The Language of Ownership

Dearborn continuedfrom previous page entire collection. Nancy suffered not only the destruction ofher house, but also her knowledge ofwhat the villagers had done. It was a profound betrayal, and she was never to feel at home again. After the war, she felt, according to Gordon, as if she had '"risen from the dead...like Lazarus,'" experiencing '"an inexplicable sense of faltering. '" Aldous Huxley wrote of Nancy Cunard's '"Giaconda style'" and said her '"caresses were like a drug, at once intoxicant and opiate'"; Michael Arlen wrote of her as '"a swift, moving, reckless, white-faced young woman, the very incarnation of youth, fearless and intent, charged with purpose'"; and William Carlos Williams described her as '"constant of the heavens in her complete and passionate inconstancy.'" Speaking of her façade, her friend Mary Hutchinson said it was a "'romantic and melancholy shadow which one [could] never approach. The façade was exquisite, made ofgold leaf, lacquer, verdigris and ivory.'" This fine biography—extremely well researched and felicitously written, especially in the musings Lois Gordon sets typographically apart at the end of each chapter—not only does credit to Nancy Cunard's complexity, it celebrates it, along the way setting this marvelous creature in the context of twentieth-century cultural history. Mary V Dearborn 's latest book is Mistress of Modernism : The Life of Peggy Guggenheim (2004). She lives in New York City. The Language of Ownership Mark Wallace Everyone I Know Lives on Roads Trevor Dodge Chiasmus Press http://www.chiasmuspress.com 121 pages; paper, $14.95 American experimental fiction currently finds itselfin a complicated moment. Mainstream publishing houses, competing for slices of the American entertainment pie, have become more averse than ever to publishing risky innovative fiction by lesserknown authors. On the other hand, with the now practically venerable FC2 as role model, presses like Spuyten Duyvil, Starcherone, Chiasmus, and others remain deeply committed to publishing such work. If a wide readership seems for the moment out of the question for this work, a fiercely devoted community of writers, publishers, and readers does not. Among much else, Trevor Dodge's new short fiction collection Everyone I Know Lives on Roads illustrates pointedly the social conditions in which much of this fiction struggles to survive. Everyone I Know presents a set of intriguing literary techniques which might not seem that new to readers of experimental fiction, while readers unaware of that tradition will likely find them startling or even incomprehensible. There's hilarious, bawdy social satire devoted to exposing corrupt systems of power. There are discontinuous story lines, in which characters disappear mid-story or morph into other, similar versions of themselves. Singular narrative threads have been replaced by fragmentation, disruption , and dissociation; recognizing what is related between various threads also involves acknowledging what's unrelated. The most structurally extreme co-authored pieces seem more prose poem than narrative. Finally, and perhaps crucially, the book insists that human experience cannot be adequately understood through the exploration of individual personalities usually called character development. Instead, human experience can at best be glimpsed only in bits and is defined as much by vast social forces as by individual differences. Many of the best pieces (it's not quite right to call them stories) in the book feature a clear-eyed examination ofwork in contemporary America. Dodge details how overworked, underpaidAmericans living in isolated communities struggle to find and keepjobs that they can't stand but still need. Such characters often search desperately for human companionship in a way that's surprisingly reminiscent of the work ofRaymond Carver. Yet Dodge doesn't explore individual character in the way Carver does. Instead, he's more concerned with how character interacts with larger issues like history, landscape, and American social planning. Some of the book's most striking moments come from descriptions of daily work conditions, or from uncovering the historical facts that have led to these conditions, as in the opening piece, "The True Point of Beginning," set in Twin Falls, Idaho: My typing skills have netted me a nominal , hourly-wage job typing insurance forms for a land title and escrow office. . . . Nothing but typing and re-typing legal descriptions for forty and...