Rescued by Metafiction

Page 18 American Book Review Pain controls and unbuilds the bildungsroman. B O O K R e V i e W s Rescued by Metafiction Joyelle Mcsweeney the meat anD sPirit Plan Selah Saterstrom Coffee House Press http://www.coffeehousepress.org 240 pages; paper, $14.95 Selah Saterstrom’s The Meat and Spirit Plan might best be called a bildungsroman, although her unfortunate narrator is not so much built as disintegrated by contact with the world. The opening pages of her narrative show her as gritty-winsome as any girl-Holden, albeit one dealt a hand from the very bottom of the socioeconomic deck: “Listen, I am in love. My sister lost her virginity to Anthony Amara when she was fourteen and I plan on doing the same.” Such plucky goal-setting aside, the anticipated defloration is dispatched on our heroine a few pages later, and stars neither Anthony Amara nor, barely, herself, but instead a drunk college boy (“Stop I say. It hurt Mandy the first time too he says. I do not know Mandy and he does not stop.”). After this hazy incident, our heroine returns to the party. Later she peers at herself naked in a mirror: …I look at myself. With the exception of being born, being fucked for the first time, and dying, you generally get another shot at things. Did I say It or did It say It? Something said It. I touch my body and the image in the mirror touches its body. Despite the novel’s opening injunction to “listen,” it is this anticipatory or retrospective “looking” that is the distinctive action of the text, a self-spectatorship which is actually a distancing from, even abandonment of, the nameless narrator’s body. Knowledge is both the goal and currency of the bildungsroman, yet here the narrator’s precocious formulation of a Proverb of-and-from Hell can hardly save her from disintegrating in the next sentence, let alone the succession of spectacularly grim scenes to come. Such splitting of our heroine into “I” and “it” is not only depictive of the physical alienation of the sexually exploited (an alienation the narrator herself pursues mightily through drink, drugs, and semi-consensual sex acts for the remainder of this section) but of the temporally skewed nature of Saterstrom’s text. The book is told in the present tense, yet before and after have much more purchase on our narrator than events themselves.As by the sexual predators who position her for their gratification and, perhaps, remuneration, this narrator is barely conscious of the plot and yet utterly, haplessly positioned by it. And yet, at least for its first eighty pages, Saterstrom’s novel is far from bleak. The narrator’s remoteness allows her to discard expository duties and participate in gorgeous digressions in which, for example, she romps alone in an abandoned museum, “carpeted in old exploded encyclopedias,” making installation art of the wreckage: “I paint the word CHASTITY above the mannequin in the rotting hoopskirt.” Another passage presents a daydream of an old-timey movie star, sometimes identified as Ginger Rodgers: You get on the plane, then you are there. Where were you in the middle? The middle doesn’t matter. You must go into it like an airplane does the sky. Like the impossible. You must push yellow ethers through your middle meat. You must get to Hawaii where others await you for the party. The movie-star fantasy is one of mobility and control , yet even in this fantasy the middle drops out and the “you” finds herself amid an accumulation of befores and afters. By the end of this riff, the fantasized world and the narrator’s world of drug-laden “parties” seem to have synched up. Little wonder, then, that this dreamy methodology takes more and more airtime away from the relating of events. At one point, the narrator reflects, “Dead people and God are witnesses. Furniture can be a witness. Eventually, reckon: Dead people, God, and furniture I know you see.” Only at the end of this stanza-like paragraph does a reference to self-mutilation explain what it is that these witnesses “see.” A final prying away...