Halle Butler, _The New Me_

NICOLE FLATTERY'S REVIEW of Butler's recently-published Banal Nightmare made me curious enough to check whether my local public library had a copy--they did not, but they did have The New Me, Butler's second novel, published in 2019.

Is there a burgeoning genre about educated, intelligent, talented young women in their later 20s, stuck in a profoundly stressful and unpromising office job in a major city and currently without any likely romantic prospects, who decide to chart a new course for their lives in some way and end up making a worse hash of things? Lexi Freiman, Catherine Lacey, Lauren Oyler, and Christine Smallwood all seem to working this particular vein of ore--even Robyn Schiff's book-length poem Information Desk may fit, in fact. Some kind of new archetype is forming.

Millie, the main character of Butler's The New Me, has a temp job she thinks is leading to a full-time job. We, the readers, know it is not. Millie also seems self-deluded about her ability to drink less and to get her exercise program started. She does not seem recovered from her break-up with almost-fiancé Jamie (who may also have died by suicide--I wasn't sure about this), and her best friend seems to be in the relationship mainly to have someone to get drunk with. Things go from bad to worse and Millie turns up at her parents' place.

I had a hard time judging Butler's tone here. Is Millie an object of satire? She is a terrible judge of her own situation, so the narrative sometimes seems to be laughing behind her back (as it were). I did, however, feel bad for her a lot of the time, and I was sorry things went as completely amiss for her as they did. 

In this respect, Millie reminded me of Elif Batuman's Selin, in The Idiot. Ridiculous but lovable? Lovably ridiculous? Someone whose self-created catastrophes we chuckle at because we know she will grow up and turn out fine? Or another lost soul in the city? A new archetype is definitely forming.

 

Sally Keith, _Two of Everything_

 I WROTE A review of this for another and much more respectable blog, and that review will probably be posted in a few weeks or so, so in this space I am not going to say much more than thank you, Sally Keith, for your fine book.

Two of Everything is a kind of memoir-in-poems of Keith and her partner going through the process of adoption.  (The partner is called "Amor" in the book, which I don't think is her actual name, but talk about resonant....) This always delicate process is even more delicate for same-sex couples, so the book is full of frustrations, disappointed hopes, and dead ends. What a payoff, though--"December Light," the book's final section, is radiant with joy. 

Word of mouth is bound to help this book; I can't imagine anyone reading it and not recommending it.

Jana Prikryl, _Midwood_

 What most struck me about Prikryl's second collection of poems, No Matter, was its being quite different from her first, The After Party; this, her third, is not much like either. Like No Matter, it feels stylistically unified (all short poems, with a remarkably consistent voice), but even more than the earlier book it seems intended to be taken as an integrated whole. The "you" of the poems, for instance, seems like the same person throughout, and the twenty-four poems titled "Midwood" interspersed through the book read like a sequence thanks to shared arboreal imagery. 

However, Midwood also has the range in time and space of The After Party, making it quite different from the here-and-now focus of No Matter. Much of the book seems set in Italy (e.g., the seven poems titled "The Noncello," a river in Italy). but Canada, New York City, and the town in Czechia where Prikryl was born all figure as well. The remembered and the anticipated get almost as much attention as the present, as though Prikryl as picking up on the poet-as-river idea that crops up in Heidegger's analyses of Hölderlin.

At the same time, the paratactic crops up, as in Adorno's analyses of Hölderlin. Here is "Midwood 3":

Out of the garment of the land
            it is not spring, why then you say
rank, but isn't 
an oracle around perimeter of which 
the words their lipid speeds pull from
and here so on the face of it
reserve, is it a reservoir
            if spill headfirst another's shape

Prikryl avoids end-stop punctuation throughout (no periods, question marks, exclamation points, or even semi-colons), which does a lot to unify the voice of the volume but also creates an unmoored effect in the syntax. The reader never knows for certain whether one line continues the sentence of the preceding line or starts a new sentence. 

Sentences thus unanchored and adrift were rare in Prikryl's earlier work, but I really liked the effect. I assumed from the outset that the title Midwood alluded to Dante's famous and unbeatable figure for a midlife crisis, that we were with Prikryl in una selva oscura without map or compass...unanchored and adrift, in sum. Where are we, and how the hell did we end up here?

Midlife crisis looms especially in the Noncello poems, which seem to be about an adulterous affair. I am not at all positive about that, but adultery or infidelity seemed to be hovering behind the lines, as in Jorie Graham's The Errancy. 

And the self-doubt of a classic midlife crisis? Plenty of that, too, as when the trees in "Midwood 20" are "like me // annoying strivers / in constant danger of making bad choices."