Gorgeous Grotesques

FAREWELL NAVIGATOR
By Leni Zumas
Open City Books, 168 pages, $14

Open City Released a new book of stories last month. It’s called Farewell Navigator. It’s written by Leni Zumas. They’re not really stories. They’re also not gargoyles, but they’re more like gargoyles. They’re delicate tone poems that, however, center most often on the cruel, the disgusting or the sad.

This reviewer wonders whether that’s inevitable, whether stories (which are not stories) that are driven by the small-scale interplay of language, rather than by narrative traditionally conceived or by their broader conceits, will drift as a matter of necessity toward the flashy and the shocking. Must 50 brilliant sentences, constructed only as sentences, add up to one grotesque? There are only so many ways for a single sentence to be arresting.

Grotesque, this reviewer thinks, would be a fair word for a woman at a fat farm who takes so many laxatives that she begins to bleed; or for a blind mother, wife of a blind father, whose "breasts look like puddles of dough," propositioning her son’s friend in the kitchen in the middle of the night. (The blind parents, called Black and Blue, move carefully through the title story, narrated by their son and guide, who’s thinking of leaving them. Is it farewell to their navigator, or is he a navigator of farewells?)

This is not to say that there are not broader conceits or traditional narrative. In "Thieves and Mapmakers," a girl is taken up and then forgotten by a wandering punk band that drinks coffee but hardly eats; the girl’s seducer has been altered surgically to seem literally heartless. This can be the soured American dream. It can be many things. It’s a layered metaphor like papier-mâché.

In "Handfasting," a young man unravels the mystery left behind by a wandering girl who takes up hearts and breaks them, one by one. This progresses in a narrative. It’s written in the present tense. But even this one isn’t driven primarily by its story, but by its language.

When it’s successful, it’s the dense, fractured, crystal language of melancholy beauty. It’s perhaps most successful in "Waste No Time If This Method Fails," which alternates third- and first-person sentences in describing a love between an asylum inmate and one of the asylum’s lunch ladies. "He is the cutest at the franzy house," it begins. "He can hold his breath for three minutes. He lies on his stomach when he pictures the fish-stick girl, so his roommate can’t hear."

Perhaps it’s not a mathematical necessity that such language tends to the grotesque; perhaps because the language—like all such experimental language, like poetry, too, but differently, for being clothed in prose—is narrow, the writer chooses topics that seem to stand up without much detail: concept, that is, not nuance. In that way they’re like sci-fi; but they’re even more constrained. These stories aren’t Philip K. Dick—they’re a demonstration.

Leni Zumas can dance very well in a shoebox. It’s a beautiful shoebox. Some dancers lean on the shoebox walls, holding on for gravity, afraid to fall down, because if they were freed and onstage, they know they would collapse; other times, they only begin in shoeboxes, but look forward to the day when they escape, because they will flower and explode. Will she flower or fall down? It’s hard to be sure, but this reviewer looks for flowers. I would be glad to see Leni Zumas onstage.

Will Heinrich is on the staff of The Observer. He can be reached at wheinrich@observer.com.