It was the kind of party that I would have liked to have gone to, had I been invited; at a Brooklyn apartment a block from my own, overlooking the river and the bridge, the entire mile of it—or is the bridge a he, a beautiful recumbent sailor?—and its stone towers, one hundred yards tall; ships’ horns yawping over the water, shouldering through the December air, and all that muffled by the windows, by the Victrola, by the chatter and the holding forth on poetry and such; sofas and corners, coats heaped on the bed, whisky and gin on ice from the juddering fridge; and underneath, the seethe of possibilities—japes and aperçus, misapprehensions, confessions, attachments ill-advised and fortuitous, vertigoes, oblivions till dawn and beyond. It’s what I’d like to watch: altercations, perhaps, and sex quavering in the air; then moths stampeding from the piled winter coats, beating their wings against the windows, beguiled by the lamps on the bridge.
Oh dear, that was just writing; words upon words, layer cakes of words, fussy as candelabra. Where are the people? Where are the smells, the sizzle and clank of the steam heat? Where are the things, not the metaphors and adjectives and attitudinizing, but the things themselves? There’s nobody home in this, no carpet and wallpaper and leaks in the ceiling, no pots on the stove, no hairs on the bathroom floor, no stains on the sheets. It’s just writing, words atop words, like snow accreting, like dandruff, confetti, Legos in a sack. It’s prose imagining how poetry sounds. But as Robert Lowell said, “Why not say what happened?” Why not “give each figure in the photograph his living name?”
I have been Heidi since I was about a year and a half. At that time, we were stationed in Ft. Devon, Boston, and my grandmother, Ruth Barrett Haley, had come to live with us in our very small army quarters. She must have been surprised to learn that her daughter was now calling herself Louise, not Sally, as she had been known her whole life. My mother’s maiden name was Sarah Louise Haley: Sarah after her maternal grandmother, Sarah Ann Hemming from England; and Louise, after Louise Duplesis Haley, her paternal grandmother from Maine. But my mother had never liked being called Sally, so as soon as she got married and moved out of the house, she began calling herself Louise. Did changing her name upset my grandmother? I’m pretty sure it did because, perhaps in retaliation or revenge, she was the one who changed mine. But first, more confusion about my name.
The running gag of Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone is that Ernest is entirely honest – a rare reliable narrator – but that the truth can hide as much as a lie. And so Stevenson’s novel sets out to bamboozle us despite, and with, full disclosure. No clue is left un-signposted. No moment of cleverness left uncelebrated. No punchline left unpunched.
As we follow the pebbles and crumbs Egan so cannily lays out, readers may feel at times as disoriented or wonderstruck as children making their way through a dark forest, at others electrifyingly clear-sighted, ecstatically certain of the novel’s wisdom, capacious philosophical range, truth and beauty. Charged with “a potency of ideas simmering,” “The Candy House” is a marvel of a novel that testifies to the surpassing power of fiction to “roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.”
Between the self Alexis Sears presents on the “My Journey” page of her website and the self we meet in her debut poetry collection, there’s an apparent disconnect. On that web page, we find undergraduate work at Johns Hopkins with distinguished mentors in poetry, an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, teaching experience, world travel, and a book prize. In the book, we find the trauma of a father’s suicide, depression, obsessions concerning love and sex and beauty and race — a panoply of confusions and wounds. I would fear making the rookie mistake of identifying the narrator with the poet, were it not for the directness of the “About My Writing” page on the same site, where Sears says plainly: “[M]y poems tell the story of my life as a biracial 20-something seeking joy and healing in the wake of a traumatic event.”
And now that I’ve assured you that I haven’t made a rookie mistake, please forget that one-sentence synopsis. You’ll get much greater pleasure out of watching Sears’s themes unspool themselves slowly over 80 pages of poems. The title Out of Order is doubly ambiguous — a machine out of whack, a failure to follow the rules of decorum — but it also points to the way events in the book are set out: not chronologically, but in scenes and hints scattered across the book’s four sections.
This novel cuts you and then bandages you back up. A few pages later — another slash. Yet Stuart doesn’t delight in misery the way writers such as Hanya Yanagihara seem to. Misery is just a necessary ingredient in his novels of sentimental education, the hit of salt that makes the sugar sing.