Violence and the Sacred

BOOK REVIEWS Violence and the Sacred John Domini The Open Curtain Brian Evenson Coffee House Press http://www.coffeehousepress.org 218 pages; paper, $14.95 Publishing these days can seem like a twelvestep meeting, everyone sharing their pain. But I doubt there's a memoir that's revealed something so twisted as the following—the more so for being part of a wedding ceremony: They moved from signs and tokens to the penalties—promises that one would never reveal the signs and tokens, even at the peril ofone's own life. If you were put in a position where you were forced to reveal the signs, you were apparently supposed to kill yourself. [The bride] was made to draw her hand across her throat as if it were a knife. She was made to pull her hand across her chest and then let both hands fall, as if she had opened her chest to let blood spill down her ribs. Later still, the back of her thumb traveled symbolically from one hip to another, slitting open her loins. A wedding! And later the groom goes behind a curtain, where he assumes "the role of God." He reaches through iconic slits in the veil to imbue his bride with righteousness; only then can she can open the curtain. The passage would seem to describe the rites of some Stone Age tribe, but the setting is Utah, and the time is the middle 1960s. The rituals are those of the Latter Day Saints, and though the passage comes from a novel, the author assures us the details are accurate. In his afterword to The Open Curtain, Brian Evenson goes so far as to invite a search of the Internet to check his facts. Not that Evenson has left behind the horrific imagination on display in his previous six works of fiction. There's plenty of bloody dementia in Curtain, in particular murder by knife. Call it a slasher story seeking a higher purpose. I'm not sure the book achieves that purpose more than intermittently—but regarding the rituals of the temple, I'm utterly convinced. Evenson was raised a Mormon and served in his community clergy. In time, however, he struggled with the faith, losing his job at Brigham Young University after conservatives attacked his first book, the story collection Altmann's Tongue (1994). In 2000, at his own insistence, he was excommunicated . Yet, a restless Mormon spirit rattles its chains behind the torture and bloodletting that occupy his imagination. As Ben Ehrenreich put it in the Believer (May 2003), Evenson develops "violence shorn of all context. . .that might render it meaningful." For comparable dissociative slaughter you might look to Robbe-Grillet (indeed, Evenson holds a doctorate in critical theory)—but before an ego can dissociate, it must first be connected. De Sade was driven to his excesses by a break with Catholicism. De Sade's Justine (1791), however, seeks ecstasy . Evenson rubs his people's wounds with alkali. His narratives inhabit a sparse and arid landscape in which motivation is a mirage; when a man kicks a pregnant woman bloody in Dark Property: An Affliction (2005), it's not all about Mormonism. But in the new novel, the faith is as central as that wedding curtain. As the afterword puts it, the book addresses "the relationship of Mormon culture to violence." Thus, the new narrative is grounded in a recognizable Provo and environs. There are Vespa scooters and adults who use the word "denial" to define a psychological state. Rudd Theurer never becomes an adult (he's nineteen at the novel's end), but he could be an expert on denial if he didn't suffer so badly from it himself. If Rudd is a slasher, his episodes occur during mental lacunae. Evenson asks us to walk out a long way on these iffy surfaces, undercutting the sense of illusion with classic I-hate-high-school stuff. Rudd doesn't get along with his mom either. The father was more interesting, a suicide, but we leam what little we do of him from others. Call The Open Curtain a slasher story seeking a higherpurpose. So the boy reaches out to...