Prose Too Carefully Tended

On the dustjacket Patricia Volk is quoted as saying Raffel is "one of America's freshest voices since Faulkner," and setting aside what it might mean to say that America has needed something as "fresh" as Faulkner, the identification is accurate. Raffel's prose also has echoes of McCarthy and Proulx, but it is carefully tended more in a modernist than a postmodernist sense. The sometimes very short chapters have been published in a range of small literary magazines, and also bear the imprint of North American MFA programs. Every line wants to show evidence that it has been pondered. Cliches have been avoided, and the line has been condensed to some irreducible imagist point. (The first of many acknowledgments at the beginning is to Gordon Lish.) This is from the opening page:

"The sight of her, the aunt thought: wan unironed sister in the light. The hand a fleshy visor. Useless. To have traveled like this, with the heat and with the child, in the festering light, no bags but bags, the aunt observed..." (p. 5)

The book continues with this density for a hundred pages, which seem, at the speed of reading, to be 300 or more. Some drawbacks of this sort of writing:

1. Inevitably, if every line is interrogated, there will be moments of excessive, and therefore distracting invention. For me the first was on the second page, where the unnamed aunt's sister is said to have "a bra strap dingy as unrinsed teeth." That qualifier must have been Raffel's eighth or ninth try at an adjective, and it's good. Bras are rinsed, and can have the color of dirty teeth, but the simile is so wrought that it's mainly distracting.

2. Inevitably, there will be moments of over-writing. On the same page there's this (the aunt is trying to get her sister and child on their way home):

"'Shall we?' she said. 'Shall we hasten?' she said, and her sister--a touch, a breast, a way of moving, Mama to the child, Elise her name--said yes." (p. 4)

"Elise her name" reminds me of the intentionally awkward grandiosity of the less successful stories by Proulx, McCarthy, and others. It's supposed to sound at once modernist (in its inventiveness) and pioneering or rural, or perhaps even mythic and faux-Homeric. But who talked like that, exactly?

3. This sort of abbreviated qualifying phrase, together with the aspiration to conjure some indefinite past or timeless present (with echoes, here, of Steinbeck as well as Hemingway) lends itself to poetic repetitions. These can be obtrusive. For instance "That it was not kept up is not open to question," or "The child appeared to be looking at the aunt with what appeared to the aunt to be a fever in the eyes." (p. 6) These repetitions aren't from ancient tragedy or epic: they are knowing, hyper-eloquent, MFA-quality decisions, and therefore mannerisms.

The problems might not be visible, or at least not bothersome, if the writing relaxed into other modes. But it doesn't. It seems that for Raffel--maybe as she understands Lish, Volk, Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, and a dozen others she thanks--really good prose needs to survive a ferocious interrogation. That is certainly often true, but it should not appear to be true in every paragraph on every page. It feels as if Raffel is fighting a doubly losing battle: to avoid every cliche (while unhappily creating new ones all along the way), and to rise to Faulkner's level of craft by sharpening it to 21st century razorwire precision (but can a practice now almost a hundred years old be answered or even honored by late academic prose?). I think of Raffel as a disease of the contemporary literary magazine and MFA culture: this is daunting, if your purpose is to write an entire novel without nodding or even blinking. It's unfortunate the prose has no other speeds, no other levels of awareness and care. And for me, it's unfortunate that all that labor has been expended on old-fashioned scenes and ideas. ( )