novella

[REVIEW] Danceland, by Jennifer Pieroni

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danceland

Queen’s Ferry Press

150 pages, $18.95

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

Spare, poetic, and strange, Jennifer Pieroni’s novella, Danceland is the story of a child raised on fantasy in the wasteland of a former town. As Lettie understands it, “Their rickety cottage, its shingles loose, was all that was left of Danceland. They were Danceland’s survivors.” By day, Lettie and her father, Frank lead a life of simple sustenance. He goes off to work as a tree trimmer, and she helps with chores, such as carrying wood for their fires in bundles as “wide as Lettie’s hug.” At night, she and Frank read old reviews of her mother’s performances. All Lettie seems to know of the world is the steady regularity of her father, “a frown sticking out of a plaid overcoat,” and the mystery of Danceland, where she believes her mother once danced and entertained all comers.

Why doesn’t Lettie remember Danceland when her mother was there? Her father invents the story of a fever: “‘Higher than natural. It changed your mind and took away your memory.’” Even while Lettie believes the fiction, she “wished things would come clear, but she knew she was lost when it came to what was real.”

Lettie’s curiosity about the world beyond their drab existence develops suddenly when she is twelve. Until then, “Lettie knew no fear. Then, one day, it came.” It seems to arise from her concern over the seizures their pet cat, Nosey begins to suffer. In reaction to Lettie’s desire to find someone to help their cat, her father declares, “‘Nobody knows anything.’” Perhaps the flimsiness of this response finally overtaxes Lettie’s coming-of-age intelligence. Continue reading →

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

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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 →