[REVIEW] An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky, by Dan Beachy-Quick

256 pages, $15.95

Reviewed by Michael Peck

Fairy tales are the Legos of art. From Mother Goose in 1695 to Pan’s Labyrinth, they uncork latent desires and dreams left otherwise bottled. Very much in that vein, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky sits at the crossroads of Gen X frustration and childlike wonder. “There is a line across which the fact wanders and becomes imaginary,” Dan Beachy-Quick’s narrator says, “but like the equator, it is an imaginary line — one crosses it and knows something is awry only when the stars rise at night in ludicrous combinations.” With Purest Sky Beachy-Quick crosses and re-crosses that demarcation, then implodes it.

The protagonist of Purest Sky, Daniel, is in the process of uncovering a fairy tale volume, Wonders and Tales, a tome his eccentric father forbade him from perusing as a child. That volume, Daniel believes, holds the key to his father’s journey to the Galapagos Islands in search of an occulted scroll of songs and the hardships meted on Daniel ever since. Weaving in his doomed relationship with Lydia, a woman who chooses physics over love, and remembrances of his entire family’s demise, Beachy-Quick rifts the world neatly in two.

His sense of wonder keeps the novel from being a brooding tone poem. Darkly sweet vignettes offset the grief-stricken perimeters of Daniel’s morose academic life and his struggle to finish his work, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky. Anonymity, the anxiety of influence (“All fathers are monsters,” Daniel notes at one point), refractions and reflections of the self (where does Dan end and Daniel begin?) are glimpsed through the winking subtexts of fairy tales and their hold on the narrator’s reveries. Looming behind all these stories is the super-myth of Moby Dick. In many ways the ultimate American fable, Melville’s whale can be made to symbolize nearly everything. Lectured on, deconstructed, slyly acknowledged throughout, it is the background to every one of Beachy-Quick’s real and imagined episodes, a titanic influence among the work’s acknowledged borrowings.

As with Perrault, who appended his tales with conflicting morals, Beachy-Quick offers no easy interpretation. Only that these miniatures are the ballast of Daniel’s incomplete childhood, a mode of eavesdropping on the arcane tales of his upbringing. The power of fairy tales is explicit in the variations of their constant retelling, not to give Daniel’s life some quaint validity, but to give his experiences a circumscribable dimension wherein the difficulties of his past become entangled with fantastical impressions. A sleeping giant mistaken for a hill, the ocean beneath a girl’s floorboards where she loses her mother’s pearl, a lonely leviathan dreaming up the world’s existence — these are the often dreary fantastical tales caught in Beachy-Quick’s melancholic web-work. Purest Sky is really two works in one: a first-person identity crisis and a compendium of fairy tales. Initially, these narratives are kept apart, but as the work progresses, they interweave in surprising patterns. (One beautiful example occurs in the middle of a lecture by Daniel, when a pearl rolls between desks in the classroom, ostensibly coming from the story of Pearl.) Verisimilitude and enchantment here concoct a duplicitous realm of allegorical, and indispensably spurious, memory.

Filled with the panning-in elegance of a Tarkovsky film and a doleful New England lyricism, Purest Sky is a singularity. Philosophy and poetry collide, colored in by fairy tales and the childhoods they possess — equal parts Edith Wharton and the brothers Grimm. At its core, Purest Sky makes inquiries about oneself — what it is, where it came from, how wonders and tales can mold and modify it — and to provide the ghost of an answer: it is a pantheon of fairy tales we recite to produce some semblance of who we wish to be. Purest Sky traffics in the mysterious and the perplexing, yet finds its beguiling power in the mundane — in classrooms, apple trees, county fairs — until the mundane and the magical become all but indistinguishable. Answers and logic are far from enchanting. In Beachy-Quick’s folklore, they can be monsters, too.

***

Michael Peck’s work has appeared in The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Juked, Eclectica and elsewhere. His first novel, The Last Orchard in America, is forthcoming from The2ndHand. He lives in Oregon City, where he deals in rare books.