Friday, October 22, 2010

a book by its cover

One of the last books I bought, before taking the vow I mean, was The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg: Stories. I read a review of the book in Bookforum, a publication that compels my addiction in alarming ways, and was intrigued. A viable argument could be made, however, that it was my attraction to the book's cover (by Hendrick Dorgathen) that cinched my intent. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg I'd like to pretend that my tastes in literature have to do with its more elevated aspects like style, content and form, but at some point I have to ask myself: how much of what I read is influenced by book jacket aesthetics? Or conversely, do publishers invest more in the covers of books they privilege over others? However a cover happens, being a sucker for them worked out well this time.

I found my way into the first story in the collection, 'Flotsam', in the most superficial way. The narrator is reeling from a wrecked relationship with a man named Robert, my husband's name, and escaping from their late home in Buffalo, where my sister lives. Of course these connections are tenuous and silly (though reading a first-person narrative wherein the narrator's recent ex shares your husband's name is more jarring than I might have thought, and there is something about having the experience and feel of a setting that exceeds the mere imagining of that place), but they suggest nevertheless a hypothesis concerning reading, or at least a manner of interacting with a text. I've never been comfortable with the idea of identifying with characters or situations in books, but I might say that the kind of writing I like is able to appeal to so many hundreds of discrete facets of myself, that it appeals to and so reveals these facets like light refracted.

I know, reader, what you're thinking: only a narcissist could imagine such an infinite self-containment and possess such an inability to differentiate herself from the other. But I say that I experience the other only upon my own person, most acutely when I am pained, when I lack, and that the other is intrusion and absence. This point was especially significant to me since I was reading the book while my babies were still stuck in the NICU (it had a permanent spot next to the breastpump on a small table in my bedroom, near their empty crib--let me tell you, it isn't easy to balance an 800+ page book and two pump bottles, but the committed adapt). They no longer existed within my own borders, they had become the others, absent from me in all ways. My desire for them surpassed all my other desires, their intrusion into my self became whole.

It's been written that Eisenberg's main characters are aimless and manic-depressive, but I think that what her women express (even the single male narrator in the collection expresses as a woman), in a sort of pedestrian manner, is this outrage of intrusion, the effrontery of lack, the real difficulty of interacting with the other. "How hard it was to figure out how to say anything to anyone!" wails the narrator of 'Flotsam', who consistently misinterprets and misconforms to those closest to her. She has the desire to relate but is mired in the trouble of locating the appropriate boundaries. I can also hear in this exclamation the lament of the author hoping to connect with a reader...