MEANINGS IN SMALL ACTS
A BOOK REVIEW BY LUCY JANE BLEDSOE
What Keeps Me Here by Rebecca Brown. HarperCollins, 1996.
The stories in Rebecca Brown's What Keeps Me Here demand the attention of all your faculties: brain, heart, and gut. These are smart, at times cerebral, stories, but far from dry or bloodless ones. Try as you might, you cannot approach them with a detached intellectual posture. This is a book to be read slowly, not only to glean the crisp prose but also to digest some hard messages about what it means to be human.
In Brown's last book, The Gifts of the Body, which won several awards, including the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian fiction, she stripped the process of death down to its most naked face, relating each tear, each drop of sweat, each fluttering eyelash, each breath drawn, each pill swallowed. There is a similar precision in Brown's prose in this new volume, a revelation of meaning in the most minute movements and actions. In the story "Bread," for example, a young girl obsesses about a prep school classmate's way of choosing, breaking, and buttering a roll. This girl, the object of the narrator's fixation, holds all the girls at the table in her power. Everyone knows to leave the one wheat roll in the basket of white rolls to her, and no one dares to eat her roll in the precise way that this girl does. Until one day when this girl is not present, the narrator, who has dared to think of the powerful girl as a bit of a friend, takes the wheat roll in her absence, and eats it in the exact way she does. But the girl shows up, after all, and catches the narrator in the act. She disdainfully refuses to take the wheat roll ever again, instead forcing the narrator to eat it, and in so doing maintains her power.
Brown's style is sometimes spare, always disciplined, but never constricted or miserly. Meanings and images fly off the page, occupy the reader's airspace, haunt her memory. In fact, most of these stories are about hauntings or obsessions. The characters are plagued by itches they can't reach, itches that grow into more serious annoyances-they are "marks," presences, relationships. The opening story, "Someone Else," begins:
Someone else is in here. Not just me.
There isn't room for both of us, there isn't room for me. But she abides, inside, with me.
In one of the most intriguing stories, "A Relationship," two women and a man are entwined in a triangle of obsession. Points of view shift and obsession itself becomes the only truth in the story. In "The Aqua Series," the obsession centers on a series of paintings on which the narrator has been working. After painting several of these, she begins stripping them of their paint. The itch in this story is that of the artist, part of what Grace Paley calls the "life of great longing," part of that painful, insomnia-producing search. These stories are themselves like insomnia, in a way. What Keeps Me Here is a good book to read in the middle of the night, not as an antidote to sleeplessness, but as a way to address nighttime demons and perhaps provide the comfort of company, if not of insight.
Though they were written over many years, they have an amazing cohesiveness. They are not linked, yet there is a strand that ties each story to the previous one. Sometimes it is just one phrase or one image, sometimes it is a concept. In "Faith," which follows the story "The Aqua Series," in which an artist strips her canvases of paint, the narrator experiences the disappearance of ink on her manuscripts. In the story, "A Severing," the narrator slices off the top part of her own head. In the following story, "An Enchantment," this act is repeated, but the slicing is done by another person: "Her sword came down and whacked the skin off the top of my skull." Each story in What Keeps Me Here has a subtle but exquisite segue to the next.
Rebecca Brown's prose is at once unceremonious and explosive. The intensity of the stories is achieved through concentrating upon simple deeds, which are recounted in few words. In an interview last year, Brown said that she didn't write her books "so that some deconstructivist will say what an interesting book I've written. I want to excite readers emotionally, intellectually, and artistically." And so she does.
Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of Sweat: Stories and a Novella and a forthcoming novel Working Parts.