The Summer of the Sub-Comandante (review)

When a poet turns to prose, magic often happens. Witness Laura Kasische's Suspicious River, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. There is a clarity, a succinctness, a lyricism to the prose of such masters, a beauty far outweighing the subject, the plot, the story. With a poet's sense of timing and rhythm, each of these authors offers us unique perspectives and poignant truths about love, about life, about memory even as they present us with disturbing, if intriguing, characters. Poet Kathleene West joins the ranks of these narrative explorers, capturing characters in a way that properly represents both the nature of life and memory; for if memory - and life - is anything, it is fragmented, and never more so than in West's beautiful and rhythmic The Summer of the Sub-Comandante.

Imagine, then, a book you might curl up with in a corner of the sofa, reading from cover to cover. Imagine a book that can fit itself into your favorite genre, a book that skirts between prose and poetry, the novel and the short story. Imagine a book with a vibrant poetic sensibility that dares to call itself a novel.

West has created such a book, a lyric journey of depth and complexity that traces the life of a protagonist from childhood to intricate adulthood with all the bungled and oblique stages in between. The novel opens and closes in Nebraska with an awkward child and a neighboring family, the first to introduce her to happy individuality and sexual passion and so sentencing her to a life of searching, of being unsure of her place in the world, of always "escaping, free, blurring the edge of the canvas."

West keeps us at a narrative distance from this main character, creating an elusive protagonist we get to know through her pithy comments, wild journeys, dysfunctional relationships. Janey, or Jane, or Jana - her name, also elusive, adapted to her geographic and cultural position - is perverse, a woman "victimized by that retro cliché, the identity crises." She wishes for "a fiber-optic future that would match image to imagination" and "walks into a party the way first-time offenders walk into a prison: promising good behavior, hoping to get out fast and not get hurt." But a promise of good behavior is merely that with this protagonist, who finds "elicit relationships" too confining yet is unsure how to deal with a man without problems, and who requests that her lover leave on Sunday morning before noon, "citing 11:00 as check-out in major cities."

At times the prose, like Jane, is laconic, tightly bound around the subject matter as Jane is tightly bound to the past she screams to escape. What makes her interesting is that she is not only escaping her past but is also consciously running from the alternate futures presented to her. She is not comfortable in the armchairs of middle-class American houses, eschewing what her baby-boomer friends have embraced, a "sensible exercise program, children-of-previous marriage, spouse's children, and brand-new baby with community involvement and a diet plan that allows for an occasional pint of Ben and Jerry's organic ice cream." Even the more radical options don't appeal to her, as "(t)he sight of crystals makes her chakras combative, meditation causes a fine rash to rise on her upper arm, and she practices yoga as a competitive sport." Jane must then reinvent herself without the restrictive lattice of others' influence. The edges of her life must be defined only by herself, even if that means at all times being on the edge of happiness, rarely in the midst of it.

Jane is a woman searching for difference in foreign places like Phnom Penh, where people ride on motorbikes and "hold babies and baskets or smoke cigarettes, disdaining foot pegs and hand grips, balanced in yogic positions serene as any Buddha." She is an ironic metaphor making her way through the exotic countries she visits, learning...