Straight Talk from the Man with the Straight Horn

America Review Messerli continuedfrom previous pagein the world whose journeys into prisons are a trek to exotic locations outside of her everyday life and experiences. What may seem inside, accordingly, is suddenlyreversed, and the very role prisons play, that of incarceration, is obliterated in her visitations. The author makes this absolutely clear in the wonderful chapters devoted to Pollard's visit to "the house of brutality and suicide," a southern prison where mostly black prisoners, shackled together for work in chain gangs, are routinely beaten and tortured . Pollard tours this prison, housed in what was a former viscount's mansion, with its curator, Hans Bonnefoy, the grandson ofthe viscount, discovering in its twisting and turning confines half dead men, rotting in their bloody wounds. But the kid has escaped from this seemingly impenetrable fortress as well, and now others have followed his lead; it is Pollard's purpose to discoverhow these escapes have been accomplished. In his novels, Olson's characters have often bordered on being superheroes (figures such as Jack Church in his Dont in Lesbos [1990] and Billy in Write Letter to Billy [2000] immediately spring to mind), and here he reveals that Pollard is not only a clever analyst, but a master ninja who, donning black, invisibly joins the shadows as she stalks the prison cells to uncover the secret pattern of suicide and escape that pervades this bloody hall of horrors . She uncovers the method of escape, but in her newfound hatred of her role of would-be informer, comes to share the prisoners' objective. She is only too ready to return to "normal" society and give up her job—in short, to escape. As Olson soon reveals, however, there is no true escape to be found. Discovering a lump in her breast, Chris is imprisoned again, this time in a hospital where the surgeons' knives remove both her breasts and radiation leaves her head permanently hairless, transforming her physical appearance into a figure close to the one which she has previously imitated. With this transformation, once again, the boundaries of in and out— is she more like a man now in or out of costume?— are crossed. As in Olson's other fictions, moreover, The Bitter Half is chock-full of coincidence—and with an entire populace on the move, it is almost believable —culminating in the arrival on her farm of a young group of itinerants who propose being paid for performing circus ticks. Like a troupe of medieval performers out of Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1956), they preview their somewhat amateurish acts. Having previously postponed her annual gathering due to her illness, she takes on these acrobats, juggler , and loquacious impresario as the centerpiece for a planned costume party. I won't describe the Detailfrom cover numerous machinations of plot that weave together Bonnefoy, the kid's sister, and dog Buck, with various other characters into this celebratory event. I have long ago stopped scoffing at such chance encounters. Like Dickens, Olson takes up the various strands of his tale and places them within Pollard's confident hands. When a neighboring landowner, who had once hoped to marry Chris, shows up to the party dressed in drag and gracefully dances the night away with Bonnefoy, we hardly bat an eye! For the figures of this novel, we now perceive, all shift in and out—ofprison, society, sexuality, love, and reality. At fiction's end, we await only the return of the kid, who—this time with Pollard's unwitting help—has escaped once again. We can only hope that this is a final escape from the cold world in which he has so long been confined, that the kid will come home to sit in "the chair" Pollard's body has promised him. Douglas Messerli lives in Los Angeles. He has authored overfifteen books and is editorfor Green Integer and Sun & Moon Press. Straight Talk from the Man with the Straight Horn Vernon Frazer Steve Lacy: Conversations Edited by Jason Weiss Duke University Press http://dukeupress.edu 289 pages; cloth, $74.95; paper, $21.99 Throughout his career, Steve Lacy was an anomaly to the jazz mainstream, a cult hero to the jazz...