[REVIEW] Rainey Royal, by Dylan Landis

Rainey

Soho Press

256 pages, $25

 

Review by Sara Lippmann

 

When I was in the fifth grade, a new girl moved to town. Kelly (not her real name) was blonde and beautiful in that classic Mattel way plus she had boobs. She smacked her gum and mouthed off in class and gave hell to her parents – her adoptive parents, she’d never forget to add – and picked on any kid who played by the rules. Boys were crazy for her and she knew it and she knew what to do.

She lived a couple blocks away, so I walked her to school. I showed her around the neighborhood. My teacher pulled me aside and warned, “Stick with her and you’ll wind up a junkie,” but that did not deter my 10 year-old self from becoming Kelly’s eager minion – if anything, it drew me faster to her designer-jeaned hip.

She was my Rainey. The star of Dylan Landis’ tremendous first novel grabs the reader by the throat on the first page and does not let you out of her hot fist. Rainey Royal – the name alone! –  is the quintessential mean girl, worshipped by other girls, who intimidates her teachers, worldly beyond her years, the girl who entrances the boys, whose amped sexuality sees lust everywhere, from the Pearls Drops commercial to the “muscles in the thigh of a Christ,” whose magnetic spell one could drink up and drown in.

Rainey comes by her appeal honestly. Her father, Howard Royal, is himself larger than life, a famous jazz musician and polyamorous lover –  can we just call him a slut? –  who practices free love with his many students/acolytes. When the novel opens in 1972, Rainey’s mom, Linda, has moved out of the city for an ashram in Colorado, seemingly fed up with their dingy village townhouse’s revolving door of bed partners (even if she’s had her share), leaving Rainey alone in the jazzy sex den with all its potential dangers – including her father’s creepy best friend, Gordy, a horn player, who visits Rainey’s bed to stroke her hair at night.

Her home life unstable, Rainey is tough. She’s become adept at navigating the world without supervision. An absent mother, a self-absorbed father who puts her on the pill at 14, it’s no wonder there’s an almost desperate hunger to her need for influence, a penetrating sadness to her attention-seeking, pain behind her cruelty. She can’t keep alienating people; even her victims become friends. After hazing Leah Levinson, “Rainey, with pleasure and surprise, realizes that her powers sharpen when she opens the cage door, not when she locks Leah in.”

The novel follows Rainey over roughly a decade – from the early 70s until the early 80s. In Landis’ assured hand, New York from this period comes alive with wit and grit and clouds of smoke, tie-dye scarves and pink shag carpet, as a time when music carried out onto the street (along with the occasional weapon) and artists could get by on creativity alone, a city pulsing with heart and soul before it sold out to the slicks of Wall Street.

Even at her most horrible – when Rainey and her best friend, Tina, follow a couple at gunpoint into their apartment and rob them of small, meaningful things, like letters and family photographs – she is complex and interesting. She has an eye for objects. She collects.

Rainey makes tapestries. “’I can always tell what emanates from a thing,’ says Rainey. ‘I work with objects that belonged to the dead.’” They don’t pay much, so she mooches. For a while she even shacks up with the elderly widower for whom she’s making a wall-hanging about his dead wife.

Meantime, her father, the great Howard Royal, proves to be one of the most disappointing and heartbreaking characters in literature. After Damien, one of his musical freeloaders, sexually assaults Rainey in her bed, not only does Howard fail to protect his daughter, allowing the offender to keep living under his roof –  he all but calls her a liar:

“’Maybe he misunderstood your cues,’ says Howard. ‘Maybe what you are experiencing now is called regret.’

He reaches over and palms something on his nightstand, and Rainey hears the tiny tambourine sound of a pill bottle being shaken.

‘Regret?’ says Rainey. ‘You think what I’m experiencing now is called regret?’

‘Sweet baby girl,’ says Howard, ‘take a Seconal.’”

Like Rainey’s tapestries, the novel is stitched together through self-contained chapters, all of which function beautifully as independent stories. I’d read “Trust” last year in Tin House without realizing it was a part of something longer. Like her rebellious protagonist, Rainey Royal bristles against convention, thumbing her nose at stodgy attitudes on how a novel should be built, and instead offers something wholly refreshing. Perhaps we’ve seen hints of this before, in Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, or Jennifer Egan’s kaleidoscopic A Visit from the Goon Squad, but what sets Rainey Royal apart is almost all of the sections are firmly rooted in Rainey’s point of view.

Linked stories. Novel-in-stories. I don’t care about semantics. What I care deeply about are Landis’ brilliant structural choices.

If short stories tend to favor the jump cut as a means of ramping up the stakes and propelling the action forward, then Landis, with her chapters/stories, has taken the jump cut to a whole new level. What she has done, in effect, is remove a lot of connective tissue, the slow paced, often draggy fillers of chronology. Maybe we don’t see the day Rainey graduated from high school, but the reader does not require this kind of hand holding and Landis knows it. Instead, she masterfully weaves in crucial details that bring us up to speed even as they don’t assume primary focus, choosing instead to spend time on only the moments that matter. She trusts her reader’s ability to make those, which translates to a most rewarding experience.

Contrary to the belief that the Great American Novel – like all things American – has to be supersized, Rainey Royal is 250 pages of lean, meaty proof that this simply isn’t true. The only thing this novel lacks is that indulgent bloat, those 50 page tangents readers skim or skip over but mostly forgive in the name of greatness. (Or Goldfinch. Or Franzen.) Landis offers a bold alternative of which I hope we see more and more: the novel as feat of compression.

Rendered tautly through crisp, beautiful, often hilarious prose, Rainey is a character who lives on in readers’ minds long after the last page. It’s no surprise she first appeared in Landis’ earlier story collection, Normal People Don’t Live Like This. Rainey is still bursting with stories. I haven’t stopped thinking about her.

Why, thinks Leah, why do you love her? She knows why she loves Rainey Royal, who is both cruel and kind, who works with objects that belong to the dead, who can sweep her gaze across Leah’s white-box life and make her feel, if only for an hour, that she is the most thrilling person Rainey knows.”

As for my Rainey?

Kelly made an irresistible bully. Our friendship (if you could call it that) involved my tiptoeing around her so as to not trigger her volcanic moods, putting out fires when she erupted. I did her homework, forged her parents’ signature on detention slips. In return, she gave me her hand-me-down jeans. In return, we drank beer with high school boys. By middle school, she’d terrorized half the class – and this was before the Internet.

When I finally stood up for myself, we broke-up. Ours was a hysterical, all consuming break-up that would drive her out of school and haunt me for years. I haven’t seen her since I was 13. I hear she is a counselor, specializing in the troubles of teenage girls.

 

***

Sara Lippmann is the author of the story collection Doll Palace. 

 

[REVIEW] Bound by Blue, by Meg Tuite

Bound by Blue

 

Sententia Books

186 pages, $15

 

Review by Sara Lippmann

 

The title delivers.  Bound by Blue is everything it promises to be – a haunting, heady collection about those shackled, bound by their individual brand of blue – pain, aching sorrow, screaming memories of childhood trauma.  Meg Tuite takes on the awful, the tormented, and the twisted like no other writer. Her characters are not ones to seek out for a moonlight stroll or to cozy up beside on the couch for a breezy rom-com. They can be terrible, but we understand them as survivors; they have suffered from and remain inextricably tied to the brutal, never-ending cycle of abuse. Even when they are unforgivable they are human. The thirteen stories feel almost feral, boldly defying conventional norms with lyrical complexity and startling imagery.  Tuite’s prose is fearless and fanged, exquisite in detail – mirroring the barbed edges of her characters whose nightmares stalk them long into dawn.

Hurt is everywhere. Almost all of Tuite’s characters are victims of unspeakable acts inflicted upon them by mothers, fathers, random boys, local men, and other family members. A go-getter medical student is ruled by her eating disorder, the outgrowth of a savage backwoods assault. A grown man gouges out his eye, irrevocably ruined by his own mother’s sexual coercions.  A child tears out her own tooth as a cry for help against her older brother’s friend, a predatory neighbor.  A caretaker to an elderly man is haunted by the cries of a demented, downstairs tenant.  A delusional housewife can’t escape the damage of a destructive marriage and a childhood rape. Continue reading

[REVIEW] Dear Lucy, by Julie Sarkissian

Lucy

 

Simon & Schuster
340 pages, $25

Review by Sara Lippmann

 

The unfortunate case of Dear Lucy is one of poor packaging: square peg, round hole kind of thing. This novel, at its core, tells a twisted, dark story, full of grit and desire, promise and protest and crimes of heart. Sarkissian is a talented and ambitious writer with a natural ear. However, she needed an editor to trim the fat and repetition that bog down the book, and to allow it to be what it seems begging to be: a smart, slim, offbeat tale of longing and difference and love, about how to carve a home in the world when the world shuts you out.

From the outset, the message is muddled. With its sunny colors and whimsical, lighthearted 50s style, the book jacket of Dear Lucy is misleading. This is not a cheerful, breezy narrative about letter writing, chickens or eggs. This is a heartbreaking story of a mentally-challenged young woman whose mother has dumped her on a farm owned by crazy abusive Christians and the friendship she forms with a pregnant teen who has been similarly ostracized. Together, they struggle for independence and understanding. Continue reading

[REVIEW] The Lucky Body, by Kyle Coma-Thompson

Lucky body

Dock Street Press

158 pages, $16

 

Review by Sara Lippmann

 

The human body is a mysterious, contradictory bully of a beast. Capable of extreme cruelty, of exercising raging pain, humiliation, and destruction upon others, it also is an emotional vessel of hope and love, the tender home of the brain, the spine, the heart. Is the body ever knowable? And what’s inside – can all that ever be understood? In his brilliant and remarkably strange debut collection, Coma-Thompson explores these questions, examining the complicated and conflicting impulses of the human body, and the human collective through divergent lenses. The result is a daring, beguiling body of work unlike any other that demands your attention. Read The Lucky Body slowly, then reread it again and again.

The opening and title story sets the tone of the book. “The Lucky Body” has been brutally murdered and mutilated. Who was the body? Conjecture follows, accruing like an incantation, an ode to the body, what it might have been, who it was, the life it might have once contained.  “It might have attended one of the better boarding schools in the upper Northeast.”  Also possible: “A series of women had loved the body for its many perfections, but also for the gentleness with which it inhabited: the warmth coming off its naked length.” Coma-Thompson is also a poet, and his stunning lyricism is evident throughout, such as in this passage that describes the motivation for the hunt and capture, the subsequent killing:

 The body had walked this earth as one of the lucky, and because of that an ineffable glow radiated from every part of it, and it was this they spotted one day and followed for three blocks and admiring it made plans to eventually snatch it off the streets and mine it for what they imagined was its hidden gold. Continue reading

Could You Be With Her Now, Two Novellas by Jen Michalski (A Review by Sara Lippmann)

Dzanc

$15.95/ 180 pgs.

“The novella,” Ian McEwan writes, “is the perfect form of prose fiction.” And yet, McEwan laments in his short essay, ‘Some Notes on the Novella,’ published in The New Yorker last October, an overwhelming number of writers find themselves “slaves to the giant” i.e. the novel – “instead of masters of the form.”

Not so Jen Michalski.

Michalski, a Baltimore-based writer and editor, knows exactly what she is doing when it comes to choosing form to suit a particular narrative function. The author of two short story collections, From Here, and Close Encounters, her first novel, The Tide King won the 2012 Big Moose Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press this spring. In the meantime, last month Dzanc Books released Could You Be With Her Now, a stunning pair of disparate but resonant novellas that showcase not only her enormous range but also the form in its tidy splendor.

While on the surface these works seems worlds apart, emotionally the characters are united by loss, alienation, and their desire to be understood. At the center of it all is Michalski’s masterful hand, at once compassionate and unflinching, possessed of extraordinary, aesthetic restraint. What she has given us are two lean bodies of incredible depth and ambition. Compression wins out at every turn, so that each word feels integral, without sacrificing her tremendous ear for language. The umbrella title for the two novellas, Could You Be With Her Now, comes from a line in the second pertaining to a fleeting, fiery romance with a lover, long dead, and speaks to the ache of impossible love, a current that runs through both stories. Both novellas hinge on the feeling, expressed by Alice, a character from the second novella, May-September:  

Something had been lost, or taken, or was never hers to begin with, even though she realized with a ferocity that she had wanted it more than anything. Continue reading