Prairie, dresses, art, other

Dutton (SPRAWL), an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, bounds across genres and artistic forms in these freewheeling meditations on art and literature. The "Prairie" section offers up uncanny fictional vignettes that contrast vivid descriptions of nature's beauty with the unease of impending climate crisis. For instance, in "Nocturne," a mother observes red clouds and "moon-faced flowers... white and alive in the night" as she drives her son home after visiting her parents during "the hottest week in the world," when three-inch hail assailed Texas and massive holes opened in the Siberian permafrost. "Sixty-Six Dresses I Have Read" strings together brief literary excerpts about dresses from the works of Edith Wharton, Jamaica Kincaid, Joyelle McSweeney, and other authors, raising implicit questions about femininity, fashion, and social status. Elsewhere, Dutton reflects on writing "fiction in response to visual art because the process... helps estrange the world for me," and presents a delightfully surreal, plotless one-act play (complete with stage directions for the audience) about storytelling's power to preserve the impermanent and intangible. The eclectic entries make for exciting reading, adding up to a surprisingly cohesive whole that testifies to art's ability to inspire new ways of seeing the world. Relentlessly surprising and thoroughly original, this dazzles. Photos. Agent: Cynthia Cannell, Cynthia Cannell Literary. (Apr.)

A shimmering and perplexing work that challenges the constraints of traditional prose. In her finely tempered collection of essays and experimental writing, Dutton, author of Margaret the First, explores a conceptual take on storytelling involving the ineffable feeling of a text, beyond mere words. Her work is highbrow while remaining mischievously playful, reminiscent of the form-smashing thrills of writers like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson. The first section, "Prairie," features five abstract stories that eschew plot in favor of hazy, memoir-like fragments. The poetic and peculiar "Dresses" is an artfully arranged list of excerpts from poems and novels that include mentions of a dress. Despite the content coming from outside sources, their collaged curation transforms the texts into something unsuspectingly resonant. The revelatory essay in "Art" helps unlock Dutton's puzzles. Here, she discusses contemporary art and the practice of ekphrastic writing, a technique that not only describes visual art in words but also aims to render in language and tone how a work makes a person feel. The author explains her interest in writing a text that can expand beyond its edges and open "a space within which we attend to the world." "How might a story embody a specific way of looking?" she asks. "Other" further develops these ideas. In the short narrative "Not Writing," Dutton briefly discusses the minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin and how scholar Olivia Laing noted "they aren't meant to be read, but are there to be responded to." Dutton asks, "Is it wrong to want to write towards what isn't intended to be read? What I want is a story that's an object that can turn itself inside out." The author not only introduces big ideas; she shows her readers how to grapple with her lofty questions. An unassuming work of literary theory that will dazzle hungry scholars. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.