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FICTION/Walsh Joanna
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Subjects
Genres
Short stories
Published
St. Louis, MO : Dorothy, a publishing project [2015]
Language
English
Main Author
Joanna Walsh (author, -)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
115 pages ; 18 cm
ISBN
9780989760751
  • Fin de collection
  • Vagues
  • Vertigo
  • Young mothers
  • The children's ward
  • Online
  • Claustrophobia
  • The big black snake
  • And after...
  • Half the world over
  • Summer story
  • New Year's Day
  • Relativity
  • Drowning.
Review by New York Times Review

I RECENTLY ENCOUNTERED a new nonfiction term: "the constructed I." A quick consideration of any classic nonfiction text - one by Joan Didion, say - yields that the "I" in essays, journalism and memoirs is usually a partial invention. A nonfiction writer artfully sculptures an "I" narrator, similar to the way fiction writers sculpture their narrators. But what happens when a narrator is too constructed? When does artfulness ossify into artifice? Read together, Joanna Walsh's "Hotel," which her publisher describes as "part memoir and part meditation," and her new collection of short stories, "Vertigo," provide unexpected counterpoints to each other regarding issues of artistry, authenticity and vulnerability. They also raise additional questions about the newly popular - especially in nonfiction - fragmentary style. When does the reader feel enabled to fill in the blanks? When does the reader feel vaguely ashamed for wanting more guidance? Walsh, who is based in England, is an illustrator, writer, editor and founder of the Twitter hashtag #readwomen2014, established to promote female authors. "Hotel" discloses that Walsh worked as a hotel reviewer while going through a divorce. "Hotel," however, is not in the business of delivering a conventional autobiographical narrative. Instead Walsh approaches her material in a manner that is fragmented, citational and formally varied, thereby assuming, superficially at least, the innovative style of writers like Maggie Nelson and Wayne Koestenbaum. Some chapters begin with deadpan and whimsical dramatis personae (Wilde as a playwright; Groucho Marx as an entrepreneur). Others, such as "Marriage Postcards," are structured as a series of written communiqués ("This postcard shows the hotel dining room: No one is eating in there"). Quotations appear, from Foucault, Heidegger and Mae West, as do summaries of Freud's Dora case and an etymological explanation of unheimlich. Part 1, "Hotel Haunting," is an essay about hotels from Walsh's particular vantage point as a hotel reviewer and disconsolate, soon-to-be divorcée. My description possibly makes "Hotel" seem, on the surface at least, voracious and playful. At its heart, however, it is neither. Walsh's "constructed I" is corseted, pretentious and opaque. Rather than probe or illuminate, this narrator delivers riddlelike observations about, for example, a hotel bar. "A place to see and be seen, which is difficult," she says. "It is almost impossible to do something, and, at the same time, see yourself doing it." Midway through "Hotel," Walsh's formally restless approach begins to seem less an inventive way to convey her story (and her mind) and more a fashionable evasion tactic - one that is intimidating and disorienting, so that common desires for sense, order or the accrual of meaning are deemed moot, even foolish. I often felt like a guest at a luxurious but inscrutably defiant resort; when I complained to the concierge that my room was missing its bed, the concierge replied, "Instead of a bed, our customers prefer a strobe light." A strobe light is nice, but a bed is sometimes necessary, especially in a book about hotels and the emotional trauma of a broken marriage and a lost home. Freud would no doubt find it telling that Walsh, in a chapter called "Hotel Diary," deconstructs the lobby and the library and the switchboard and the restaurant and even the bedroom, but she has very little to say about the bed. "Hotel" has no platform for intimacy. The sadness driving Walsh's meditations fails to penetrate; the meditations themselves lack suppleness, curiosity and nerve. Walsh quickly abandons her cannier lines, thus turning a potentially fruitful and philosophical starting point into a dead-end aphorism: "In a hotel, everything must be just so." This is also true of "Hotel." The erudition and formal diversity on display prove, in the final accounting, to be "just so" : inert building blocks yet to be activated by a sweeping artistic vision. The stories in "Vertigo," by contrast, fixate directly on bad marriages and cheating husbands and the sexual threat of other women. Walsh's fictional narrators are, like her nonfictional one, armored and affected, but her stories reveal a psychological landscape lightly spooked by loneliness, jealousy and alienation. Walsh likes negative space and wordplay and repetition. Lydia Davis's methods come to mind, but Davis's narrators use logic as a means to hazard emotional connection; Walsh uses logic in a more expected manner, to keep emotion at bay. Of her mother, one character says what might be said of these stories as well: "She looks formal, arranged, neat. She cannot shake it." WALSH CAN OCCASIONALLY deliver frankness - "If I'd had any courage I'd have been a fat woman for longer" - but as with "Hotel," there's a prevailing and often infuriating caginess to many of the stories. They do not cut downward or inward; instead they move laterally until the energy simply dissipates. Her sentences are like a series of rocks expertly skipped across a body of water that maintains its surface tension, refusing to allow objects to sink in. Only the collection's last story - "Drowning" - threatens Walsh's emotional laws. Here eddying logic and wordplay yield to the despair of a woman on a beach, watching her estranged husband caring for their children. Pretensions are dropped; in their place is the resigned desolation of a narrator considering suicide: "I go back into the sea because there is nothing else to do. Or, there is, but I do not do it." In "Hotel," Walsh tells of keeping a box of treasured possessions under her bed in case of a fire, but "because I was always ready for escape, the fire in my house never happened." The final story in "Vertigo" suggests that Walsh might be ready to not be ready. She might be willing, in her next book, to let the fire happen. HEIDI JULAVITS is the author, most recently, of "The Folded Clock."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 11, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Walsh's penetrating short story collection evokes the titular feeling of dizziness. "I sense no anchorage," the narrator says in the title story, "I will pitch forward, outward and upward." It's a statement true of both the writing and the women in it; all share a detached tone, as if speaking from the end of a tunnel, and what one character describes as "uncontrol," lives lived in language more than action. This continuity of tone often makes it difficult to tell where one narrative drops off and another begins, as the stories are linked loosely together in flashes of syntax, which read like poetry and sometimes retreat into italicized, third-person meditations. In "Claustrophobia," a woman's relationship with food runs parallel to her relationship with her mother. In "New Year's Day" a woman's description of a party where "everyone knew how to keep some distance" is joined to her lover's recounting, a moment later, of all the women he's cheated on her with. "Online" is about a woman who discovers her husband has been online dating. Any navigational difficulties are worthwhile, as Walsh is an inventive, honest writer. In her world, objects may be closer and far more intricate than they appear; these stories offer a compelling pitch into the inner life. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Less a collection of linked short storiesthough it is that, toothan a cinematic montage, a collection of photographs, or a series of sketches, Walsh's book would be dreamlike if it weren't so deliciously sharp. At an oyster restaurant looking over the French sea, a women contemplates the likelihood that her husband is currently having an affair. "Where my husband is, it is not lunchtime yet," she says. "If my husband sleeps with the woman he will do so in the evening. As he has not yet done so, as he has not yet even begun to travel to the city where she lives, to which he is obliged to travel for work whether he sleeps with her or no, and as I am here in the oyster restaurant at lunchtime in another country, there is nothing I can do to prevent this." This is Walsh at her best, towing the line between an equation and a poem. The rest of the stories are equally precise. "Vertigo" is a snapshot of the family's holiday among ruins ("predicated on spending as little as possible"). In "In the Children's Ward," the woman waits for news from a nurse with kissing kittens printed on her apron. For the womanfor women in general, perhapsWalsh's vision of domestic life requires an identity in constant flux. With the witty and unsettling "Young Mothers," Walsh presents motherhood as a kind of regression: "Pregnant, we already wore dresses for massive 2 year olds." In "Online," the woman finds her husband's digital affairs and tries on his lovers' personas. "What do you like for breakfast?" she asks him, not untheatricallythe difference between her and the lovers is that she already knows the answer. ("That is where the women online have the advantage," she observes.) With wry humor and profound sensitivity, Walsh (Fractals, 2013) takes what is mundane and transforms it into something otherworldly with sentences that can make your heart stop. A feat of language. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.