[REVIEW] Farm For Mutes by Dimitri Anastasopoulos

203 Pages, 15.95

Review by Morris Collins

Dimitri Anastasopoulos’s pyrotechnic new novel, Farm For Mutes, explores the collapsing relationship between Luther Bouquie—a film restoration expert—and his wife, Sybil–a germaphobe suffering from a mysterious disease. Luther works to restore an early recording device whose purpose was to capture, but not replay, sound, while Sybil waits in cloistered withdrawal reliving the choices that led her to her sickbed (though Anastasopoulos remains wary of narrative causality). Meanwhile, an extraterrestrial observer—serving as chorus in all senses of the word—watches, hunts, and abducts via a frequency-altering scream the inhabitants of the Bouquie’s Buffalo, NY neighborhood.

So, this is what “happens” in Farm For Mutes. Or, anyway, this is the novel’s situation, but unlike conventional novels, it is a situation that does not produce narrative consequences. It is all epilogue: Anastasopoulos welcomes us to the moment just after his characters’ last possible choice, an aftermath unfolding at the end of their marriage. The “events” we witness are the consequence, perhaps, of previous actions–some of which we experience in flashbacks, unreliable memories, and travel logs—but the novel’s present tense remains pure reckoning. Or, maybe more accurately—pure echo.

The events in Farm For Mutes, then, mean more than they matter and Anastasopoulos uses sound as a conceit to link them thematically while at the same time questioning what a series of linked events (a novel, say) can possibly communicate. To be reductive, sound here represents the dead language of received narrative—the domestic conventions by which his characters make their choices and live their lives, and the narrative expectations readers rely on to cobble those choices into meaning. Viewing the Bouquie’s world from the perspective of the alien, Anastasopulos writes:

After arriving in Buffalo, a mute observer revels in such platitudes—natural
phenomena and human habits reduced for easy consumption—which give
order to life, encourage feelings of certitude, and thus allow a visitor from a
placeless place to better know the locals…Above all he despises nuance…

This, then, is the work of narrative. Rendering nature and society into platitudes for the easy consumption of a mute observer—the reader. Similarly, Luther initiates his doomed marriage by reducing a numinous moment (his first kiss with Sybil) into a narrative cliché:

So now: his chance, this moment, his everlasting kiss with Sybil. A chance to
force himself out of words, out of his reliance on things he could see and touch…
Breaking his kiss, Luther asked Sybil to marry him.

Faced with emotional complexity, Luther grasps for the “order” and “certitude” of convention. But if this is what contemporary readers crave from their narratives, Anastasopoulos is not necessarily proposing the experimental novel as antidote. Luther, for instance, views the antique recording instrument whose sound he must help restore as “a sculpture…that, beyond its magnificent function, had no intention of lifting the human spirit, a work that wanted to deform as much as inform.” An aesthetic object, bent on deforming meaning? This sounds like the criticisms usually levied against the experimental novel. Of course, Luther is not exactly a keen observer of the human condition, and Anastasopoulos’s narrator, although didactic, remains inscrutable. He opens the novel by admonishing the reader to distrust the “uncanny certainty” of memory: “Never trust your ears, never presume you know the meaning of mumbled words, be skeptical especially of aphorism and clichés.” Clear enough—and yet the novel defies simple reductions: throughout the book, the narrator coins countless aphorisms and the critique of the easy consumption of narrative platitudes comes at the end of an entire chapter of character exposition.

Indeed, in a text that makes conspicuous the limits of narrative language and form, Anastasopoulos displays facility for the traditional machinery of the novel: he employs stunning descriptions (here, a drunk woman’s voice: “her lisps, her sibilant tongue-swallowing, hardly sounded like a language at all, more like a sea creature gasping for breath, trying to relate everything there was to say about living at the bottom of the sea in the few seconds of surfacing above water”); uses scenes rarely, but to great effect (a chapter where two children torture a frog is a moving short story of its own); and concludes the book with an engrossing pastiche of that definitively nineteenth-century trope—the recovered travel log.

Ultimately, Farm For Mutes charts the way narrative produces meaning through a series of mediating frames—formal, causal, linguistic. In Martians, Dave Kress (mentioned in the acknowledgements, that other type of frame) writes that “any frame always churns out a story.” Of course, once we’re aware of frame there has been a rupture in the relationship between text and the world it represents. This is the process that Farm For Mutes effectively dramatizes: the anxious distance between frame and story, reader and text—a person and their certain world.

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Morris Collins’s first novel, Horse Latitudes (MP Publishing USA), came out this fall. Other fiction and poetry has recently appeared in Pleiades, Gulf Coast, The Chattahoochee Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Nimrod among others. He lives in Boston and teaches creative writing at College of the Holy Cross.