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The Theater of Skin Stacey Levine American Genius, A Comedy Lynne Tillman Soft Skull Press http://www.softskull.com 320 pages; paper, $15.00 Lynne Tillman's fourth novel is an extended monologue from an extremely bright middle-aged woman living in a nonspecific institution. The story takes place internally, with one singular external event at the novel's end. Tillman's cadences are luscious, and owing to her admirable control, the narrator's thoughts, vividly interesting, draw a classically realistic character, in contrast to the book's unconventional progression. Whether the protagonist lives in a rest home, artist colony, or outpatient ward seems immaterial to Tillman, who prefers the setting, as well as the main character's name, age, and other fundamentals, to remain gauzy. This strategy underscores the narrative's texture, leaving the narrator's mind—her memories, opinions—as virtually the only element onto which the reader can hold. The experience is vertiginous and requires trust, since, in another way, the book is also a mimesis of thought, an extended representation of what it's like to experience the pleasure of a well-functioning mind. Helen (we learn her name in the book's final hundred pages) is an erstwhile high school history teacher who sets great store by the ideals ofAmerican democracy. She has endured a great deal of grief, having lost her father, brother, and more than one close friend or lover to accidental or natural deaths; she also anticipates her mother's death. Though her thoughts and catalogue-like knowledge covers sometimes-comic real-world topics such as chair design, fabric quality, the Manson clan, Thoreau, dermatological and other medical conditions, and the personalities ofcats, the meanings ofthese topics coalesce during the course of Helen's monologue to create quite a raw, sad, tender document of an individual at the center (as we all are) ofAmerica's fragile democratic experiment, and that experiment's messy, cacophonous trajectory. Through this, American Genius moves toward its true emotional center, which is the profound difficulty, or perhaps impossibility, of coping with loss and death. Helen is taken up with great concerns about her "sensitive" skin, and her real or psychologically induced condition ofdermatographia, in which scratches on the skin deepen and tum into weals. Helen's discomforts and inabilities in life are projected onto the theater of her skin; she has evidently read and reread skin lotion labels intently, for "protect" and "nourish" are, annoyingly, her mainstay verbs. Her skin is itchy, dry, shrunken, needful; it is "too fragile ," even for the experienced touch of her European cosmetician. On her leg, she has a scar from a cat bite, on which "small craters formed, whose depressions could not ever again be replenished, so much tissue was disgorged, and my left calf will never be normal or beautiful again, but forever marked by the action of an insane cat." Helen's tragicomic, relentless mention of her metaphoric skin, along with her heightened fussiness about the boundaries between her body versus others', indicate that her past psychic injuries are keeping her suspicious of other people and terribly isolated. Again, her condition localized onto the skin; she is hypervigilant and all too aware of being separated from the world and "in" her skin. This conundrum is an existential one, too, of course. But like many of us, Helen is half-aware of her psychological problems, freely noting that her neighbors at the institution, particularly women, somatize their unconscious emotions. But she is not conscious, or not at liberty, to reveal the true source of her pain. Helen's monologue creates quite a raw, sad, tender document ofan individual at the center (as we all are) ofAmerica'sfragile democratic experiment. Helen also transfers life's discomfort onto her neighbors at the institution, to whom she gives reductive, mildly critical monikers: "the anorectic disconsolate woman," the Magician, "the demanding man," "the odd inquisitive woman," and the like; and her existence in the uncomfortable skin neatly echoes the discomfort of life inside an enclosed community. It also echoes the way we all are products of our nation and American governmental procedures. Helen asks us to consider the bitter blaming and accusation between North...

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