Daddy's by Lindsay Hunter (A Review by Joseph Owens)

Featherproof Books

217 pages

OK, before I dive into this review, I feel compelled to offer my two cents on an issue I personally feel is pressing.

“Experimental literature” is kind of a nebulous term and ultimately a misnomer. Though it’s not a misnomer in the typical misnomery way people simply [mis]use terms out of context, but rather in a way that is almost insulting to those writers writing literature in a way that is considered “Experimental” by others—where calling the writing “Experimental” is ostensibly pejorative: “Man, this shit is weird! So it must just, like, be an experiment, right?” Weird and Experimental become synonyms. It (i.e. Experimental) becomes a term that gets applied when a work is different, difficult, or breaks with established conventions.

And that way of thinking is lazy.

This phenomenon is similar to calling someone like Zach Schomburg’s poetry “Surrealist” poetry (with a capital-S). Schomburg would tell you—in a really nice way because he is an incredibly nice guy—that the Surrealist poets were from a different era, the past, and that they were their own movement. So it’s fair to call his poetry “surreal” (with a small-s), but don’t call him a Surrealist.

Lindsay Hunter’s Daddy’s qualifies as small-e experimental literature. Her prose is unconventional and it certainly decenters the reader from his or her preconceived notions of how to read a book. For starters, you read Daddy’s from the top-down rather than from left to right. The reader is immediately forced to reorient him- or herself to the text even before reading the first word (an effect that might be lost in digital translation on an eReader).

However, Daddy’s is not as utterly convention-busting as Johannes Göransson’s Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate or Darby Larson’s The Iguana Complex. Hunter is still very much interested in allowing the reader to feel at least slightly grounded in most of her stories (more so in others), allowing the reader’s brain to wander a little and imagine the scene that is unfolding on the vertically-oriented page (as opposed to Göransson’s and Larson’s books that force the reader to pay attention to the text on a sentence-to-sentence level and appreciate the wordplay and technical fireworks occurring in the details each author has painstakingly implemented).

Another example of Hunter’s unconventionality occurs when you try to figure out what Daddy’s actually is. A few stories into the book, I tweeted Roxane Gay: “I’m not entirely sure if this is a story collection, a story collection-as-novel (a la Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son or Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas), or just an experimental novel.” After which, I add: “The greatest part is that it doesn’t really matter!”

And it doesn’t. Matter, that is—it really doesn’t.

Some of the chapter-/ section-/ story-breaks have dialog placed in quotation marks. Others do not. But whether or not what is being said is in quotes, you immediately see that Hunter’s decision was ultimately the right one for creating maximal effect. You, as the reader, trust her with all aspects of this universe that she is hurtling you through.

And therein lies the glue that holds Daddy’s together: its universe. Whether or not the stories seem connected by way of an overall story arc does not matter—you just know the given elements belong together. This also reveals Hunter’s genius: some stories are more experimental than others. Some are more narrative-focused.

I wonder if it’s possible that an air bubble got injected into his bloodstream in the crash somehow, that it will reach his heart and he’ll go down, his heart exploding like a firecracker in an apple.

Some are more focused on the interplay between individual words and sentences.

I want to tell her something that would shock her—something like, I had a dream I was licking your dad’s hairy chest, or, the lightning in your eyes looks like cinnamon floss, or, You’re ugly.

In summation: this is yet another shining collection of fiction from Featherproof Books (Christian TeBordo’s The Awful Possibilities, Patrick Sommerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, Amelia Gray’s AM/PM, Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas). The stories are unforgettable and will likely resonate with you on about 50 different levels. There’s an extremely good reason this is so popular around the PANK-O-Sphere, and that’s because this is an extremely good book!

*

Joseph Michael Owens has written for PANK Magazine, The Rumpus, The Houston Literary Review, InDigest Magazine and Grey Sparrow Journal (CELJ’s Best New Literary Journal of 2010), where he is a regular contributor to its “Man on Campus” section and an associate editor. Additionally, his short story “We Always Trust Each Other, Except for When We Don’t” was nominated for both Dzanc Books‘ Best of the Web 2011 anthology and storySouth‘s Million Writers Award. Joe lives in Omaha with five dogs and one wife.