[REVIEW] Excavation by Wendy C. Ortiz

242 pages, $28

Review by Alex M. Frankel

Wendy Ortiz’s memoir, Excavation, is an outstanding first book. It chronicles how the author, as a middle school student back in the mid 1980s, was seduced by her English teacher, Mr. Ivers, and how he carried on an affair with her over the next several years. The memoir is remarkable not just for its taboo subject, but also for the matter-of-fact tone Ortiz takes as she tells about her most unusual relationship. It is a relationship on which the author has had plenty of time to reflect: now in her forties, she works as a therapist in her native southern California. She has published both poetry and prose (including an essay in the “Modern Love” series in The New York Times) and is the founder and curator of Los Angeles’s Rhapsodomancy Reading Series. Alongside the main story of her teenage years, Ortiz has added vignettes from her personal and professional life as an adult, including her work with at-risk youth. These passages, beautifully interspersed with her adolescent tale, shed light on the person she has become, and also function as brief pauses following cliffhangers, enhancing the book’s atmosphere of danger and foreboding. All the while, the reader keeps wondering, “When and how is Ivers going to get caught?”

Ortiz—in spite of her literary background—is not concerned with creating a work of art: her style is plain, undistinguished. It is this very plainness, however, that gives the book its authenticity: Wendy is an ordinary teen who tells an extraordinary tale, which would be undermined if she approached it with the fastidiousness and polish of, say, Nabokov in Lolita. This is how she describes her first phone call to Mr. Ivers, later known as “Jeff”:

We talked about my writing, which he raved about, having read the contents of the red binder, my novel in the making. Films we hadn’t seen but wanted to see. . .

Over an hour into this conversation, this conversation that forced me to listen, reply, and think swiftly to keep up with the speed and flow of it, he used the word “crush.”

He said “crush” like I said it in sixth grade. . .

He said, “you” like I was the embodiment of some kind of dangerous elixir threatening to seduce him, forcing any control he might have over himself underground.

My teacher was revealing to me, admitting to me, that he had a huge crush on me. He said he wondered what it would be like to have his face between my legs, and I crossed my legs hard, trying to imagine what this must mean, flipping mental pages of Cosmopolitan in my head to remember what I had read of oral sex, what it might feel like, and I found myself enjoying the way he growled these desires in my ear.

The whole book is written in this frank and engaging way, and we see Jeff and Wendy vividly, poignantly, throughout the story. Wendy’s parents are alcoholics and almost completely absent; Jeff lavishes on her the attention and approval she’s never received at home. Wendy is a complex and interesting character, and while the author doesn’t psychoanalyze herself to death, her motivations are clear. Jeff, on the other hand, comes across as shallow and clueless. And yet Ortiz is restrained and non-judgmental in her portrayal of him: she refuses to demonize him, and readers are left to draw their own conclusions. But though he may be a shallow person, what is perhaps missing is a more complete picture, a deeper probing into who this young man really is, what motivates him, where he started in life.

Excavation is a swift, compelling read. We care about Wendy as she works her way through a tough adolescence. And, at the very end, Ortiz has a surprise for us. I can’t reveal it here, but it has to do with one key aspect of her life now, a life strongly impacted by her time with Jeff: “My own [biochemical] composition,” she writes, “was changed when I met and was taught by this man. He seeped into my existence. I smelled the danger and for many reasons, I wandered in.” In the book’s last scene we see her walking by the La Brea Tar Pits with her own daughter in a stroller. She ponders her life and her daughter’s future. She sees tourists “holding the black fence that keeps them from losing themselves in the lake of muck.” Ortiz herself is, like many of us, a victim of her private “lake of muck”; her work in this engrossing book is to excavate the “fossils” found in this muck, brush them off, study them, study their difficult history and their journey to survival.

***

Alex M. Frankel’s first poetry collection, Birth Mother Mercy, is available from Lummox Press. He also has a chapbook, My Father’s Lady, Wearing Black (Conflux Press). He writes reviews for the Antioch Review and hosts the Second Sunday Poetry Series in Los Angeles. His website is www.alexmfrankel.com.