By Alvin Lu.
Stacey Levine, Mice 1961 (Verse Chorus, 2024)
Lauren Fairbanks, Prison Mars (corona\samizdat, 2023)
Stacey Levine’s debut novel Dra— suggested an Eastern European absurdist detained in the equally gray environs of the Pacific Northwest. Its mordant surrealism, and that of early short masterpieces like “Sausage,” bled into the later novels. With Frances Johnson and in particular Mice 1961, however, an inversion took place in which the worlds that seemed projections of the single protagonist’s anxieties, or at least the proscribed communities Levine utilizes as her canvas, went on to counter-project their mass neuroses and inane theories onto the lives of the poor main characters, whose aims are by contrast simple-hearted. Those characters display their spiritual and physical deformities like scars made by the jabs of boorish neighbors from whom they yearn to escape.
With characteristic incongruity, the anodyne suburban Florida setting, vaguely threatened on its borders by creeping tropical nature (volcanoes, swamps) and crawling conspiracies (Cubans, communists), serve as a backdrop for, of all things, a subtly observed novel of manners, a cross between Jane Bowles and Jane Austen.
Though she said these words, I knew the older sister did not like Mice getting close to others. And if the younger girl had any impulse to explore the world on her own, she also wanted Jody Marrow as close as she could be—I knew it.
Once, when Mice and I sat together at the hobby table, the girl quietly informed me that she didn’t like her sister’s pushing and pulling at her. Reef Way neighbors bothered her too, and, she described, all people were surefire paths to disaster. I leaned in, wanting to tell her that people can often be kind, mild, and benign, yet I said nothing, for no specific examples came to mind.
Levine’s honed but supple sentences, which tend to pull up short, then reach out again, serve as containers for her contradictory impulses: to distance the story with the formality of a fable, while allowing her characters’ pathos to drive the drama, without somehow succumbing, here in this tale of multiple orphans, to melodrama or parody. The closely observed details, of clothing, food, and other textures, and the unexpected word or turn of phrase, suggest we are in the woman-centered world of nineteenth-century realist fiction, but here such fineries are deployed to either feed into or balance against the book’s more violent ruptures of reality.
Many finish in that celebrated, falsely conclusive way, the lacquered finish I both long for and cannot stomach. Some fail to see that a story is far more than a recounting of events. And certain stories stray to a faraway edge that tastes as unreal as saffron: metal crushed with honey.
I don’t mind being yanked along with a plot’s train: I’m curious. I don’t care about clichés either—I crave that sugar.
The source of this remarkable language is the narrator, Girtle, who is also the novel’s most impressive device. Taking a cue from Madame Bovary’s opening sentence, Levine goes a step further to bring her into the narrative proper, complete with stirring backstory—like the two main sister protagonists Jody and Mice, Girtle is also an orphan—while at the same time keeping her hidden, literally behind sofas, trees, and poles, in a way that is both realist and metafictional.
As the novel turns from the tragic circumstances of its core trio, Levine, in full display of her comedic powers, unfurls a tapestry of human stupidity worthy of Bouvard and Pécuchet: high-school student Joyce’s discovery of blue water and confession of her real age, pretty Sherrie’s embarrassing question about cheese, Larry the beatnik’s futile attempts to get his square neighbors to appreciate Charles Mingus (“Is he a … dingus?”), the neighbors’ attempts to wrap their heads around the Bay of Pigs invasion, and Sherrie’s sister Trudie’s literary debut.
Another structural touch is how each of its six chapters diminish in length over the course of the book (96 pages, 74, 57, 16, 7, 3), an acceleration to zero or a fairy tail folding in on itself and disappearing, which is exactly what its main characters wish to happen.
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If Levine’s novels lie, for all their distortions, in the introverted border territory between observation and daydream that is in the mainline tradition of the exemplary novel, those of Lauren Fairbanks are their opposite: stubbornly exterior, radical in their seeming lack of structure, and relentless in their verbal aggression.
In retrospect the blurbs that accompanied the release of Fairbanks’s debut Sister Carrie (“This is the future of American fiction coming at you faster than an MTV alternative rock video,” etc.) better capture what “the future of American fiction” seemed like in 1993 than the novel itself did. While the collage structure of Sister Carrie suggested a kinship to Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, a recent read suggests an affinity with William S. Burroughs more at the level of sound, in both authors’ perfect pitch for demotic forms of American speech, not just the way it is delivered in the movies, but the far-ranging ways it is in “real life.” For all the claims made on its behalf for the fragmented postmodern subject, it is this quality of unfiltered authenticity, especially read now in that future the critics and writers rightly anticipated, which makes Sister Carrie so strange.
Prison Mars brings Fairbanks’s gifts into greater focus, narrowing the speakers to four, with a single one, the domineering mother, squeezing out the others in a protracted, painful, senescent rant that takes up most of the book. As in Sister Carrie, and like Levine, Fairbanks is primarily interested in the relationships among women, and the twisted, barbed humour that defines them, in particular here the poisonous dynamics between a bitterly ageing mother and her adult daughters:
I want her to see me naked to get a grip and realize no better is in store for her. Help scrawny poor old me. Look and weep. Your punishment for being alive is to bathe me naked. This is you in a couple years. Honey. Punishing. I was never into nudity but why not start now? Bathe me. Now’s as good a time as any. Lesson to be learned. See this? Disgusting, isn’t it? It’s in store for you. Around the corner bitch.
I loved telling her she had fetal alcohol syndrome. Like a violent face slap. Currently not PC. In a laughing joking way. So mean. It repeats in your head until you breathe your last. Hard to get the hardy hars going after that. […] Some things are true only after your mother verbalizes them. Epiphany for my child. She never thought herself quite so damaged that way. Exactly. I said it was a joke after I said it. It was the worst thing I ever said. You’re so mean. Without a doubt. Funny she never came to that conclusion even when seriously questioning her brain’s abilities. Delve into the forming. Not a hard one. Her brain. Works differently than other brains.
Despite the somewhat more sober influence of Gilbert Sorrentino in greater evidence now (“His writing is out of fashion in a Me-too era. He really captured the male psyche. The male-dominated world that he refused. Women were his thing, baby”) and a narrative framework less scattered and channel-surfing, Fairbanks remains audacious enough to turn the entire book on its head when called for. It is with this flip that Prison Mars becomes what its predecessor was hearkened for: the most contemporary of novels. The future that was hailed has now long since come to pass, not so much in American fiction as in the ongoing catastrophe we all seem unable to flee. Taking at first what seems the mode of an unending complaint from an unravelling mind, Prison Mars gradually reveals itself to be a different, albeit related kind of horror: a circuitous, absolutely bonkers conspiracy theory, conveyed via the mind-maze of your most loathsome relative.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alvin Lu is the author of the novels The Hell Screens and Daydreamers, the latter forthcoming from Fiction Collective 2 in 2025. Twitter: @alvinlu
