day thinking about the characters and the alt-history, unknotting some later plot developments and choices. There’s a lot of smart and funny here in all of the relentless action. Hot damn, that’s something, insomnia or not.

Wifey: Not Jumping but Hanging

Not jumping but hanging. 

First off, I’d like to note that Wifey was chosen as a group read for a romance-reading group. This is seriously funny-sad, in retrospect, because I think this novel is the anti-romance. Which is not to say it doesn’t have some commonalities with the romance novel: female protagonist, concerned primarily with sex and relationships, trappings of consumerism and status. This book also shares a commonality of usage with romance in that many, many people about my age stole this from their mothers at an impressionable age so’iz they could read the sex bits over and over. Having read this as an adult, I find this somewhat hysterical, because it is possibly the least romantic book to be classed as such. If a romance novel is primarily an act of wish-fulfillment, where love conquers all and sex is cauterized through marriage, then this succeeds in only one of these things. And I can tell you it’s not the love bit.

I have a pretty severe allergy to this time period in American fiction, and I realize a bit of this is learned and a bit of it is just general cultural anxiety. Writing from the sexual revolution can’t work for me, generationally, because things that are couched as stunning revelations – women feel desire – read like cliché. Of course we do! Durr. Then there’s a boomer friend of mine likes to lean in and make jokes about that time period, in this upsetting way, because he’s the father of a friend of mine, and shouldn’t be talking about sex to me: the sexual revolution was all about getting into the pants of those not inclined. Hey baby, why do you have to be so square? I take his point: sometimes people equate free love with the sexual revolution, when I think that’s super reductive, but that equation is one that has a long history, and I think this book cuts a slash though that equals sign. The parts of the sexual revolution that I love have to do with the interrogation of gender roles and social expectations, and I think this book hinges on the equation of sex with liberation, and shows how hollow that idea can be when there isn’t a corresponding change in assumptions. There’s all kinds of social panic in this book: gay panic – apparently having a woman touch a man’s nipples makes him gay; racial panic – there are several enlightening conversations about what constitutes a “good” minority, red-lining, white flight, etc; gender panic – having sex with a woman on top makes her a “women’s libber” (god, I haven’t heard that term in a dog’s age). Sandy’s miserable in her roles a housewife and mother, and sleeping around may put those roles into crisis, but it doesn’t make those roles go away.

I recently read The Crying of Lot 49which was written roughly ten years before this, at the other end of the country and at the very beginning of the sexual revolution that is about to crash into the Jewish New Jersey suburbs in Wifey. I think that Oedipa from Lot 49 and Sandy from Wifey have strains of the same DNA in their blood. I’m feeling a little stupid comparing Pynchon to Blume here, but seriously. Oedipa is a useless housewife, as is Sandy; despite their transgressions, both are incredibly socially conservative; they both go on their little journeys of sex and discovery, and both novels fall completely apart, in the end, although one is much more personal a failure than the other. There’s other commonalities too – I think that the Nazi shrink in Lot 49 has something in common in creepiness with the gynecologist brother-in-law in Wifey, both of them trying to enact their institutional fuckery on the principles of these books. (I’m not using the term Nazi metaphorically here, although Pynchon might be. Dr. Hilarious was a bona fide Nazi doctor.) The difference may be that Pynchon treats his Oedipa with disdain & misunderstanding, in a gendered, satire kind of way – I’m pretty sure the only thing that makes Oedipa a woman is that her heels clack – Blume treats her protagonist with the pointed cruelty of understanding. Sandy does not just have clacking heels, she has an itchy vagina which she scratches to bleeding. Sorry, this is gross, but it’s the vagina-that-shall-not-be-named, the spooky specter of female libido.

There’s a moment in Lot 49 when Oedipa confronts what to any good social conservative is the inevitable horror of societal sexual permissiveness when she watches a mother and son tongue-kiss their farewells in a bus station – they’ve been using the evil, subterranean postal system to telegraph their transgressive love – and Oedipa falls into a dream-swoon, unsure if this real or imaginary. If it is acceptable to cross one line, then why not another? But Oedipa is mostly a satirical creature and Pynchon’s poking fun at her perceptions – I think it’s no accident that she ends up floating around Berkley or wherever it is running into gays and hobos and Vietnam veterans after she has her extramarital affair, because it’s almost like Pynchon is rubbing her nose in how she takes one part of the social movements going on by giving herself a pass to have an affair, and discarding the rest. The sexual revolution had as much to do with Stonewall or custodial rights or whatever as it has to do with giving already privileged people the permission to do what they want, which they would do anyway. When she finally returns to her husband, he’s lost in drug-perceptions, and the pinwheeling satire of 49 draws to its unfinished conclusion.

But Oedipa is a satirical creature and Sandy is not; Sandy has an inner life much more fully realized than Oedipa. Pynchon comes to judgment on Oedipa, and Blume does not. While there are elements of social satire in Wifey, it’s not satire, a frustrating muddle of realism and satire, of burlesque and social commentary. It’s aggressively straightforward, almost to a strange degree. I’ve read me lots of genres, and there’s usually a moment, even in the most prosaic of fictions, when the writer tries some writerly zig-zag, just to make sure you’re paying attention. I don’t feel like that ever happened here, and it makes me think about the female diarist in Possessionwho never writes what she means, and that not writing it is an act of subversion. I’m groping, again, as I have been in all of this review, because I feel like a definitive reading of this book is severely impossible. But as I’ve found in reading this women’s fiction in the group, I take Sandy a lot more personally than I do Oedipa, which is sometimes a mistake. If I’d written this review the minute I finished reading, it would have been one-star outrage – I would have read myself, as a wife & mother, into Sandy, and I would have taken personally the outrages committed and perpetrated by Sandy. I never had that reaction to Oedipa, because she’s not really a woman, and I’m less sensitive to what I perceive as sexist twaddle coming from men, rightly or wrongly.

Blume writes a portrait, a character, and refuses to tell you how to read it, which is absolutely the strangest thing ever. I held off reading the intro until after I read the book, and that fucked me up in all kinds of ways. Blume wrote this after she left her husband in the 70s, and Sandy makes all the choices that Blume did not: to stay by her husband, to hide in her Jewish, suburban enclave, and fuck, I don’t know what. I hate reading books through autobiography. (I have almost zero interest in the lives of writers, maybe because I’ve been tainted by the New Criticism of my mother, who is my internalized reader, my readerly super-ego.) The subversion in the writing is the lack of gloss, in the lack of artistry. Here it is, she says, think what you will. Blume might have written Sandy as an elegy to the choices she never made, because there was a moment there, somewhere, where she could have become Sandy, and she understands and empathizes. Maybe not. There are good arguments against the polemic novel, one that tells you what to think and why, but this is anti-polemic, letting you twist wondering why choices were made and conclusions come to.

Here come the spoilers.

When Sandy and her husband come to their agreement, and choose to remain in this horrid, soul-killing marriage, I died. In a year, Sandy will kill herself too, inevitably, awfully. My husband and I screamed out this conclusion: why does it have to end like this? A shared bed is a horrible capitulation – this is not a happy choice. This may be me bringing too much literary reading to my reading, but I was horrified by Sandy’s offer to shave her puss so that her husband could endure it. I think of all the literary hair: Ruskin freaking at his wife’s pubes, Humbert Humbert and his smooth girl, the hard, alabaster Edward, J. Alfred Prufrock noting the hair on the arms of the women coming and going, and on and on. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, because I do not have a woman to hem them. Maybe I’ve just articulated one of those insane personal pet theories, but hair and its metaphorical stand-in for real sexuality, for libido, for the deeply anti-social nature of love seems to be a running thread not just in fiction but in life. Sandy will hem her husband’s trousers, and hem her cunt, and I hate that it comes to that. I hate that I just said “cunt”, like her husband did to Sandy when he found out about the affair. I hate all things that seem like choices but are not, or are choices but the wrong ones.

Another component of the romance novel is one of the exceptionalism of its principles: a love that knows no bounds, love that turns transgression into acceptance, the kind of love that turns someone as soulless & inconsequential as Bella Swan into the heroine of a grand plot. It is the inner life turned out, made manifest in the men who can see the exceptional nature of the protagonist. Sandy is not exceptional: not smart, not talented, not healthy or spunky or robust. But she is character with the only reality, and her rich fantasy life is almost a commentary on the dangers of mistaking wish-fulfillment narratives of love & romance with hard realities. If this were a romance, her affair with Shep would have concluded with their happy marriage and some more babies. But Shep is just some schmuck, like her husband, and wishing for happiness, hoping that love will magic away her obstacles for happiness continues to put the agents to her happiness in other people. As crushed as I was by her conclusion, for her to stay by her horrible shit of a husband after he smacks her and calls her a cunt, I can’t imagine her making the choice to run away and find a less inconsequential life. This story interrogates the idea that romantic love can change your life, and lays it bare. Sandy should, by all rights, chuck this dreary shit and strike out on her own, but she’s been bound by a narrative of domestic harmony and consumerist comfort that makes such a choice impossible. In short, she’s swallowed the barb that’s in a lot of women’s fiction: that you cannot do this on your own. Love will set you free, but if there is no love to be had, then you remain in your cage, and she does. I hate her choice. I think it will kill her in the end, but I appreciate Blume’s lack of judgment & her compassionate portrait of Sandy. Sandy is the road most traveled. May we all look on her and despair.

An Elegy for New York: Zone One

Maybe it was just a matter of the timing of my read because the tenth anniversary was last week, but I feel like this book was a 9/11 novel. I don’t mean to be reductive – there’s certainly other stuff here – but there’s this thinly morose elegy for New York going on, cut with something less combative than sarcasm and more emotional than irony. I spent the fortnight leading up to 9/11/11 – a stutter of a date – narrowly avoiding public commentary, while committing a series of glancing asides with friends. Where were you? 9/11 in public has been rendered cinematic, that famous long-shot of the towers burning is maybe too restrained for Michael Bay, but it certainly lacks the ashy situated experience of the day, all phone calls and slowly dawning horror. One thing that kept popping up in my conversations of rememory was the almost whispered question – do you remember the people jumping, falling from the towers? Do you remember the reports of the smack of their bodies hitting the ground? Do you remember the footage? It’s gotta be out there somewhere, not that I want to see it again, but it’s been collectively wiped from our retinas, an eye rub that seeks to dislodge the sleep-ash of the nightmare. But it’s been ten years. We’ve stuttered into our new normal, the uneasy and easy everyday of a world walking on. 

 Zone One by Colson Whitehead follows with an intimate third person a character called Mark Spitz. He’s not the Olympian Mark Spitz, his name instead a post-armageddon macabre joke about his relentless averageness. Whitehead tosses off a lot of incisive, tending towards over-wrought descriptions of other characters and places, but his lead is so blank, so lacking in affect that you feel the chill of loss despite the semicoloned literary style. The action of the book takes place over three tight days, but the true incidents are lappingly recounting in flashback, the scum of the blood-tide peeled back layer by dried layer. Much of the supporting cast could dissolve into quirk-fests if it weren’t for constant reminders of the sources of these quirks, the almost laughingly named disorder PASD – Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. PASD when spoken aloud sounds like “past”, a sometimes funny, always awful double entendre. 

Mark Spitz – and this name is never familiarized to Mark, nor do we ever learn his given name – begins the book cleaning out “stragglers” from the titular Zone One, which is a section of Manhattan barricaded from the rest of the island by the reforming government of the US and cleared of the more active skels. (This set-up is not dissimilar to the set-up for 28 Weeks Later, though the colonial and family psychodrama aspects are much more understated.) The zombies are Romerian (Romeroian? Both of these are ugly adjectives; I apologize) – shambling, biting, unintelligent and relentless – but for a small percentage of stragglers – the undead frozen in tableau, unmoving, unblinking. Mark Spitz and his sweeper team work through the grids of this zone building by building, opening the closets, shooting the active skels and casually trying to divine the mysteries of the stragglers. Why here, bent over a copy machine? Why in a field flying a downed kite? Are these the actions that defined their lives, or just a burp of a recording set to pause at a random frame?

The social rules of survivors recounting the trauma of Last Night are meticulously cataloged by Mark Spitz. There’s the Silhouette, for those to whom no connection was felt; the Anecdote, suitable for large groups and the more long-term of the short-term traveling companions; then there is the Obituary, told only to the intimate, though not without rehearsal. This declension of the narratives of trauma reminded of my fortnight of 9/11 recountings this year. I was getting ready for work when I got a call from my sister in Midtown after the first plane but before the second, and then a gush of extraneous details; a friend tells of the ash beginning to fall on Brooklyn; another relating only the tersest of details. I don’t know if I’m allowed to quote from the bound galley I have, so please know that this may not be in the final draft, but, “At their core, Last Night stories were all the same: They came, we died, I started running.” The towers were hit, and then they fell, and where we were at the time is both intimate and immaterial. 

Then there is the New Yorkiness of this book, a resident recounting his mixed irritation and affection for the cityest of American cities, carefully prodding nostalgia that at any moment might stir and bite. And when it does, put it down with a bullet. There’s a lot of that insular provincialism found in any person writing about their hometown – a running gag where Mark Spitz refers to Connecticut, where he spent a bad part of the interregnum, always with a damning adjective: damned Connecticut, hated Connecticut, abhorrent Connecticut; or a one-line dismissal of the Midwest which had me both laughing and bridling. Critically elegiac, the love/hate of the before that did not prepare for the after. Sometimes this doesn’t work, and I found myself boring through a description of the family eatery, its essayish tone slipping to droning, too many meanings, too much memory. But I see your point. 

There’s the stink of the inevitable all over this story, and if you’re paying attention at all, you will know how this three days in Zone One is going to end. This is not a spoiler, but a statistic: 100% of people have died, except for the living, who will likely succumb to statistics just like the rest of history eventually. Despite the zombies, this is not a genre exercise, not really. There are no hat-tips to conventions of the zombie narrative, no attempt to science up the zombies or ruminate on causes. Ten years later, it’s just a done deal, something to recount while picking through the mess, the carrion body of historical fact. Even then, zombies carry with them certain inexorable truths in their rotten bones into this literary landscape. Reflection is a sad, useless business, self-serving in the abstract and distracting in the specific. But reflection is also compulsive and necessary in our human states: silhouette, anecdote or obituary. What does it matter where I was? It simply matters that I was. We pick up and shamble on.

(An ARC of this book was provided to me free of charge by the publisher, but no conditions were put on my review. Fyi.)

Blueprints of the Afterlife. No, Seriously.

It’s possible I’ll append the original review to this here new shiny one I’m writing, but that may not happen. The future’s not written, right? It’s something I can affect? Well, we’ll see either way.

I seriously don’t mean to disappear up my own reviewing asshole, but the first attempt I made to review I was in this just painfully emotional place, and it embarrasses me, because that’s not really what this book is about. Blueprints of the Afterlife is – and I don’t mean this statement to be reductive – just a mordantly funny genre exercise that’s got its cool philosophical fingerprints around the throat of popular culture, futurism, and the American tendency towards apocalypse. The plot is…nothing that can be encapsulated with ease, more a series of very interrelated vignettes that stack themselves up into a, what?, Venn diagram? Something squishier? Our societal and metafictional guts? Then it knocks them all down and starts over again.

It’s coughcough years into the future – more than 50 but less than 150 – a futuristic period that seems to be a fallow area for science fiction writers at the moment. Even my main man William Gibson who used to write in this period has decamped to closer futures (i.e. the Bigend trilogy). On the other side, there’s a ton of dudes (mostly dudes) writing in the far-future post-human expanses of space and ti-ee-eye-eee-ime. Some of this is the post-post-apocalyptic bent of this novel – this is not a survivalist’s manifesto, one of those musings about the order of society in crisis and whatnot, not the Individual’s Search for Meaning in an Age of Fucked Up Shit – but about our tendency to imagine Fucked Up Shit as a future in the first place.

But then also a ton of other stuff. The science fictional ideas/commentary/whatever of this book are tossed off with a frequency and casualness that belie their fucking awesomeness, and there are at least a half dozen ideas here that could warrant their own freaking novel. I don’t mean to imply that Boudinot is giving anything short shrift here though – these ideas are all of a piece, and they fit together like one of those boxes of shapes you get from the Science Museum, and there’s 20 little flashcards of the way those shapes might make a larger pattern, and you flip over the card and go! Put it together! Now take it apart! Go! Make a different shape! Go go go!

This review is turning into the same godamn mess my first one was, only different. Which is perfect in a way. If you split a hologram in half, you get two perfect holograms, like an earthworm, but more technological. I can’t even pretend to understand how that works – both the hologram and the earthworm. The central metaphor here is blueprints, those imaginings of the future written on a scaled, engineered map which may or may not give rise to the fact of buildings, in whose habitable spaces we may, or may not, live out our lives. It’s just..it’s just the godamn shit to read when you’re a cracked and leaking emotional disaster – as I was when I read this, not to make it about you– this elegant, beautifully written puzzle that contemplated the ends beyond the ends, or the middles beyond the middles, or all permutations of continuation and cease. Which, fuck yeah.

And in the spirit of fuck yeah, I’m going to post the original review, but I’m not proud of it, and it (as I said before) kinda embarrasses me. Not because my emotional vulnerability is an embarrassment, but because I don’t think it does this book justice. The earlier review was dealing with the hard edge of grief, the emotions I feel as I can see the end coming. That’s not what this book is about, and I don’t want to mischaracterize. This is 50 to 150 years past that fucked up shit, which is just one of the reasons I loved it so. The end is still coming, but I’m still in the middle of the middle, still.

—–

Original review:

I don’t even mean to be like one of those cryptic facebook updates that people drop when they are looking for attention, but emotionally I am in no place to review this. Which might be the perfect place to be emotionally to review this? My beloved grandmother is dying. I read this fast like fever in the car to and from emotional upheavals that I haven’t even begun to sort into something resembling sense.

So yeah, this is one of those reviews. Be warned.

I picked this up because of Josh’s tumescent review. And because – I can be honest about my shallowness – this is just a fantastic cover. After I finished my read, I popped back onto Goodreads to reread Josh’s review with knowing eyes. I was bolted to the floor when I saw he references Lars von Trier’s Melancholia in the first few sentences.

Before I left for my visit with Grandma who is dying, on a slow Saturday, my husband pulled me down onto the couch and made me watch that film. Not all. In sections as I ran the dishwasher or packed that forgotten thing or talking on the phone to a distraught family member, imagining the family ugliness that is inevitable once she’s gone. We’re all considering the end, mapping out alternate futures of the end and after her end. I’ve had my problems with von Trier in the past that aren’t worth getting into, but Melancholia was a series of images that burned me quietly, this end of the world that is both metaphor and fact. Science fiction stories can be a lot of different things, but the ones that get me scrying my own overturned guts are the ones about our personal universes as alien planets, the hard gravities of our emotions and what we tell ourselves are our emotions. The way Melancholia ran this apocalypse through a series of family connections, bright loosely connected images, the hovering close-ups and near-static tableaus – ah ah ah ah.

I spent the weekend trying to be present, trying to feel Grandma’s lips when I kiss her, or her hands in mine, watching my step-mom write a list on a napkin. Presence is a difficult thing, and I’m no Taoist; my mind does not let things run as they are. My mind chews on the future. I prognosticate, therefore I am. There’s a certain philosophical aridity that appeals to my presence-avoiding mind in these pages, though I admit I have close to zero interest or background in straight philosophy. Arid is maybe the wrong word. As is philosophy.

Folklore of the future?

I’m not sure that this plot can be spoiled, dealing as it does with a roving glacier of various time periods, persons, non-persons, and battling visions of the future. Sad as I am, superimposed as I am between present and future, this story, this collection of elegant, funny, wigged out, careful sentences washed me over and washed over me. I could read this forever. This could go on and on, but it ends. If I were less emotional and messy, I could catalog the influences and hat-tips, from the obvious PKD and Gibson, to the more muted Star Wars and UKL. When I talked about this with my husband, he asked what it would be like to be someone other than George Orr in The Lathe Of Heaven, someone changed subtly or largely in someone else’s sleep. It will be hours before I know she’s gone — this is the way of things; the phone-tree is long and branching — and in those hours will she continue as if that end hadn’t happened? Will she be gone in those hours? There’s questions like that everywhere here.

This book probably deserves a less sloppy reader, one that isn’t leaking at the seams. My dad did all the sodoku puzzles from the last two weeks of the paper; I read this. I was fully absorbed in the intellectual puzzle of end-times and the after-end, a game of futures. I can’t unbind my emotions from the end of it all, the end of her all. But the blueprints lay down blue and bloodless. They make me think. They make me wonder — in that old school awestruck sense. And I know that absolutely none of this makes sense, which is why it is such a comfort.

Scraping at the Skin: A Review of Palimpsest

There are whole cities of me who could have hated Palimpsestby Catherynne Valente, or been indifferent, or been casually affectionate, and then left the next morning – or even just as it ended – and then called four days later and been polite but firm that it was over. Books can be – they are – often like lovers. We hold them in our hands – or if the lights are off and we cannot see – they whisper in our ears, and it raises gooseflesh all over our bodies. Sometimes our teeth clank, or they are too rough, or not rough enough. Sometimes they fill us up. Sometimes the same lover is all of those things: teeth-clanking, giggling, shuttering, and perfect – but you met them on the wrong day, in the wrong mood, and its fumbling and awful. I met this book on the right day, the right days, and I loved it. 

I don’t listen to audio books that often. My mind makes sounds when I read, and when other people are making the sounds, my mind is left to wander like a horse that has pulled its picket. But I found myself on a ride north with no other adult to talk to, with this book sounding out in my ears, my restless mind penned into watching the road and the landscape. This is a novel of cities – of a city, Palimpsest – a sexually transmitted city. A contagious city, a city that enters into the body like a drug, and leaves its absence as surely as any withdrawal. 

Four people – Sei, Ludovico, November and Oleg, each from their own countries – enter into Palimpsest through their own lovers and madnesses – and are bound by a frog goddess through lines of experience and string. There’s something Narnian about it, but only as a departure point – the wardrobe full of mother’s furs wearing its subtext as text. The language is aggressively adjectival and allusive, the plot not so much action as experience and the uncovering of memory. Even the sections that take place in the cities I can point to on a map – Rome, New York, Kyoto – had the too-vivid feeling of a fairy tale, or a dream. The characters are strange, bejeweled creatures who cannot live in this world. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t dream in black and white. That I do, or should, is one of the strangest things people tell me with credulity, so I understand these bee-loud almost-people. 

There’s a place in me that grows weary of the adjective, that prefers the unornamented. That place was out the window – the nodding scrub and twisted near-spring branches of the landscape was the stage this city grew onto. It was perfect. Palimpsest can only be returned to for the characters by sex with strangers – strangers who have the maps of neighborhoods tattooed on their skin by their own entrances and addictions. It’s somewhere between erotic and disgusting the way it works, all this flesh and skin, and the leap to ecstasy and alarm that finds them once again in Palimpsest. 

I’ve been with the same person for sixteen years, we finally counted out one of the evenings this week, and I still dream of sex with others, usually the dream-faceless, but occasionally, with upset, someone I know. Invariably, as I feel and move, I remember within the dream who I am, whom I have made my bed and life and children with, and I panic in the dream. The dreams don’t spin to nightmare often, but it is disquieting to be someone else, to be somewhere else, in a city of dreams, and then wake up – but not often truly wake – and remember who I am. When I have nightmares where I fall and fall I often wake with the sensation that I have hit the bed. Or I run from monsters until I wake up with a charley horse and clutch my leg and writhe. That’s this book. 

I had to switch to paper after the rides north and back were completed – my house is loud and busy, and audio has no place in that – and I would fall into naps and dream the city, Palimpsest. However often my waking brain would bother itself with one too many description of smell or sound or touch, it would curl around those descriptions and play them out. For a city predicated on the vellum of monks stripped layer by layer and rewritten, leaving the trails on the skin on the eye, it was perfect. 

One last thing: this book is an intertext with The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Though that story was referenced here, it was written after, and September and her Green Wind – good God – what a thing. I’m just shivering with what Valente did with children’s stories and retrospective adulthood and the stories we tell and are told and all of those devices, those devices that whir in our brains like damp clockwork, like maps to ourselves and others. I kept thinking of Autobiography of Red, where Anne Carson spoke of the magic of the adjective that reorders the noun, the place, and Valente’s heavy adjectives do just that. Perfect for these bones, for this skin, for this grey brain. I put out my hands to touch. Lover, come to bed.