RIVERWORK, by Lisa Robertson
For a period of time, and perhaps still today (I’ve stopped paying attention), it was common for literary editors to say they weren’t interested in “fireworks.” They didn’t want a show-off; they sought something resembling “heart.” Personally I’ve never understood this. I like a show. So few people are capable of putting one on. Among those people is the poet Lisa Robertson, whose latest novel, “Riverwork,” is a collection of labyrinthine acrobatic lexical maneuvers delivered with the unadulterated confidence of the unhinged.
The book’s nominal subject is the Bièvre, a real river rendered filthy by centuries of misuse, now buried under Paris. (The phrase “slutty little river” appears in the book’s epigraph.) The book’s nominal protagonist is Lucy Frost, an erudite Parisian house cleaner of Canadian provenance who is trying to make sense of chaotically organized historical research conducted by her long-disappeared aunt, the aunt having been obsessively cataloging the lives of long-dead women linked to the lost Bièvre. Here flowed a river of laundresses, of abattoirs, “dye and piss and offal,” sex workers and revolutionaries. Here was the body of water on which Dante began writing about hell. The river was erased, much like the records of working women Frost attempts to recall. “We were experts in forgetting but we did not forgive,” she says of the women of her family. “Forgetting without forgiving was our matrilineal church. We abandoned our names. In this way we resembled the general idea of a family, shipwrecked on silence.”
Describing this setup — a mission to recover a buried history — suggests, falsely, that the work will progress dutifully toward resolution, but Frost repeatedly, explicitly, rejects narrative containment, preferring instead a lavish layering of philosophical reverie. “Stories and their moral logics,” Frost declares, “were nets, entrapments: to be craftily avoided, ignored, or better still, vandalized. The story of gender. The story of betterment. The story of family. The love story. The story of origins. … I am for whatever can augment, annex, entangle, unmap. Opacity resembles the densely figured world. … I don’t want to be sorted out, I want to go into the dark woods.”
The dark woods will here involve François-René Chateaubriand’s sexual appetites, Edward Said’s thoughts on late style and Gertrude Stein’s “middle-class American” accent, in which the narrator hears “a sophisticated cajoling or juiciness held just beneath the locution.” Frost cleans and reads. There is a persistent interest in the aging body’s wet collapse. (“I survived the school of my own desire and I survived my desirability, becoming scandalously foreign to the world in which I nevertheless live on.”) There is interest in the way the dead express themselves through the living, a temporal elasticity to the Bièvre and beyond.
Robertson is capable of syntactic complexity but more interested in finding fresh ways to press words into use: “The problem of money and not having it rhythmically arose.” She is a celebrated, prolific poet associated with Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing, the winner of the inaugural C.D. Wright Award for poetry and the author of many book-length works of lyrical experimentation. Her protagonist reads and wanders and drops insight with a kind of random decadence, an epiphanical promiscuity, feeling no pressing need to save or scrimp or deny us in preparation for our little rewards. “I understand that the purpose of symmetry is to still time,” Frost declares. “Libraries are the entrails of thinking.” Poets and diminished royalty “have in common their sartorial resistance to the intolerable present.”
This is an extremely specific strain of fun, but we are definitely having it. It is impossible for me not to feel affection for a narrator who devolves into tears over her inability to complete an ambitious research project and immediately asks: “What is the role of weeping in historiographical representation?” The approach is slyly cerebral, but an author-narrator who can speak of “the haptic frisson of the card catalog” is in touch with something well beyond scholarship, a kind of waggish delight in the absurdities emergent from sustained attention. Robertson insists on treating the sentence not as the colorless transmitter of deceptively clear ideas but as a window for performance. “I feel lust,” writes Robertson’s house cleaner, “for both the nihilistically skeptical and the seriously ideal in their most useless extremes.” Having taken drudgery as its subject, “Riverwork” very much feels like play.
RIVERWORK | By Lisa Robertson | Coach House Books | 232 pp. | Paperback, $24.95
Source:
www.nytimes.com
