English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

The Soul in Its Flight

M. ElizKaren Brennan. The Garden in Which I Walk: Fictions. Tallahassee: FC2 Press, 2004. 144 pp. Paper $14.95.

By Joseph Dewey, University of Pittsburgh—Johnstown  

            Mary Ann, a young black nursing assistant at a modest Boca Raton retirement community in Karen Brennan’s marvelous “Three Seaside Tales,” understands as an ambitious student in a local college creative writing class that writers are compelled to explore what baffles them, compelled to interrogate, open-eyed, an everyday landscape that so clearly offers little more than the tedium of expectation and disappointment and the difficult hunger for a single slender moment’s enlightenment, the urgency that would confirm that this pedestrian world might possess nuance, depth, and form. Mary Ann moves about the infirm residents of the retirement community, noting with a vivid embrace of her alert senses the enticing data of the moment, casting about such unpromising material for some glimmer of insight, hoping for the alchemic wonder promised in the fictions she has studied, might recover some illumination, like polished stones in a kaleidoscope accidentally, gracefully finding their way to design. She dutifully notes the shuffling retirees, their orangey skin tones, their fragile frames, their careful pedicures, their outrageous hairdos. Nothing. Finally, driven to understand the immediate, she decided to inhabit it: she slips on a resident’s frilly nightgown that she finds hanging in the woman’s closet. She is stunned. “I become the light and I also become the nightgown”—it is a tectonic moment, a consequential moment of both awe and fear, a moment snatched from the routine. She feels herself pitched toward tears, unexpected and unaccountable. She returns the nightgown only to find later when she turns to her composition book the feeling eludes recovery, defies even her genuine (and determined) faith in the ability of words to record such galvanizing experiences. As Brennan closes the story, Mary Ann promises uneasily that as soon as she locates the words that finally can shape that moment into tidy form, she will surely insert them into her assignment.

            The experience captures the deep pulls of need and frustration under which Karen Brennan’s characters exist. These are recognizable people, vulnerable, yearning to matter, struggling toward the sort of epiphany that is so routinely dispensed to characters in the fiction that they read and study—most of Brennan’s characters are word-fed: professional writers, literature professors, veteran readers, students of the craft. But epiphanies elude Brennan’s characters; confirmation of purpose stays a suspect hope, a glimmering possibility, even as her characters in turn are casually, relentlessly blindsided by bad luck and the hammer-blow of surprise. In the brutal, poignant “The Woman Who Loved Petunias,” for instance, a woman who has sacrificed two years to help nurse a daughter crippled by a motorcycle accident decides to buy petunias for her yard only to find herself caught in the crossfire of a disgruntled employee’s shooting rampage at the garden center. Given that universe, insight is momentary, as fragile as the morning light one character traces as it is glides through a window and then just as quickly slides away. The title story, for instance, is a brilliant tour de force that foregrounds language’s attempt to record the simplest kind of experience—in a series of sentences identically constructed (each beginning with the demonstrative solidity of “There is” to suggest language as reportorial and accurate and emphatically compelled to record what nevertheless comes quickly to baffle) a woman loses her hat in a fountain in a city park and finds herself helped by a stranger, a man on a bike whose presence becomes inexplicably creepier as the story unfolds, a Good Samaritan who quickly comes to remind the woman of a horror film killer with the same thick thumbs and narrow eyes. Even as the brief encounter ends and the woman heads gratefully away from the garden and back toward the city, she eases herself into a darkness, nighttime falling on the city, with the man still behind her taking measured steps that compel a disturbing fear even in the reader. We close with the experience faithfully recorded--yet shot through with a rich ambiguity, a generous uncertainty that enfogs all of Brennan’s characters. They hunger for release from ambiguity; like Mary Ann donning the stranger’s nightgown, they long for the generous dispensation of clarity and understanding.

             Brennan’s characters surely trace their pedigree from Flaubert (a character, a newlywed mired in a marriage that steadily stales, reads Madame Bovary, identifies with her generalized misery, her marriage’s speechlessly steady collapse into cliché).  But, Brennan approaches her characters more like Raymond Carver, whose precise, anorexic prose is nuanced nevertheless with a generous compassion for his thin-souled characters, as they settle into heavy discontent, thick boredom, and unendurable yearning. In “Secret Encounter,” a marvelously constructed triptych, three characters yearn simply to touch beauty, each determined to find their way to the experience of its enhancing energy: a man clumsily attempts to conduct basic improvements of an old house (each gesture ends inevitably in more unsightly damage) even as he conducts an equally clumsy “relationship” with a woman on the Internet who when she ultimately visits, shatters his delicate conception of a burgeoning romance by revealing a curious fetish for pain and requesting only that he do the S & M gently; in another, a woman at midlife decides with unsettling doubts to finance significant cosmetic upgrade to her face and finds herself, as she endures a painful recovery, drawn to cable television specials on the paranormal, on psychics who routinely suspend physical law to conduct mesmerizing “tricks” that, like cosmetic surgery, only appear to defy nature; and in the third, a woman, unable to sleep and desperately discontent over her comfortable soccer mom life, commits herself to a sleep clinic hoping to find her way to the sweet escape of dreams--only to dream, finally, of her own routine life. Without effortless precision, Brennan braids the three: the expectations, the frustrations, the disappointments of each character gently inform the others—indeed, the characters actually cross paths in the course of the narrative.

             The terror here (and in the other stories) is subtle, interior, unexpressed to us because it is un-expressable. These characters rage noiselessly, their casual chatter distract from the deeper anxieties, their secret sadness. They exist against a backdrop, an exhilarating narrative space that like Carver’s (and Anderson’s and Joyce’s) trembles on the verge of revelation, every noun Brennan introduces is packed with symbolic freight carefully underplayed and entirely unsuspected by the characters, whose every gesture is an indirect revelation of character. These stories are interactive, demanding and rewarding multiple readings, coined in a sculpted proseline sensitive to suggestion without clumsily insisting on theme and manipulating obvious ironies.

             Brennan, who teaches at the University of Utah, is clearly an accomplished student of contemporary fiction (she is a poet and Pulitzer-nominated essayist), a university-product whose academic background and evident familiarity with such fiction might threaten to make these fictions, like so many of her generation, painful avant-garde gimmicks, frame tales with smart-ass voiceovers content to direct attention to the toldness of the tale. Make no mistake. Brennan relishes foregrounding the writerly dilemma of recording observed experience. In a particularly memorable study (“Saw”), a woman with a pool clogged by branches from an untended tree enlists the help of a one-armed tree surgeon who subtly encourages the woman to shake free of her dull routine, even gets her to grip the pulsating power of the saw itself only to find in one of those signature Brennan moments of black surprise the saw spring from her hand and cut her badly. The resulting maiming, while minimal on the outside, compels the woman to reconsider her life even as she conducts an affair with the tree surgeon whose sympathy and concern following the accident is expressed in the gift of a tree seedling that serves to subtly suggest the comfort and compassion of the stranger, a decidedly paradoxical figure given his part in her maiming. A maiming that restores, a wounding that heals, disfigurement that yields an intensity of beauty—it is a marvelous construction of paradox and irony. Throughout the narrative, however, Brennan intrudes, posing writerly questions, testing characters by posing a series of difficult premises—“what happens if a beautiful woman is injured” sort of thing. Far from being gimmicky and intrusive, such framing moments remind us of the writer who struggles, like Mary Ann, to understand experience into a manageable form.

             We recall the character in the splendid “The Soul in Its Flight”: she is at once a lapsed Catholic struggling to confirm a soul, a literature professor intrigued by the stunning epiphany that closes “The Dead,” and a troubled daughter reeling in the trauma of the recent death of her difficult father. As she struggles, sorting through recollections of her distant father, determined to coax from them the slenderest glimmer of a Joycean epiphany, she is content finally with memory itself, those sturdy constructions that may not dazzle but surely comfort (the woman’s grown daughter, herself already savaged by a failed marriage, patiently builds gorgeous collages in the backroom). That rich sense of contentment, there among the ruins that testify to the beautiful mayhem of the beating heart, suffices for Brennan’s characters who in story after story are compelled to acknowledge how experience resists the tidy form of fiction itself. Fictions that remind us what fiction can’t do even as they subtly confirm what it can do—these are marvelous, rewarding reading experiences.