Oulipo Remix

Page 25 November–December 2008 Cherry continued from previous page will marry. The other will be vengeful, possessive. As Veronica remembers her, Ada was a fantastic woman. I have no other word for her. For the set of her shoulders and the way she trotted off down the street, with her shopping bag flopping at her hip. Her hands were never empty, and you never saw what she had in them; whatever was to be folded or washed or moved or wiped…. Even when I was eight years old, I knew she had charm. The marriage of Ada to Charlie Spillane issues in Veronica’s “sweetheart” mother and a son who is confined to an insane asylum. The Hegarty family— “great lovers, the Hegartys. All eye-to-eye and sudden fucking and never, ever, letting go”—is a jumble of personality clashes but also of warm (not to say heated) feelings. But it is Liam, her late brother, who stands at the heart of it. The problem with Liam was never something big. The problem with Liam was always a hundred small things. He had cigarettes but no matches, did I have matches? Yes, but the match breaks, the match doesn’t strike, he can’t light these cheap Albanian trash matches. Do I have a lighter? Fuck, he has spilt the matches. Why don’t I have a lighter? He goes to find a lighter, rattling all the drawers in the kitchen. He walks out, leaving the back door open. He comes in the front door twenty minutes later with a lighter he found on the street—lying just outside the house actually—except that it is wet. Anyone well acquainted with an alcoholic knows the type, and yet the narrator’s love for Liam, and what she discovers, or recovers, of his history, particularize him, and the reader feels almost as strongly about him as does the narrator. He is a lost boy, a good-hearted soul consigned to a purgatory not of his making. The ravished innocent. “Drink made him vicious,” but we are to understand that he found no other way to cope. “[T]he look in Liam’s eye was the look of someone who knows they are alone. Because the world will never know what has happened to you, and what you carry around as a result of it.” Veronica’s willingness to forgive Liam is contagious, because her reasoning is persuasive. As she explains, “I am all for sadness…. I am all for the ordinary life of the brain. But we fill up sometimes, like those little wooden birds that sit on a pole—we fill up with it, until donk, we tilt into the drink.” The “gathering” of the title refers to the wake/ funeral for Liam, which brings the book’s people together. It is a masterpiece of orchestration, every note sounded, the whole symphonic. Afterward, we return to Veronica’s current crisis: all along, she has been at odds not only with herself (self-mutilation is a sub-theme here) but with her husband, Tom. No longer breathing “second-hand air,” Veronica confronts the meaning of her own marriage. Veronica’s voice is mesmerizingly intelligent, hypnotically lyrical, and a reader will want to listen to it as long as possible, to the end of the book, in fact. Still, I confess I was slightly disappointed by this ending, even though it is a strong ending; I wanted the book to expand on the image of a “world wrapped in blood, as a ball of string is wrapped in its own string.” I wanted its implications to be larger. But why? I ask myself. The implications of Enright’s beautifully written, swiftly paced novel are already large and significant, not to say moving, and troubling, and—I insist, though at least one reviewer has denied it—compassionate. Kelly Cherry’s most recent titles include the ironic novel We Can Still Be Friends (Soho Press, 2004) and the just-published Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana States University Press). oulipo remix Karla Kelsey The nouliPian analecTs Edited by Christine Wertheim and Matias Viegener Les Figues Press http://www.lesfigues.com...