Distance Mapped

Distance Mapped Holly L. Baumgartner Hangings: Three Novellas Nina Shope Starcherone Books http://www.starcherone.com 303 pages; paper, $16.00 In Peter Greenaway's 1996 film, The Pillow Book, the female protagonist struggles after her lover's death to become the pen instead of the paper. To provide inspiration and to give contour to her experiences, she searches ancient Eastern traditions for written traces of women's lives. In Hangings: Three Novellas, Nina Shope paints characters who similarly struggle for voice. Her book, however, is informed by the ancient Greek and Roman roots that undergird the Western Tradition, especially the worlds of women, which, though written about obsessively, were never voiced by the women themselves . Shope reminds us that perhaps the memory of those ancient stories clings to us in ways we have yet to imagine. In "Hangings," the first novella, a young girl's emerging sexuality and her mother's slow collapse from breast cancer are braided together with the Greek myth ofArachne, a weaver transformed into a spider by Athena. "In Urbem" unleashes all that is trapped in the foundations upholding the modern city: from the voices of the Vestal Virgins and the Sabine Women to the mistresses and mothers of emperors . Finally, "Hagiographies" explores the martyred female friendships of two college roommates paralleled with that of two little girls, all of whom must negotiate the labyrinth of loss, which, Shope suggests, does not necessarily lead to healing. Hangings, winner of the Starcherone Fiction Prize, is catalogued as experimental fiction, a term that always make me nervous, implying that a daunting text awaits. However, what I thought would be a three-day Odyssey turned into an afternoon excursion . The book exemplifies the best ofexperimental fiction: jarring us out of our complacency with narrative , challenging our conceptions of the writer's craft, overturning our expectations of language. One strange effect of this book is that the three novellas , so very different in tone and topic, can be read seamlessly; likewise, any discrete page becomes a poem. This effect is enhanced by Shope's mastery of white space. On many pages, only a paragraph darkens the frame. Though this could easily have served as a disruption, it instead becomes a space of absorption, a space to breathe before the cut of the next razor-sharp textual dagger. Though the novellas are enriched by their intertwining proximity, they are equally concerned with the claustrophobia ofdistance, the intersections between presence and absence. White space and text both work to alienate and embrace the reader. "Hangings," for instance, analyzes the "gap" between mother and daughter, the way "[ojn the x-ray, the tumor shows up as an emptiness." The daughter "measures herself in distances," starving herself to take up less space, to be "less," and so "bridge the distance" to her mother. Similarly, in "In Urbem," Tarpeia and Caesar's mother "trade territories and map out cities around one another's feet" while Archimedes's bath translates to a symbol of displacement , an image continued in the third novella. When the two little girls in "Hagiographies" first meet, one is standing in a wading pool only to find "the water pushed higher up her legs by the weight of another body entering" as her new friend joins her. For the older pair of friends, the two college girls, "even when they cross campus separately, they leave room for each other." Like the characters that inhabit them, each novella leaves its traces in the others, their overlapping spaces not easily teased apart. The pages, like transparencies, stack together to form layers of meaning. The reader can look down through their clear depths yet never see bottom. White space becomes a space ofabsorption, a space to breathe before the cut ofthe next razor-sharp textual dagger. Shope situates the female body as a site of transformation, changed by a monstrous corrosion from cancer, the betrayal of puberty, or the interruption of awakening desire—bodies forever tattooed by violence. Hangings interrogates the uncomfortable territory of unwanted, wisdom and the body's betrayal of itself. In "Hangings," Shope warns of Arachne's transfiguration by Athena, goddess of wisdom and war. "Arachne was once human.... Arachne was...