Fantastic Metropolis

William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic (1985) impressed me tremendously. Just about any writer who tried to put so much ideological speech in their characters’ mouths would almost certainly face accusations of being a polemical ideologue using literature for didactic ends. Gaddis, though, pulls it off beautifully. Rikki Ducornet’s The Jade Cabinet (Dalkey Archive Press, 1993) is as mysterious and conspiracy-ridden as Carpenter’s Gothic, but its style is rich enough to not only accommodate the crazed sensibility that must necessarily imbue a bitterly personal enemy of Charles Dodgson but also support the recognition that “memory is a cabinet of chameleons and the mind as unstable as the moon.” Both Kathryn Davis’s The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (Knopf, 1993), the tale of a cross-dressing Danish composer and the woman she chooses to complete her last opera posthumously, and Zoe Landale’s The Rain Is Full of Ghosts (Tesseract Books, 2000), a ghost story involving another Danish expatriate, perform the arduous work of mourning in precise, textured prose. Jeff VanderMeer’s Veniss Underground (Prime, 2003) retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice with an energy and brio of imagery that catapulted me breathlessly through the novel: I had no choice but to read the entire work in one sitting. I also read Patricia Duncker’s The Deadly Space Between (Ecco, 2003) in one sitting, because its habit of constantly offering new tropes for reading its story teased me deliciously. Is this a story about a vampire? A werewolf? A Dr. Moreau? Or an alien disguised as a human. Could it be a new telling of Frankenstein? A pact-with-the-devil story? Or a ghost story? It amused me to discover that it is possible to read a story without knowing which tropes are appropriate (and thus without every clearly deciding its meaning). Needless to say, that discovery only further complicated my thinking about narrative forms, intelligibility, and politics.

So much for 2003.

L. Timmel Duchamp’s first collection, Love’s Body, Dancing in Time, can be ordered directly from Aqueduct Press.