A Collage of Crots

More than thirty years ago in his now out-of-print book An Alternate Style (1980), Winston Weathers revived the term "crot" to describe a fragmented writing style in which the writer uses sections without employing transitions between them. Weathers quotes Tom Wolfe, who explains the way crots make the reader search for a point, making logical leaps. In the award-winning collection Notes from No Man's Land, Eula Biss uses crots to explore issues of race (including her whiteness) in America. Her segmented, lyric essays read, as her title suggests, as notes from an uncertain, sometimes confused and confusing place.

Biss's subject matter, the lack of racial integration in America, seems mirrored in her writing style, an abrupt movement between topics that demonstrates a certain uneasiness, an uneasiness that speaks powerfully but doesn't allow her or her readers to ponder the issues more deeply. The unsettling quality of such abrupt movements between topics reinforces the troubling nature of colliding questions, experiences, and histories. Is that Biss's purpose? To show herself as unsettled, to unsettle readers? If it is, she's done an admirable job. In her notes at the end of the book, Biss explains that the title—No Man's Land—means both "debatable land" and "indeterminate state, a state of confusion or uncertainty." Her essays, in both form and content, lead readers to this debatable, uncertain terrain.

At times, Biss's collages of crots are held together with associational transitions—sometimes clear, other times jarring. In the book's first essay, "Time and Distance Overcome," Biss includes bits of trivia: "Mark Twain was among the first Americans to own a telephone," and "By the turn of the century, there were more telephones than bathtubs in America," yet the topic of the essay is far more serious than the first fourteen paragraphs would lead the reader to believe. Almost mid-essay, Biss goes from a quotation from Thomas Edison concerning the ability of telephones to bring "the human family in closer touch" to a statement that in 1898, "a black man was hanged from a telephone pole," and she follows this matter-of-fact statement with a list of other hangings and brutalities. This jarring juxtaposition—the hope that an invention might bring the human family closer to the reality of a serious and violent disconnect between members of the human family—is effective, highlighting both positive aspects of America and deeply troubling ones. The America that Biss describes is a place of both ingenuity and horror.

It's a place, as revealed in "Relations," in which a couple can realize the dream of having a child with the aid of in vitro fertilization, yet due to a mistake also be faced with the horror of having that family dismantled. It's a place where courts can reunite parents with their biological child, yet the question of who that child's relations are remains. In this essay, Biss weaves research, observation, literary allusion, and experience. She moves from a story of a woman giving birth to one black baby and one white baby and the courts ruling that the black baby must be returned to his biological parents, whose embryo had been mistakenly implanted into the white woman, to an example involving Biss's sister's and a her own dolls, to a broader discussion of race and relationships—one's relationship with oneself, one's family, one's culture, and with others. As reader, I followed her discussion of relations, willingly making the leaps required to come to an intuitive understanding of the complexity Biss explores.

I was less able to make those leaps in "Land Mines," which moves from Biss's experience of teaching in New York public schools to the historical education of emancipated slaves, from a story about a colleague who was harassed by school children because of his sexual orientation then back to the education of freed slaves. The link Biss makes between her public school teaching and the education of...