Person/a by Elizabeth Ellen

Person/a is a positively dizzying book. At first it seems similar to the gritty, gut-punch emotionally raw stories of Elizabeth Ellen’s earlier collection, Fast Machine:

The second time I drove to see him without telling him I did not tell anyone I was going. I was bored of talking about him with my friends and was embarrassed that I had not managed to overcome my feelings for him. Several of my friends had mentioned the word “therapy” which I thought of in a similar vein and with similar seriousness as the words “murder” and “online dating service.” I.e., I couldn’t take any of them seriously, though of the three, “murder” felt the least offensive and also the most likely to succeed.

Without bringing in a different prose style though, things quickly become significantly more amazingly complex and layered.

Person/a centers on a fictionalized Ellen’s intense obsession/relationship with another writer, or a musician (same man, I’ll explain more below). For the most part, this man keeps her at a distance. There are only a limited number of interactions in person; the majority of their relationship takes place over text or email, with even few actual voice phone calls. In fact, the majority of their relationship involves him supposedly trying to prevent a relationship at the same time that he pulls her back toward him and she attempts to get him to do so.

The complexity comes in about the time we hit the second volume one. Supposedly structured in four volumes, there are in fact multiple volume ones. Ellen tells it one way, and then re-approaches the same thing in a different way (while still managing to advance the story).

For example, the man is an unnamed writer in the first volume one, but a musician named Ian in the second. Breaking up with her previous lover before Ian becomes going back and forth with him repeatedly, in love with both the previous lover and Ian in different ways. Jamaica becomes Mexico. A daughter becomes a son, and then oscillates repeatedly between genders. The changeable details end up altering seemingly at will.

In one volume one we have:.

The first time I drove to see him without telling him was two days after I got back from Jamaica. I think of our relationship now in terms of before Jamaica and after. I was gone six days. I often wonder if I hadn’t gone to Jamaica if things would have turned out differently. I think it’s a fair thing to wonder.

In another:

The first time I drove to see Ian without telling him was two days after I got back from Mexico. I think of our relationship now in terms of before Mexico and after. It is the cruelest way to think.

The differences are small, but significant. These differences change the overall impression of what is going on. There are many passages like this. Some are thematic repetition; some are the reality of the novel shifting under the reader’s, and Ellen’s, feet as the main thread stays unchanged and progresses.

Ellen, mixing autobiographical information with fiction as she does, is deciding and re-deciding how to cast it all, what details to include and what to hide or reveal. She’s seeing how it affects the whole, and her. After all, she’s writing herself as a character defined by this obsession. Does she not define the persona and live in it as much through the writing as through the obsession itself? Combining instead of cutting, she’s layering multiple meanings into the novel while the main thread of meaning running throughout does not change.

At the same time that Person/a seems chaotic and uncontrolled, it’s clear Ellen (the author, to whatever extent there is a difference) is completely in control. This is a wonderfully sophisticated structure for such straightforward prose that leaves the reader as bewildered and emotionally flayed as Ellen (the character, again to whatever extent there is a difference). Gratifying as Person/a is on a sentence-by-sentence level, the book is something that really needs to be experienced as a whole in order to really experience what it manages to accomplish. At the end, I’m more stunned than able to decide or articulate what I really feel about Person/a, and that’s marvelous.

Tiny Pearls in a Big World

These people that litter Mary Miller’s stories in Big World are nearly broken and almost just as unlikable. Or that is to say they are living mostly unlikable lives, because Miller’s characters — the predominance of which are young, underachieving women — are not unlikable in the ways, say, Bret Easton Ellis or Jonathan Franzen characters are unlikable. These characters are unlikable in the secret ways we don’t like ourselves, hiding those things we try to hide in a big world: “I’m sort of horrified by the things I tell myself when I’m the only one around to hear them,” one aimless narrator confesses — to herself — in the untidy closing story, “Not All Who Wander Are Lost.” Untidy and aimless, these are apt descriptions. Miller’s characters often resist change and the stories themselves can teeter on plotlessness, like the wheels of a pick-up truck spinning endlessly in the Tennessee mud. One narrator scrubs her addict boyfriend’s camper in reaction to his half-hearted and ultimately unfulfilled promise to bring the thing to the state park. Another narrator attempts an affair with a co-worker in the absence of her alcoholic boyfriend, but that too does not stand to last. Oftentimes, we’re left simply to wait for sunrise.

But Miller is adroit in her storytelling, and where these stories are slight in their action they are larger in scope. The characters share a hopelessness that is often found in Raymond Carver’s characters, a certain grittiness, here removed from Carver’s lush Pacific Northwest and trapped in the honky-tonk and trailer park South where the landscape is pocked with beer bottles and cigarette butts; full of cheating lovers and surrounded by Ruby Tuesdays, Taco Bells, IHOPs and Dairy Queens. The stories of Lorrie Moore, too, come to mind. Miller’s characters make the stupid decisions that have been thrust upon them by all their stupid yesterdays, all of it soaked with death, with divorce, with loss.

Yes, these stories are tiny pearls, each one propelled by Miller’s pinballing language that is lyrical in its sudden turns: “We stayed in a house on the beach and ate seafood and went to the outlet malls, but my father wouldn’t let me go in the water because once I got caught by a riptide and almost drowned and after that I got stung by a jellyfish and after that my mother died.” It is clear Miller loves these characters: for all their misgivings, the author does not condescend to them. For all their hopelessness, Miller lovingly imbues the tiniest grain of hope into each character, and only Miller herself believes in the power of that grain to be polished to pearl. She understands the pressures that weigh down on these characters, how these characters are all, self-referentially, “fucked in the head.”

And not for nothing, but the artifact itself is wondrous too. A beautiful soft cover pocket book with moody watercolor cover art that somehow serves to reinforce the heart of this collection, as if the one thing these characters can hold on to, cradled in small hands, a curious logic of holding such a small book and calling it Big World.

Grand Animated Formations in the Sky: A Review of Adam Novy's The Avian Gospels

We’re dealing today with a story of a long-standing dictatorship, a city in flames, people streaming into the streets to rise up against their oppressive government, and that government’s attempts to crush the rebellion. And I’m not talking about Cairo. The Avian Gospels is a hell of a good dystopian novel that may seem eerily prescient regarding recent events, but resonates even more so in light of past forays into the Middle East in the last decade. It’s a strange, surreal, and fascinating ride.

A father and son (Swedes — or are they Gypsies?) live in an unnamed city in some unnamed country that borders Oklahoma. A war with Turkey does not unseat a Stalin-like Judge from power. His thugs, called RedBlacks, share their leader’s love of torture to extract information. Gypsies (or are they Norwegians?) are heavily oppressed and live in a network of tunnels under the city.

Ever since the war, a plague of birds has settled on this bleak urban landscape, and the avian congestion is especially thick on the grounds of the Judge’s enormous and echo-filled mansion. The father and son have the unusual and spectacular inborn ability to make the birds do their will: the son organizes them by color to form grand animated formations in the sky.

No one knows why the birds are there or what they mean. Are they the return of those who died in the war? Are they a plague brought down upon an unjust land in need of regime change? “We suspected,” the unnamed narrator says, “that we deserved the birds.” Add to this surreal cocktail the action-filled plot of revolutionaries and arson, all packaged in two beautiful Bible-like volumes, complete with rounded corners and gilt page ends. It all, strange enough to say, works together wonderfully.

The events of the last ten years — not to mention the events of the last month — make uneasy reverberations in this novel:  a green zone, spider holes, “bring it on,” a city filled with murals of the ruling family on the walls, coffins buoyed up by protesting crowds, the political need to use fear to inspire coherence to what is going on — cast their shadow over this novel.  While not directly referring to any particular war, terrorist event, or military action, the novel gives a disturbing sense of all of these, a deftly-unsettling story that is a sublimation of the chaotic handling of the policy of regime change and terrorism-management.

That certainly is a lot to chew on, but the power of the prose moves you through, shifting from the people at the forefront of the gathering resistance movement to those tightly holding the reins of a land rolling full-speed off a cliff. On both sides it’s a brutal tale of mislaid and misused power. Novy’s writing is deliberate, controlled, and the narrator, who tells this story long after these events took place, keeps a certain remove from the characters’ points of view, keeping us ever in sight of the greater landscape — a bird’s-eye view — that shows the overarching results of their actions.