A Book ReviewFlesh and Bone, Stories by Cydney Chadwick. Penngrove, Ca.: Avec Books, 2001. 187 pp. $14. Flesh and Bone is Cydney Chadwick’s second full-length collection of stories. Like its predecessor, Enemy Clothing, the new book consists mainly of short pieces written in an appropriately edgy prose, for Chadwick’s protagonists are ever vigilant as they deal with predatory spouses, lovers, co-workers and other acquaintances. Most figures who inhabit Chadwick’s stories are nameless, yet they possess an uncanny familiarity in their contradictions, quirks and persistence in trying to figure things out. They have a strange allure, too, which takes one into some odd territories. Scarcely more than a page long, “Prescriptions” indicates where most pieces in Flesh and Bone begin and end, in that corner of the mind swirling with contradictory impulses. In ways the piece resembles a distorted self-help manual cataloging patterns of self-defeating behavior. For instance, “We imagine being married, and at the same time insist we do not enjoy the company of men and fantasize about a same-sex experience.” Or, “We often feel stupid—or wildly intelligent.” In the last sentence of “Prescriptions” Chadwick almost suggests a way out, that is, by following “our narratives, those horizontal lines supposed to lead somewhere.” But it is a false lead, because the lines her characters follow are exceedingly erratic. A more accurate assessment of their predicaments might be found in the very first sentence of the story, in the belief “that we have gone crazy.” What does Chadwick mean by “crazy”? For an answer one should refer to Pirandello’s Henry IV. When “Henry” finally stops pretending he is mad and reveals to his attendants that he is sane, he adds an explanation as to why mad people are so unsettling, “Crazy people, bless them, construct without logic. Or with their own logic that flies like a feather! Voluble! Voluble! This way today and what way tomorrow, who knows!” [Trans. Mark Musa.] One of the more vivid illustrations of “Henry’s” view appears in Chadwick’s “Spring,” a story revolving around several visits that a wife makes to her husband, who has left her to live in a one room cabin in order to commune with the Lord. As time goes on, he grows more absorbed in his religion, and she becomes less inclined to re-establish their relationship. At first her motive seems to be his happiness, but eventually she realizes that she can no longer penetrate his logic, whose ultimate conclusion excludes her, “every time he touches her, loves her, he can’t find the Lord for days.” But the most disturbing moment comes at the end of “Spring,” when the man’s logic suddenly leaps to the brink of violence: She hides her resentment, her confusion and behaves as his friend. He is happy to see her. Her cheek is tingling. She is sure he left a red mark. He gets up from the picnic table and glowers. After he has struck his wife, the husband walks away, shouts that no one has the right to be jealous of God, and the story ends. In “Sleight of Fancy” the unpredictable logic of a “crazy” person manifests itself in reverse, so to speak, through being uncannily predictable. The principal male character seems to be following in the footsteps of Arthur Cravan: Dada poet, husband of Mina Loy and boxer who fought heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, although the match was quite farcical, at least according to the account in Blaise Cendrars’ memoirs in Sky. Chadwick’s story begins when the man and the woman protagonist meet in a bookstore over a collection of Cravan’s writings, Oeuvres. Next they begin collaborating on translations of Cravan’s poems, before finally moving in together. Shortly afterwards, the Cravan figure brings home some boxing equipment. Next he decides that they speak to each other only in French (Oeuvres is written in French), and after a time he splits, leaving behind a note saying, “Went to Mexico,” where the real Cravan disappeared without a trace. The gesture has all the affect of a predictable punch line, as the woman reacts, “She thought maybe it was supposed to be funny.” The protagonist herself, however, is not immune from the pull of the Cravan fantasy, particularly the violent undercurrents of the boxer image. When the woman discovers that three of the Cravan translations on which they collaborated appeared in a literary journal without an acknowledgment to her, she goes to the punching bag and hits it until she is sweating and breathless. A little later the two engage in a card game in which they strike each other’s knuckles till they are bloody, not even keeping score as if they had done it for sheer pleasure. In the end the woman becomes a victim of the fantasy, a prisoner who never quite gets the Cravan figure out of her mind, a fate ironically sealed by a note from the man stating, “Gone for good,” received just as she had begun to forget him. “The Golden State” is another story where the boundaries of the predictable and unpredictable blur, and eventually result in a kind of double vision centering on a woman jogger who typifies a California Girl, “an icon health-and-fitness woman.” Right off, there is a striking incongruity: the jogger is pushing “a large stroller, built for two,” which causes the principal character to speculate, in the first of several such curious observations, that the stroller is used to conjure images of motherhood in order to discourage male drivers from shouting obscene phrases. A times the jogging woman fades into the background, and the story shifts its focus to the narrator’s career as she progresses from student to executive director of a county arts organization. Just about every step up the ladder is accompanied by some kind of satiric comment. For instance, at college there is a professor of the short story who makes students search for symbols as if they were conducting “an Easter egg hunt for adults.” When the narrator lands a job in arts administration, she comments on her colleagues, “Not content to let their art propel their careers, they connived, manipulated and struggled for power with as much fervor and determination as anyone on a corporate ladder.” But, she adds, they “made much less money.” Each time the jogging woman reappears, however, the narrator’s speculations grow a little more involved and a little more obsessional. At first she wonders about commonplace things, like how the woman can manage to exercise so regularly, even if she were a homemaker. Later, after the narrator has advanced to her executive director position, she, quite by chance, sees the jogger still pushing the stroller, this time remarking that the babies “would now be in junior high school and at least five feet tall.” As she begins to see the jogger more often, the narrator’s logic becomes more malleable. Could the woman be running a day care center and taking some of her youngest charges out with her as she exercised? Could she still be using the stroller as protection against unwanted attentions, placing “dolls in it, or small dogs that stayed put.” The narrator’s final speculations, however, take a philosophical turn as she measures her life against the jogger’s routine: Did the jogging woman create the life she wanted, fighting to keep everything static, and given her appearance and routine, succeeding? It is not unusual here that many try to make time seize up. The leisure and financial security of being able to repeat activities over and over again is considered the good life. . . . Although seemingly cozy, this version of the good life is not an invigorating one. Ultimately the narrator cannot be sure whether she finds the jogging woman “compelling or annoying.” If there is a resolution to the dilemma, it lies in the final vision of the jogging woman with its dichotomies. Here Chadwick adds to the image of a middle-aged fitness addict, a touch of the heroine who strides off into the sunset, “I watched for several seconds until she became a speck of red-and-black spandex, moving in the bike lane in between a line of cars and a row of eucalyptus trees.” In Flesh and Bone Cydney Chadwick explores some strange territories, which are simultaneously engaging and unsettling, both to the reader and to the characters who people them. At the core of Chadwick’s stories one finds a common thread, a particular view of human relationships expressed at the end of her story “Mists,” “The perceptions and beliefs we hold to be true become damaged as we inevitably become emeshed in the mists of others.” The premise appears to offer a dim prospect, yet the result is thought-provoking, especially since it helps to create a series of stories well worth reading and contemplating. - editor’s note - Flesh and Bone won best short story collection of the 2002 Independent Publisher Book Awards. The awards were presented at Book Expo America in New York City on May 3rd. In the various categories there were 1,185 titles entered from 765 presses. |