33.2

Here at The Florida Review, we’ve been arguing over what counts as truth. It all started with fact-checking, a task I assigned to a detail oriented member of the editorial staff—let’s call him “Joe.” I asked Joe to research whether the winner of the editors’ award in nonfiction had accurately described the political situation in Iran that she fled by crossing the desert with drug smugglers, in fear for her own life. The answer: she had. I didn’t know whether our graphic narrative, “Off the Bone,” was memoir or fiction, but it still seemed important to know whether or not, as depicted, research into a human/ape hybrid had gone on during Stalin’s regime. Surprisingly (to me), it had. Read on...

Loren was at work, his wife home packing for both of them, when she called him. Her doctor had just called with the test results.

Loren didn’t speak at first. “I’ll cancel our tickets,” he said. “I’ll make the calls.” She said nothing.

He told her he loved her. He used her name when he said it. He drove it in like a thumbtack. “Emily, I love you.” As if the words must not miss their mark.

“Come home,” she said. She hung up.

He imagined her in their quiet room, every angle of wood, every fold of cloth, transformed from what it had been before. He imagined she’d curl up on the bed, her knees to her chest, and pull the edge of the comforter around her. This way she’d lie, still, as the light changed with the movement of the sun, as though time needed to be measured, needed to be experienced like air moving through lungs. The pile of clothes would fall to the floor.

This was how he found her.

They had waited on marriage. They told each other this made sense. At their age, they now knew what they wanted. There would be no regrets.

Then they waited on children. They now had the maturity and wealth to transform a child’s life. When they were unable to conceive their own, they told each other this was fine. There were unwanted children they could take into their hearts. The trip was to a Ukrainian orphanage. A room down the hall had been prepared for the newcomer.

The trip was cancelled and Emily began radiation treatments. Her appointments were in the mornings, and he’d take her and bring her home, going into work after lunch, then working well into the night. After hours, the offices around his were dark, noiseless and cold. It could have been the moon. He left notes for his secretary taped to her computer, and she answered with notes taped to his. He read through the minutes of meetings he had missed. He accomplished more without the distractions and his drive home at night was eased by the empty roads. At home, she was already asleep, fatigued by her treatments, and he would undress in the flickering light of the muted television... Read on...

Afghanistan: April, 1983

In A Cold Desert covered with thorn bushes, in pre-dawn silence, under the moonless sky, I follow the footsteps of a turbaned man who knows the way and avoids the land-mines. On my right, somewhere in the shadows of the night, there is a man on a black horse. I smell the animal’s leathery odor and feel comforted. In this forty-five minute walk, my son sleeps on my back, sedated. I feel the weight of his small head on my shoulder and his warm breath on my neck. He is a talkative two year old, who has captured the heart of the head-smuggler, Ismail the Baluch.

“You have to make sure he won’t sweet-talk when we’re in the desert,” he told me last night when we were sitting at the “sofre.” The shepherd and his wife had spread this long cloth on the dirt, outside their hut, and kept bringing bowls of yogurt and hot plates of rice. We had to force down the greasy rice and lentils mixed with grains of sand. This was our last supper, before the journey, and our hostess, the shepherd’s wife, had done her best to feed me and half a dozen smugglers, who were Ismail’s gang. She was a young, sun-scorched Baluchi woman with many zing bracelets and necklaces jingling on her as she worked. I saw how she made a fire and set the soot-covered pot of rice on top of it. She was eager to please me and all through the evening offered me hot tea and sugar cubes, smiling, showing her broken, yellow teeth.

“Ismail, what have you done to my Baba?” my little boy asked the tall, bearded smuggler. Ismail laughed hard, as if he’d never heard a two year old speaking so well. He told him, “I’ve crossed your father to the other side.

He’s in Nimruz waiting for you. Tonight I’m crossing you. Agree?”

“Agree, but why are you wearing this thing on your head? Are you bald?”

He laughed again and slapped his thighs. He couldn’t resist the baby anymore— lifted him up and sat him on his lap, letting him play with the extension of his black turban. Now he warned me: Read on...

Out of the corner of her eye, Carla noticed Vic slide his fingertips into his coat pocket, then reach toward her, tickling her wrist, first the outside, then the inside—until she finally realized he was trying to give her cash. She glanced down at the bills, which were folded hard in half and doubly secured by a rubber band, and he closed her fingers over them.

I owed him, he said.

But he’s gone, she said, and she leaned back against the couch.

Then I owe his estate, he said.

I’m not sure I need it, she said.

You might. Anyway, I need for his estate to have it.

Why.

It’s called square-up. It’s what he and I did here every Wednesday, and it’s something I just needed to honor one last time.

That’s respectable, Vic.

It’s really just me making sure I sleep well from now on. No disrespect to him. It’s just that, when a friend buys the farm, there are certain loose ends that need to be tied.

And I thought you were making a pass at me, Carla said.

No, Vic said. And let me say this right now: I would never pay you this visit with anything like that in mind. Not that I wouldn’t have thought about you like that if the situation were different.

You mean because you two were friends?

Friends and business associates.

Vic, Del was your bookie. For most people, gambling isn’t exactly what you would call business.

For him it was.

Good morning.

First day of junior high—the realization like the sunlight coming through your bedroom window, with its razor-sharp assertion of the world, both troubling you out of your sleep and giving you reason to retreat back into it.
Wake up.

Your grandmother still hasn’t bought you a backpack like she said she would, but you know how to take a plastic grocery bag from underneath the sink, loop the handles over your arms, and use that as your backpack. You have nothing to put in it yet, so as you walk to school the wind inflates it on your back like a sheer plastic sail. A strong gust could carry you away.

In your right hand you clutch a rolled-up newspaper like a club. It’s to fight off dogs should any decide to attack you. You’ve seen Cujo. You know. On the newspaper you can make out part of this morning’s Jumble, the answers still empty. They will remain empty, but you still study the puzzle as you walk.

They are on their way home from school when it happens.

There are five of them. They wear jeans and button-down sweaters, their hair swept behind ears or folded in ponytails, in imitation of the high school girls. Their book bags thump against the smalls of their backs. They walk in pairs, one girl left trailing behind the two in front of her, tagging onto their conversation as much as she can. You let him what? Did he stick his tongue down your throat? They can barely contain their giggles. They walk along the side of the road, half in the grass since there is no shoulder. This is farm country: There is the Parsons’ horse farm half a mile back and the McCullens’ pastures up ahead, behind the small stretch of swamp where turtles meander across the two-lane road, bait for the next infrequent car. On this day, the horses have already gone back into the stables. The only turtle is already squished, his shell fractured and wet, legs stretched so far from the rest of him that he looks less like a real turtle than a child’s drawing of one. Only one of the girls notices. She stops, peels his body from the pavement and lays him down in the shrubs at the side of the road his head was pointing towards. At least, she thinks, he’ll get to where he was going. The other four reconfigure themselves so that they are all paired with someone new, without so much as a pause in any of their conversations.

These are girls who’ve known each other their entire lives, who might not have been friends if their parents hadn’t happened to live so close together. They are good kids, who get good grades, who play sports and join reading clubs or attend cheerleading camps in the summer. They read books about babysitters and a set of triplets who win Olympic trials and save their hometown from strip miners. They watch movies where the shy-butreally- very-pretty heroine falls for the prom king or the handsome ad exec but always finds happiness with her dorky-but-really-hot best guy friend. They’ve outgrown make-believe. They aren’t prone to imagining things. They lie only when it is necessary.

As they approach the McCullens’ farm, a car drives by and honks. Kirsten and Julie giggle. Hannah waves, as if she’d been expecting this. They quiet a bit when Ellie tells them about Mike, and how she maybe let him stick his hand under her shirt although she knows his friends dared him to. She says this quietly, as if the trees might hear and tell the world...

Beyond the bedroom window it’s pitch dark, and inside as well, but somewhere, V tells herself, there must be light. Why else would the bird carry on like that? Its song is repetitive, urgent. A house finch, she guesses, but this is only a guess. That voice, disembodied in the dark, there’s something disorienting about it. V tries to attach the sound to an image of something solid, but can’t. The finch calls out again, then waits. Stillness. Where is the reply? The bird cries out the same intricate pattern, then pauses. V listens, and waits.

V can’t see a thing. She feels around for the sweater she fell asleep clutching, the cardigan that is too small for her, even though she is slight, and becoming more so. Or is it that she’s becoming less? It’s too confusing. She runs her hands through the bedclothes and when she can’t locate the sweater, worry gnaws at her but she pushes it back.

But there is another problem: when V tries to get out of bed, something is strange about her legs, more specifically, her ankles. It’s as though—her mind stutters to make sense of this—as though they are bound. She is alert now, frightened. She reaches for the bedside lamp, but can’t locate it. In the confused darkness, she pushes herself to roll over. Once on her side, she tries a scissor kick, but this only frustrates her. She gropes under the sheets, burrows down and at last lays her fingers on the sweater: there it is, buried deep under the covers, down at the foot of the bed. But the discovery fails to reassure her. The sweater—Alice’s sweater—has wrapped itself tight around her ankles.

V drapes the lavender sweater over a ladder-back chair and begins to make breakfast. She puts on the tea kettle and heats a heavy iron skillet. When she cracks two eggs into a glass bowl she flinches at the sight of the yolks. But this morning they are fine: two thick rich yellow suns. She thinks of Alice, her niece, and the last morning they made eggs together. One perfect yolk glistened in the clear bowl. She had let Alice crack the second dappled brown eggshell. A half-formed creature spilled out. Gray. Spiky, and curled. Transparent capsule eyelids. It floated on top of the viscous whole yolk as she and Alice stared.

Alice, her cheeks flushed, leaned closer, over the bowl. Her dark blue eyes followed the creature floating on its yellow raft...

In “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” John Donne describes those who die so peacefully that mourners, uncertain whether or not the death has happened, begin to argue about it. “As virtuous men pass mildly away,” Donne writes, “some of their sad friends” say the “breath goes now, and some say, No.” It’s a debate that I don’t want to hear, thank you—not over my dead body!—though I might welcome some comic distraction. I greet warmly the thought of a peaceful death with friends and family gathered, their voices receding all too quickly into the background forever. I’m less anxious about their conversation as we count down my last breaths than I am about the one that will be raging in my own head. Will I, I wonder, lose my nerve?

Writers I admire certainly have. Wallace Stevens, the poet, created a secular paradise out of words and the imagination, but, according to the Archbishop of Hartford, called at his deathbed for a priest. Montaigne, too, asked for last rites at his deathbed after creating a literature in which God is barely mentioned at all. In his writing he claimed that the goal in life is to “take pleasure” and enjoy “true blessings” and “to rest content with them, without any desire to prolong life and reputation.” It is a secular vow of poverty—one he broke by calling in a priest to make permanent arrangements for his everlasting soul.

And what about me? My truths are clear: no personal God watches over me. No cognizant and responsive self persists past death. When the body dies, the self dies with it. I’m over. Accepting these simple truths enriches the only life we get. Most people, I suspect, know this reality but are afraid to face it, creating elaborate theologies to hide the truth and powerful ecclesiastical agencies to enforce the lie. Why? Because they are afraid to die. So what about me? During the final flickering of consciousness, will I, too, lose my nerve?

The final flickering of consciousness—the thought does give me pause. No one enjoys being awake more than I do. I don’t even like to sleep at night. I dread the minutes just before I nod off waiting for somnolence to come, and I postpone the ordeal, staying up too late. It is not the jumble of thoughts going through my head that concerns me—I enjoy them usually— but the counting down to unconsciousness, the anticipation of “death’s...

The car lurches, drops into a rut, into a pocket, gravel clattering hard against steel. Behind me, the road rises and falls like a sea serpent’s back, narrows into the vanishing point. I am too far from anywhere for anyone to see.

Anyone except a cow. She sees me approach, pokes her placid, chewing face through the barbed wire to watch. Our eyes meet, her quiet brown one, my little, anxious gray one, then she stares unblinking as I go on, and she disappears into the dust.

There’s a whole lot of nothing out here on the High Plains of western Kansas, especially once I get past the stubble fields and the badlands begin. Nothing but rocks, dry ground, cactus, ravines steep enough to break your horse’s neck. The kind of place where only bad things can happen. Scarlet Fever, snake bite, feathered arrow—thwack—through the throat. Out here is where the cowboy ends up lying against a rock squinting into the glare as vultures float in and out of the sun, licking their beaky chops. Maybe a rancher comes and saves him, maybe not.

A real tumbleweed bounces across the road.

Cavers say that descending into the dark of a cave, tunneling through rock on your knees, on your belly, you really face yourself. That internal darkness of your unconscious, your fears. The High Plains also call you to yourself, to that vanishing point of the nothing you are in the face of the cosmic void.

I am at the edge of annihilation.

Philadelphia in August is a steam-bath, the temperature in the eighties already at 6:00 a.m. on this Saturday in July, the air cloying with humidity and palpable city grime. I’m at the Convention Center downtown for the one-day taping of Antiques Roadshow, Public Broadcasting System’s highest rated prime-time show. I’d tried to get tickets to the 2006 Philadelphia taping through the show’s random drawing, which allows anyone to register for free passes months in advance. I tried stuffing the box by recruiting family members and friends to enter, but the Philadelphia show hit a new high: 23,000 requests for 3,400 pairs of tickets. Like the 19,600 other ticket seekers, my name was not drawn.

The random drawing system evolved by necessity. After the show’s first season, when they suddenly had eight million viewers, first-come, firstserved ticketing was “crazy, like a rock concert,” recalls Judy Matthews, the shows publicist. In Los Angeles, thousands of people lined up at the box office. “They slept on the sidewalks overnight. It created a human and vehicle traffic problem and a safety problem. It was scary,” Matthews said. “We call that the ‘clogging the freeway moment.’” In Richmond, Virginia that season, a woman fainted in the 100-degree heat as she waited in the line of 5,000 people, but when the ambulance arrived, she refused to give up her spot. In the third season, the show pre-ticketed through Ticket Master, but callers jammed the phone lines and the tickets were gone in fifteen minutes. “There was an access issue for older folks who couldn’t dial as fast or were not computer wizards,” Matthews says. The random drawing system (they do not want me to call it a “lottery”) has worked well. Since my name wasn’t drawn, I contacted Matthews, who invited me onto the set.

When I watch Antiques Roadshow, I feel nostalgia for something I don’t have. I’m envious of the guests clutching family heirlooms or telling poignant stories about a great-great grandmother who offered some famous Civil War general a humble glass of water and was rewarded with a trinket that a century later is worth thousands. Or listen to tales of the family silver or a highboy passed down for seven generations. Hearing these stories, I long for a tangible past, a record of my family in objects...

The few nods to ancient Rome that may be found in post-World War II American poetry (Robert Lowell’s “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid” or his poems in History about the likes of Cicero and the two Catos) stand in contradistinction to the numerous raids on the Roman archives in the first half of the century. One thinks of Pound’s appropriation of Propertius, Allen Tate’s summoning of Virgilian gravity and of translations such as the Zukofskys’ Catullus—all crucial work. Yet as the American scene took on, with its far-ranging wars, non-stop circuses and frank avowal of the ways of power, a distinctly imperial cast, the world of Roman poetry seemed to ebb further and further away. To ask a contemporary poet for an assessment of Horace or Juvenal—even in translation—would seem far-fetched. What relevance lay in that world of barbed satire, emperors and evocations of a sensuous yet modest good life? I Claudius made for television fare but so did every other era the screenwriters could get their mitts on.

There are plenty of reasons for our indifference. Not many people study Latin anymore and the world of the Romans is repulsive in more ways than one can count. If people gravitate to the classical world, it is to Greece with its philosophers and playwrights and democratic orators and lyric poets. The Roman world is associated with torture, slavery on a gigantic scale, gourmandizing, persecution and constant warfare. It is a world of unapologetic brutality. Greece is tragedy and myth; Rome is greed and appropriation. Greece is the original; Rome is the third-rate copy. Greece still vibrates to the touch; Rome is gossip about people no one cares about anymore. The shows of virtue that once had every educated person reading Plutarch no longer resound. Perhaps we read the Roman historians for a taste of the awfulness of the political life or the gory personalities of the emperors or the penchant for suicide, be it honorable or dishonorable. Perhaps the spectacle of our own insensitivity is more than adequate. We do not require another misshapen lens.

The Roman world with its emphasis on clans and obligations was a deeply socialized world. Everyone owed everyone. The winners were those men who could collect the most debts and could make a show of their position as they dispensed their favors. It is little wonder that the inner life the Christians praised appalled so many Romans so thoroughly...

Terese Svoboda’s most recent book, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret From Postwar Japan, is the winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. The book is in part a portrait of her uncle, a man she once saw as Superman: “With black Clark Kent glasses, grapefruit-sized biceps, lots of brilliantined thick dark hair, and a solid jaw, six-four and as handsome as all get-out, he’s the perfect match for Kryptonite.” Later, she discovered that during World War II, he’d been a military policeman in occupied Japan. And her father said he had a secret. As the writer in the family, Svoboda was supposed to turn his life into a story. She completed the book after his suicide.

Terese Svoboda’s previous books include four works of fiction, Tin God, Trailer Girl and Other Stories, A Drink Called Paradise, and Cannibal, and the poetry collections Treason, Mere Mortals, Laughing Africa, and All Aberration.

Florida Review editor Jocelyn Bartkevicius spoke with her on a summer evening at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where Svoboda was conducting a residency in creative writing. Read the interview.

Catalyst Books Press, 2008
225 pages, paper, $15.00

Before picking up Are You Famous? Touring America with Alaska’s Fiddling Poet, I hadn’t heard of Ken Waldman. And perhaps that’s the point. Waldman’s book chronicles his travels and travails writing, teaching, and fiddling his way from obscure, Alaskan thirty-something to semi-obscure, wayward fifty year-old. Over the course of that time, he gains a degree of notoriety amongst small lit mag readers, summer festival goers, fiddle enthusiasts, and school children across our country—but fame? His niche never crosses over into the American mainstream. And yet onward he toils, presenting us with this written account.

Waldman’s willingness to openly toil, openly question his chosen path may be his greatest strength as a writer. Far from unshakable, his persona is an honest one. We first encounter him in Alaska in 1992, fiddling with friends, when his elbow apparently gives. “This is going to kill me,” he writes. And thus begins a rather scattered, fatalistic—some might say psychosomatic— battle with something ostensibly larger than an elbow ailment. Waldman’s body breaks down progressively, gradually incapacitating him with joint pain. When doctors are unable to pinpoint the cause of his malaise, he turns to therapists, alternative medicines, naturopaths, New York City and a lonely woman who also suffers, and Arizona with one who does not.

There are passages in this book that bring readers close to the action with both reflection and imagery, as in a scene set outside Phoenix. “Later,” he writes, “as I jogged the hills near her house, inhaled the dry cool December air, took in the brown hills and white pines, marveled at the clear blue sky so big and deep that it seemed the perfect midpoint between water and space, I reflected that, yes, this was a miracle: I was really getting well.”

More often, however, the prose largely skims the surface, delivering a survey of experience. There is a highly summarized sense to this work. Dialogue and setting are scarce. There is a dearth of imagery and description, from the women with whom Waldman interacts to the many places he stays. He is or is not “attracted” to a woman; a shared hug may or may not “turn sexy.” We rush past the tensions and tiny dramas of life. Waldman “likes” some cities or regions or living arrangements, and “loves” others. Situations and scenes are internally weighed and flatly delivered. What we read too often lacks subtext.

In response to adversity, Ken Waldman moves. In moving from coast to coast, from romance to friendship to relationships of convenience, never really under his own roof, never occupying his own space, Waldman is, in a sense, running alongside a literary tradition. The book’s back cover blurbs entice the reader with favorable comparisons to such American legends as Whitman, Sandburg, Kesey, and Jack Kerouac. Certainly there’s a topical parallel between Waldman’s story of solitary, nomadic travels, and those restless, angst-ridden wanderings chronicled before him. Like his predecessors, the author suffers openly. His is a trial of loneliness, disease, lack of recognition, and marginalization. Not unlike the earlier generations of uniquely American writers and performers, Ken Waldman feels a bit cast-aside in his own time, under-appreciated and under-compensated, and alone; he is often, to borrow from Kerouac, beat.

Groundless and occasionally—as a result of his prolonged leave of absence from teaching, or a lack of tour dates—jobless, the author is a wandering artist in the moment. He moves about America as most of us leading traditional lives move about our apartments. Essentially homeless, he paces the continent. We instead wear paths in our carpets, or in the roads along our daily commutes, and envy people like Ken Waldman.

But what he does not convey to his readers, is that beatification which comes across so clairvoyantly in Kerouac’s early works. There is no personal illumination along the way, no candid catharsis with which Waldman’s readers can connect. There is primarily a quest for validation. Maybe it’s a function of his few and far between (early on), tenuous successes. Maybe we’re all needy. Certainly few of us are so open with it. At one point, a banjo-player with thirty years in the music business says to Waldman, “You’re living one of my dreams.” But Waldman dismisses the compliment, claiming it’s accidental, that anyone could do what he’s done. But the banjo player persists, and Waldman quotes him as saying, “I couldn’t do it,” and “Besides, you have something to really offer.”

Such small validations usually follow passages about credit card debts, travel expenses, and booking difficulties. Waldman’s world is a shaky, stressful one. Credit card debts? Is the contemporary artist so entangled in the grid? Maybe we don’t want to admit this reality. Mounting debt and difficulty finding professional recognition—it seems we who might choose this path should be prepared to struggle, and to look for rewards (and compliments) in whatever form they might take.

It is really not far into this book where we realize what we’re really reading; not a personal, poetic rendering of a modern struggle, but a practical, step-by-step guide to the slog. This work is not a celebration of the author’s lifestyle. He will not allow for us to romanticize what he does. In fact, he will not allow for any of his life experiences to be romanticized, which can both work for, and against, his writing.

This book isn’t about Ken Waldman. It’s about what he does, and how he does it. We never get a vivid sense of the man, just his work; nothing visceral, nothing bristling with the sad circuitry of life. Instead Waldman recounts the machinations and logistics of his professional progress towards something sustainable. He renders a thorough accounting of what it is to live and work on the road. We spend nearly an entire chapter weighing with him the pros and cons of finding an apartment in Anchorage, then another on the utility of buying a minivan, or a truck, maybe selling his beater. Pragmatism is important to Waldman and to anyone pursuing an independent performer’s life. He sums it all up early on in the book: “Past all the challenges of marketing and self-promotion, which sometimes could seem like a silly, stupid game, there was the fun part: the travel (which was sometimes paid), then the actual teaching or performing (which I loved and which was the reason I did all the rest of this), and finally the paycheck (without which, I couldn’t continue).”

Be certain that Are You Famous? is a must read for those seeking to follow in Waldman’s footsteps. His need to openly dispel myths of the road, and romantic notions of suffering, may serve as that rare, much-needed reality check for other aspiring artists. But also know that reading his book is not likely to inspire future generations to embark upon that journey.

Reviewed by Kyle James Shrader

Random House, 2008
304 pages, cloth, $25.00

In the opening chapter of While They Slept, Kathryn Harrison admits her almost pornographic addiction to true crime. She turns and returns to tales of murder and mayhem not from a delight in the salacious or to revel in the gruesome end to which humans seem capable but because these books reveal, as she puts it, “a need I only half understand.” What draws her to murder, to violence, to outlined bodies on the carpet floor is, in fact, her own traumatic past. Because Harrison’s investigation of a brutal murder begins and ends with her own story, While They Slept is less a reflection on an unspeakable act and more an exploration of the unspeakable itself. Harrison shares something in common with the murderer in this story, as well as with the survivor—all three have experienced the kind of totalizing trauma that divides a life into before and after.

In the middle of an April night in 1984, eighteen-year-old Billy Gilley took a baseball bat and beat his mother and father to death. Concerned that his younger sister had witnessed the event, he then bludgeoned her with the same bat, leaving her to die on the kitchen floor. All this was heard by his sister, Jody Gilley, then sixteen, who stayed in her bed upstairs, unsure of what to do. Billy, blood-spattered and breathing hard, appeared moments later at her door and let her know that they were now free. His hope was that they would run away together. Instead, he went to prison. Jody graduated from college, went to graduate school, married, and became successful in her career. Both suffer.

The story of the Gilley family murder extends the length of the book as Harrison unfolds the present and the past by relying on interviews with both Jody and Billy as well as with others involved in the case. Underlying this story and woven throughout is Harrison’s own story of abuse, a sexual relationship with her father and a mother who was both unavailable and cruel. We are never far from Harrison as we read about Billy Gilley and his sister. What she learns from them about how to live after “a previous self…no longer exists,” helps her understand her father, his kiss, and the story she tells of the past. Harrison writes about the Gilley family murders as a memoirist who knows that the telling of any story is really a telling of your own. Toward the end of While They Slept, she says, “there is nothing I write that doesn’t in some measure address what happened between me and my father, that doesn’t respond to the chaos he ushered into my life.” In highlighting her own stakes in taking on this project, she revises our understanding of trauma and what survival looks like.

One of the most compelling aspects of Harrison’s narrative is the ambiguity she allows to remain. Discrepancies exist between the story Billy tells and the one Jody recounts. In Billy’s version he suffered repeated and unbearable physical and emotional abuse by both his parents, abuse that pushed him to murder them as a way to free his sister. He describes how Jody asked him to kill their parents, begged him even. Jody sees the past differently, refusing the idea that she was complicit in any way with the murders, at the same time admitting she knew the violence Billy was capable of. She also claims Billy sexually abused her—something he denies—and that family life was not as bad as what Billy describes.

Rather than try to align these versions of the past, Harrison allows them to sit side by side, creating a kind of solidity in their ambiguity. In Harrison’s story, there is no good and evil. Her own past reminds her that truth bears many complications. Years of abuse by his parents may have led Billy to commit the murders, but in Harrison’s eyes that doesn’t excuse him. Of her own past she writes, “the fact that I suffered does not redeem the injury I caused.” Jody may or may not have been complicit in the murders. What Jody, and by extension Harrison, must live with is the knowledge that she has succeeded in ways she might never have because of “the terrible gift for which her brother still pays.” Nothing is simple, solid, or clear.

The only categories Harrison upholds are those of before and after, a life begun anew, the division that links her to the Gilley children and to trauma survivors everywhere who must decide how to move “forward from that point of division.” The form of Harrison’s narrative gives the reader some sense of what that beginning might look like. Serpentine in structure, the narrative moves back and forth in time, detailing events and scenes that happened before the murder while simultaneously telling the story of the day of the murder. Sometimes Harrison picks up Jody’s thread, other’s, Billy’s, and sometimes her own. The structure of the book creates a feeling of inevitability about the murders, the same inevitability people saw in Billy, that such torment would lead to greater suffering. Harrison ushers the reader along, lifting a dropped thread only to remind us that we all know where this will end.

Telling and retelling the story is a central part of surviving trauma, and it is Jody and Billy’s ability to tell their family story—through their own writing—that is essential “to their surviving its destruction.” The story, though, is never ordered, never complete. It comes in fits and starts, with legal and narrative truths entwined, revealing as many gaps as bridges. Harrison embraces the erratic nature of traumatic memory and lets multiple versions of the past rest alongside one another on the page. At one moment, when describing Jody’s return to the place of the murder, several people enter the house, two in one person’s mind, three in another’s, both equally true. Harrison lets go of her desire to weave the narrative into something comprehensible, a “story,” she says she “can accept” and instead gives the reader a story that is complete in its absences, solid in its hesitation.

The book is a fascinating exploration of trauma and how “it disappears you.” The lives of Billy and Jody, and ultimately of Harrison, are so intertwined, so bound together, that at one point Jody chooses to write herself into Billy’s head as a kind of penance for her freedom. Harrison sees herself in Jody, in the way she remains composed, even flat, when describing the tragedy, and she defends both of them to critics who see their “emotionless” response as suspicious. By the end, it is difficult to tell where one story leaves off and another begins.

Ultimately, Harrison gives up the idea of a divided self, or at least the idea that the division is simply into two parts: before and after. Harrison sees herself in all three of the Gilley children—the one who sought revenge for long-standing abuse, the one who escaped into the world of ideas, and the innocent victim who never had the chance to grow up. She “remain[s] these three selves.” That is the only story she can accept, the only one she can understand, the only one that makes sense. It is a brave statement that comes at the end of a brave book. Harrison received criticism for her memoir The Kiss from those who thought she was too consensual in entering into an affair with her father, not apologetic enough. While They Slept is a long-awaited response to those critics in its tireless journey into the nature of trauma and the impossibility of ever having an acceptable story.

Reviewed by Jennifer Sinor

Casperian Books, 2008
227 pages, paper, $15.00

Without Wax is the story of Wax Williams, porn star. Wax is a tall tale come to life, a modern day Paul Bunyan; but instead of being admired for his power as a laborer, Wax is revered for his stamina in sex. And where Bunyon’s height awes the masses, it is the length of Wax’s penis that makes him a star. Wax is always on the set. He can’t retire. Staying in sight, Wax is the industry’s spectacle and becomes folklore to those who can’t look away. Walsh’s novel focuses on the porn industry’s labyrinth, both figurative and literal, where characters can’t escape their own loneliness. “Wax wanders the booths at the convention, which are set up like a maze to make sure you go in at one end and come out at the other with no chance of detour or premature exit.” He stumbles upon a hawker of “authentic private investigator sex-surveillance photos.” But Wax thinks the shots aren’t porn but, “just sex, and that’s nothing to look at.” The true terror is not a random Minotaur, but never finding anyone else. “He wouldn’t be a porno actor if it weren’t for the fact that he has to because what else can he do with himself and his big unit.”

As an undeveloped and naïve adolescent, Wax didn’t seem destined for porn. He was shy about his body, anxious about undressing in the locker room. At the suggestion of the gym teacher, his parents start him on a puberty catch-up plan. They contact Dr. Johnson, practically a mad scientist, who prescribes Wax a cocktail of “human growth hormones, steroids, natural herbs, vitamins, and…freeze dried bull semen, ground rhino horn, pineal gland from an elephant.” Wax resists, and “makes every effort he can against growing bigger. He wants to stay small, to take up less space in the world. It would be easier to stay out of the way, to ask for nothing.” But at age sixteen, he grows quickly and painfully, resulting in his porn-perfect penis.

Walsh intersperses the narrative of Wax’s life with second-person “consumer profiles,” all of whom are at some level familiar with porn-star Wax’s legacy. Consumer Profile #1 features “Boothgirl,” who uses payper- view machines in the local porn shop. There’s never any face-to-face conversation between the Boothgirl and the men in the private stalls next to her or clopping down the stairs in post-viewing guilt. As a schoolgirl, Boothgirl took sick days to watch Wax’s videos in her VCR.

Consumer Profile #2 is “Tugger,” an unabashed porn addict with a shelf full of Wax’s movies. Consumer Profile #3 is not a person, but a place, “In Houston,” where two strangers meet at a bar. Later, they undress while a Wax flick plays. “It’s all the same. Like Westerns,” the man says. Their mix between love and lust blurs the lines of sex. Without lines from a script like a porno, they don’t say anything in the aftermath.

Wax’s producer, Lyle Mammon, a washed up standup comic, discovers him through a science journal’s published photos and report on Wax’s growth. Lyle apprentices Wax from his parents for a $10,000 contract. When Wax was a boy and told his mother he was running away, she gave him a postage stamp and said, “You know our address. Please write us once you’re settled in.” Walsh writes of the ensuing escapades between producer and star: “A conversation with [Lyle] can be like trying to catch your breath underwater.” Lyle and Wax go on the road hitting once a month male stripping shows at nightclubs to generate buzz. Later, they return to Lyle’s production studio off of the interstate far from porn’s Mecca, the West Coast.

Wax understands that porn is an act from his first film “DormitOrgy,” where he loses his virginity, to his final film “All Doll,” in which a mannequin comes to life. Even though he becomes a legend, Wax “kept silent in the press, worked often, didn’t seek publicity.” All the while, he longs for the normal life of an everyday man. Because the industry “is just sex and getting along in life without being alone,” Wax has many girls to fill the void. Nevertheless, he maintains his childhood hope of being left alone, Wax can’t seem to retire, since the man he is on film defines himself.

No work about the porn industry would be complete without paying some attention to outsized physical traits. But in this novel, the emphasis is on their freakishness. When Wax asks a female co-star why she doesn’t reduce the size of her implants, which are disproportional to her frame, she answers, “You can’t unring a bell.” Wax starts to wonder about the physical limitations of being large. Fainting spells follow his rigorous sexual performances. The cost to the rest of Wax’s body is a rush of blood leaving his hands and feet, seeping out of his arms and legs, making his extremities feel as numb as frostbite.

The industry’s cold void literally sucks the life out of Wax. After he suffers several complete blackouts (as well as a lawsuit for endorsing an enhancement product gone wrong), he considers career suicide: shortening. The industry views Wax’s decision as a “self-hating castration fantasy” at best. However, under the knife, when Wax is cut, he feels nothing. He becomes normal with less, and not a star with more.

To many people, pornography is another kind of violence toward women perpetrated by men. Without Wax challenges that view. The novel explores perspectives both inside and outside of the pornographic industry, the experiences of both producers and consumers. Wax, the great star, doesn’t even want to be recognized. He wants to live a life of solitude, but he is showcased as a freak for everyone to view. The Consumer Profiles create characters who, like the reader, view the porn industry from the outside, as a fact of life that they may welcome or just tolerate as a kind of background noise. This technique creates a kind of transparency and sympathy that mutes typical judgments about pornography. In a sense, that makes this quiet narrative that much louder.

Reviewed by Chris Wiewiora
The Florida Review