Book As Site For Inevitable-Resound: On Carolyn Zaikowski's A Child Is Being Killed

Book as catapult, as dark cliffs among which an impossible voice is being initialized, is becoming confident enough to sound.

Book as reverb in a yearn-school.

Book as site for inevitable-resound.

From a voice taken a voice is invented: Shrap. Shrap sharpens. Shrap is to shrapnel. Shrap is a profound sear along a system of seams (“Shrap imagines [] sewing her own tongue back in place while chewing the doors off the closets”).

Zaikowski’s A Child is Being Killed is a soaked-yarn-endeavor whereby a young person is sounding themselves into existence even amidst imposed violences and horrid turmoil (“I am your little girl, the understudy for the daughter you couldn’t fuck in real life”/ “The island in the middle of the tsunami is mine and it is untouched. This is the line I kept writing in my head when you were all fucking me”/”All the men with their one woman”). Shrap is a land of wounds in “time’s womb” (“I landed in a pile of myself underneath the window”).

A many-faceted dysphoria (“I refused to feel the pain”/ “There are no available selves”).

A constant ambulation.

Book as holder of a chewy story.

Chewy story chewed as a chew toy: my mouth, my own voice, are getting stronger the longer I gnaw.

In Zaikowski’s remarkable and poignant narrative, captors (Father, Corey, other men who rape or pay for use of Shrap) though inflictors, are also, at times the only other human contact (there are other contacts: rodents, ghosts, voices, images, memories) (“The things that are wrong are human things, not animal things”).

Book as page-place where the authentic gender is lived (“My penis has a clitoris”/ “My penis is nothing but a long clitoris that has fallen out of my body”/ “She wonders whether or not she is actually a king [] she has a penis and a vagina. She has other genitals you can’t conceive of. That’s why she’s so powerful”).

Shrap comes in contact with the maternal as lover and stand-in mother. Consuelo: consolation and courtship, camaraderie and confidante (“Consuelo: I love you. I love you. She replie[s], yes, I love you too, Shrap”).

Brutalization and non-consent, through reams of men, the girl in the white dress wishes for the shore on which she can be brazen on her own terms. She sounds the wish and is never seen. Through Shrap’s voice, through Consuelo, through the swells of mother visiting, a girl in a white dress is finally being seen. It is the evening after Corey’s murder. Her dress is blushing as the horizon’s red deepens, nearing some mid-way point before it goes below the land which stands in front of it. (“When I really think about it, all the dirt and earth, where it all starts and ends and goes around in circles and explodes—I want to make total love to it, I have made total love to it”).

Creating Negative Space, Showing Us the Ways We Fail, the Ways We Lose Our Humanity

I’ve known Caleb Ross for a few years and his writing’s always visceral — both grotesque and erudite — and As a Machine & Parts is no different.

A man, inexplicably, begins to transform, and his transformation is almost Kafka-esque. But, more than his transformation into a machine — certainly the most obvious part of the novel — is Caleb’s focus, which is not about becoming a machine, but what it means to be human.

This novella is about relationships, how they’re formed, and the ways they can fall apart, and the ways we change. This, I think, is what all great literature does, and I know it’s the question at the center of my own writing: what does it mean to be human?

It’s a quick read and it kept me up while I raced through its pages, even sending him a Facebook message when I finished, sometime in the middle of the night, which, I suppose, is just when I tend to be wandering the Internet the most. But his novel really hit me, not just that night, but for the rest of the week, and even now, three months later. It still sticks in me as I battle with the questions that haunt me, trying to sort out what it means to be human, and how, perhaps, one day I’ll be one too.

To be human, all my life grappling with that desire. And it’s stories like this that make it somehow clearer, by creating negative space, showing us the ways we fail, the ways we lose our humanity, the ways we long to even just cling to that which makes us human, that we learn how to be.

Human.

And even while our narrator loses his humanity, so too does the text lose its humanness. The page itself transforms, the structure moving from a standard storytelling model to schematics and diagrams, an instruction manual designed to show us what we’re reading. Something I’ve always loved about Caleb’s writing is how visual and gripping his images are, and, here, he’s married his language to concrete visuals, pushing his storytelling past what I thought it could be.

This novella about heartache and love and identity and humanity is also just completely fun. It never gets bogged down in its own peculiarity or tragedy, simply accepting the transformation as a matter of course, allowing for laughs even while the story reaches deep into your bowels.

A Few Words on Corey Mesler’s Notes Toward the Story & Other Stories

Appreciation for the female form, in many manifestations. Appreciation for language. A cunning wit and endearing style. Boundless creativity. The presence of a well-read author who makes an original contribution. That about sums it up.

Don’t ask me why Mesler, who has both novels and poetry collections published in addition to story collections, has not gained larger distribution in terms of a big agent and a major book deal with wide distribution, but yet again I find myself grateful for the risks independent and academic publishers are willing to take.

What we have with Mesler’s new collection is exactly the kind of gathered stories I like to read — varied in style, theme, and content. Elegant and guttural. Full of the flavor of life and the lyrical beauty of literary work. More sensuous but similarly ironic to Vonnegut. More accessible than Roland Barthes for those who like story more than essay, but also as comfortingly aching in elegant prose as a latter-day Nabokov — with the same sort of flair for unexpected language combinations and a symphonic melody of sounds rendered together like a culminating force. Mesler’s work has been compared to Brautigan, but I sense metafictional traces of John Barth, too — as well as what I’ve always found to be the enjoyably surreal facets of many excellent early T.C. Boyle stories.

Coincidentally, this is also exactly the kind of story collection I like to read from a male writer, if we let gender play a role in this discussion. The men in these stories enjoy women. Frankly, I like that.

Not to be sexist, but when I read a book with powerful sexy female characters and that book has been written by a man, I am almost tempted to check his pants to verify gender. To gilt-edged frame him. To send him up with a parade. Were he not married, I’d likely ask for a phone number or a sample life-primer to allow distribution to less fortunate men in airports. Certainly, Mesler excels with longing — in many of Mesler’s stories, specifically, female longing plays a part — but what I enjoy is that he explores not just the act of wanting — but also the fulfillment of feminine desires. Three cheers for that!

The story that opens this collection entitled “Monster,” for example, discusses a woman with a cheating husband who decides to stop her pattern of sadness and violation via having her own affair; before she can consummate this however, her husband comes home, discovers her intent, and treats her violently until she is rescued (and later sexually satisfied) by the “Monster” in the story, who is an unusually large, well-endowed, yet ugly man. There are so many things I love about this story — the breaking of patterns. The story beyond the story. The idea of an ugly man as a monster who is large yet possesses such tenderness that he allows the smaller woman all sexual power in the story.

I really enjoyed the collection’s experimental title piece as well, “Notes Toward the Story,” since it is a wonderfully escalating narrative that moves skillfully between the author composing notes for a desired fiction and the undesired but progressive authorial reality entering relentlessly through these notes. Mesler applies his humor and savvy here too.

If I had all day, we could talk about the themes this collection houses, the sweet piece about two twin sisters who dye their shadows because it’s sexy (and communicate with a strange sort of ESP), or the meaning of the minimalist near flash “Strangers In Love,” where Mesler applies a more distant style yet still makes relationship commentary.  We could talk about these or any of the stories in this collection. That’s why it is so good.  It really doesn’t matter where you open this book; all of it is smart, funny, appealing, well-written — the kind of book you keep hoping to buy and sometimes feel disappointed to realize you are not holding. This is why reading people, thinking people, should buy this book — because that sort of disappointment is terrible and recurrent in a lot of collections out there, but not part of Mesler’s gathered offerings.