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A Review of Diane Williams' Romancer Erector |
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When Deron asked me to review Diane Williams' new book, I leapt, both in excitement and in fear. I'm nervous as I think about it, before I've even seen the book, because I've always admired what Diane does, but I've also always had trouble sitting down and reading a book of hers straight through. You come (or as Diane might say: "One comes") upon things in a Diane Williams story. Picking out sentences. Cobbling them together by luck. To try to summarize or characterize a Williams book in some sort of narrative fashion is a pretty scary prospect. So, now, as I try to figure out how I'll get hold of Diane's new book, I start to plan. For sure, when I get the book, I'll handle it for a while, not opening it. I'll read the dust jacket, the author bio, the note on the type. I'll read the title page carefully. The warning not to copy any of the book without permission, except brief passages for the purpose of reviewing the book. I'll see if they list Diane's other books somewhere. I'll check out the cover credits. I want to love the object. Also, I think I'll do what I can to defeat the linearity of the book. (This is my plan.) Not that Diane Williams writes stuff that would be called linear. But I mean the linearity of the object, the forced motion from left to right, from page one to two to three. The table of contents linearity. I'll go into the book at random and read a paragraph somewhere in the middle of a story. Maybe this will seem offensive. Surely Diane ordered the book the way she ordered it for particular reasons. Or maybe she didn't. But say she did. Say she was very careful about the way she put the book together, the way one sentence followed the next, the way one story led to another. Is this something we should respect? Something we should take into consideration in all fairness to the writer. I guess I'd like to reconsider the idea of being fair to the writer, of being fair in the sense of attempting to elicit from the piece that which the writer put in there. I'd like to wonder, before I go get the book, if there's anything left of what the writer brought to the work after the work gets put on paper in a certain order and slapped between two covers. Are Diane's reasons my reasons? Does it matter if our reasons coincide? Say it didn't matter who wrote the book. Say it only mattered how one sentence moved you that day you picked the book up and opened it at random. Say you were on the subway, and you pulled the book out of the bag you'd been carrying it around in for weeks (afraid to open it) and then you just let it spill open at page 31, or 73, or whatever page it happened to fall open at, and you started to read a sentence smack in the middle of that page and it tore your heart out. What would you do? Would you rush back to the start of the book and start at the beginning, intent on devouring each sentence in its turn, intent on allowing the context Diane provides to colour the sentences in just the right manner, waiting as you read to have your heart torn out again? Or would you close the book, put it back in the bag, and go home to your family. Sit with the kids and watch Magic School Bus. Would you say -- when a commercial came and the kids were willing to pay a bit of attention -- "Listen to this sentence, kids?" and then read the sentence you read on the subway, knowing that the kids would find the sentence ridiculous. Or would you rush home and lock yourself in the bedroom and read more of Diane's book. I would sit with the kids, is what I would do. I would sit with the kids, not hearing the tv, wishing I was in my bedroom alone, reading Diane's book. Which is my fear of agreeing to review anything. Some sort of obligation. The reader has some obligation to the writer, doesn't he? Don't I? Do I? To what am I obligated? To the meaning the writer meant for the book? I hate that obligation. Fool that I am. I sit alone with a book and feel obligated. Not in the reading of the book, but in the contemplation of reviewing it. How can I take that obligation and make it integral to my reading without abandoning my desire to come upon the moment as if it holds everything? Like a blind fish in a dark cave seeking a mate. * "The most tragic fact about Kierkegaard's spider and Walt Whitman's spider was not that they were surrounded by the void, with no place to set foot, not that they can find no foothold however much they sprawl, but rather that the thread by which they hang must be formed and spun from out of their own entrails, that it is part of their entrails and not a rope outside themselves upon which they must take hold." * By mistake, I read the title story from Diane's book, "Romancer Erector", online before I got the book. I am even more afraid now. What I read silenced me. How can I write a review of a work that silences me? What can I say? How could I ever circumscribe this terrible silence better than Diane circumscribes it in her stories? Don't get me wrong. I was already mortally afraid long before I came across Diane's story in the online Boston Review. I became mortally afraid yesterday at some point, I don't remember exactly when. I just remember that at some point in the day I found it hard to take the next step. Somehow the web of relationships that surround me became too complex to grip. I'm losing my grip, is what I'm saying. Reading that Williams story, knowing I'd agreed to try to review it. Jesus. I might as well coat my hands in butter just before I make that last ditch attempt to hang on. Oh, and also -- and this has nothing to do with Diane's book, so maybe it doesn't actually belong in a review of the book, but part of losing your grip means losing all hope of assembling any cogent meaning and now that I think about it Diane's book is exactly that moment when you let go and tumble into space, that moment when you stop trying to hook things back together again for the umpteenth time knowing they will only fall apart again -- my son called me on the phone at work this morning wanting me to help him with his math homework and I had no idea how to help him. I could feel myself growing more and more frantic as he repeated, over and over, the question we needed to answer. I realized more and more clearly, as the sound of my son's voice got more and more quivery, that my son was growing more and more aware of his father's limitations. I hung up the phone, knowing my baby (11 years old) was on the verge of tears, and who am I to say that those tears have any more to do with his not being able to complete his homework than with his realizing he'll have to give up on his dad one of these days. Knowing that day is coming is one of the few things I can count on hating flawlessly. * I've gone back to read more of the online Williams story. I closed the Word window and opened the Explorer window, but I couldn't read the story anymore. The unconnectedness has got to me. I'll wait till I get the book. One o'clock this afternoon. Derek's coming to have coffee with me and he's got me a copy of the book. I'll be sleeping at Mom's place tonight. I'll read some there, perhaps. I'll tell Mom about the book. She'll want to read it. Later, after I've read it and committed a review to paper, I'll lend it to Mom. She'll read it. Two more people will have read Diane's book -- Mom and me. Derek's already read it, I know. Don't know about Jason. Deron read it a few months ago, he told me. He said he thought I'd enjoy it. * Got the book. It's almost better than I'd hoped. There are two pages of "Praise for Diane Williams" with clever, poignant, meaningless sentences like: "These stories will drive you crazy in the way readers of serious fiction need to be driven out of their heads occasionally." -- Chicago Sun-Times At the back of the book, there are two pages of "Selected Dalkey Archive Paperbacks." There's an "Also by Diane Williams" page. There's a Shakespeare quote: "I must eat my dinner." (Good one Shakespeare.) Best of all, though, there's a table of contents. Some of the titles are stories I want to rush to read, but so far I've controlled myself. Even when I saw page 39 has a story called "Actual People Whose Behavior I Was Able to Observe" with all the title words having capital letters on their first letters, I controlled myself. * I stopped being afraid yesterday. I got out there again. I felt wildly alive. Thought: Good time to attack the Williams. Was at Mom's, staying over. Grabbed the book. Got some paper. Wanted to record the very first moment I encountered the very first Williams' sentence in the very first story in the book. Decided to go at it from the start. Run the narrative gauntlet, so to speak. Here's what I wrote: Mom just fed me. I'm under about four blankets. I'm good. I'm ready for this. * He took me by my sleeve which is wrapped in very delicate skin, so you treat it in a special way. He treats all the skin that way. We go into Illinois. I fell for Diane Williams when I read that. I was falling for everyone that day, though. I fell for the woman at the donut shop, the one with the eyes. And the guy with the hole in his smile where there ought to be a tooth. Afterword Because it is going to take me forever to finish reading this book, because I don't want to finish reading this book, because I don't want to finish reading this book ever, because I have to set this book down after each sentence in order to catch my breath -- because, because, because and, again, because -- I am submitting this review without having finished the book. (Imagine a reviewer who is out there with you, my savvy reader, out there, living the adventure that is knowing Williams is out there, too. There are uncaptured Williams' sentences waiting to be stumbled upon. We must stumble upon them. We must stumble. And then, we must move on: leave those sentences behind for some other reviewer to stumble over.) _______________
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