Evergreen Review

Brooklyn: Rail Editions, 2013. Donald Breckenridge, Editor.

Review by Jim Feast

I was discussing the new Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology 2 with Richard Kostelanetz. It’s a fine book, by the way, if a bit scattered in terms of the contents, which includes both notable current American writers and a wide spread of translations, going back to the Marquis de Sade and Atkutagawa Ryunosuke as well coming forward to more contemporary authors from Chile, Spain, France, Lebanon and other nations. Richard said in reviewing the book I should see it as an expression of the Brooklyn Rail’s philosophy and view of the world.

Now I’m not sure that’s a very good way to proceed since I’m not sure a corporate entity can have a view of the world, but it does make sense to look at it as an expression of the views of the Rail’s fiction editor, Donald Breckenridge, who edited the book. And seeing how these selections reflect his taste it shouldn’t be that hard since all one has to do is consult his three novels – all have been reviewed in Evergreen – to get an idea of his concerns, which are carried over into the selection of the anthology’s entries.

Take 6/2/95. This Breckenridge novel gives a cross section of many lives on one sultry day, displaying, above all, an alert present-ness, mirrored in the author’s quick, sure fleshing out scenes through use of the apropos detail. Many short stories and excerpts in this anthology exhibit the Breckenridgian ability to illuminate a scene. A triumph here is Emmanuel Bove’s “Night Crime,” set in Paris’s lower depths. While this story of a man getting bamboozled into being an assassin reads as more hallucinatory than real, this particular tone makes each description stand out with the un-canniness found in dreams.

Breckenridge’s You Are Here, another novel that intercuts scenes, though this time over a longer period, studies two May/December love affairs. Employing a smaller cast of characters than the previous effort, the book focuses with sharp lucidity on the sexual politics of the romantic entanglements. This same attention to the way love and courtship are closely configured with power relations is brought out in the story “The Sweethearts” by Mario Benedetti. The piece tells of a young woman who has set her cap for a neighbor since childhood though she is only ready to draw him into marriage once his family has been through a monetary catastrophe comparable to the one that hit her family decades previous, and which brings him down to her financially disgraced plane.

A second fine dissection of sexual politics occurs in Lewis Warsh’s “The Merit System” which, in a fever dream of steamy prose, explores the breakup-to-makeup odyssey of a Park Slope couple. Warsh is an observant recorder of psychological nuance. For instance, in this passage, a wife is told by her husband that his love for her has died. That might seem a rather jarring thing to hear, but, she reflects, “It was only while he was telling her what he was feeling, that he had stopped loving her, that she remembered why she had armored herself [against him] in the first place. ….His actions, over the last few years, had communicated his lack of love for her, so that hearing it all now was a redundancy.” (It’s worth noting that such a sentiment, about coming to a realization in the act of saying or hearing a statement, has been voiced before by Warsh as in the poem, “Out of the Question,” where he writes: “Don’t think things out in your head//ahead of time. You know what//you’re going to say before you do,//but not until you say it do you know it’s true.”) As it turns out, this particular passage in the short story is highly ironic. (Did I mention that Breckenridge is also a master ironist?)

Breckenridge’s third novel, This Young Girl Passing, criminalizes the May/December motif developed in his previous effort by centering on the prelude to and aftermath of an illicit affair between a married high school teacher and an underage pupil. The story is told in long, intensely developed individual scenes, which are out of historical sequence, forcing the reader to recalibrate her/his sense of what happened before and after each new scene as more is learned of the acts and motives of the main characters. Along with the fully realized details in the book, the reader also finds very poignant, well captured dialogue, revealing the hand of a playwright.

And the anthology features quite a few notable plays and film scripts. One of the finds is Ionesco’s scenario for the film The Egg, describing in excruciating detail the process of egg boiling. It’s a script that was commissioned but not produced by Grove Press’s cinema division.

Closer in approach to Young Girl is Julio Cortázar’s play, “The Kings,” which retells the story of Theseus and his battle in the labyrinth. When I say this play is close to Breckenridge’s in approach, I’m not implying it describes a randy minotaur deflowering all the young virgins sent as tribute from Thebes. I mean, rather, that the unexpected stances of the various characters, from Theseus to King Minos to Ariadne force the reader to rethink the myth in surprising and satisfying ways, just as in Young Girl the chronological mash-up means the reader has to constantly rethink his or her expectations and vision of the narrative.

As with many of the writers encountered in the book, that of Cortázar makes you want to read more deeply into the author. But let’s go back to Kostelanetz for a minute, for he, too, has a piece in the book. It’s one of the more experimental offerings, though here I should also mention Johanna Rodgers’s “A Note on What Holds Ink to Paper,” a playful, paradoxical piece about how to write when not writing. Kostanlentz, whose piece is right near the end, appropriately offers a set of closing lines, all waiting for a short story to come along and lead up to it. And many make a good way to end this review: “She lived in a room so tiny she slept at night standing upside down against the softest wall.”