{"id":61723,"date":"2013-10-25T13:34:10","date_gmt":"2013-10-25T17:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=61723"},"modified":"2013-10-25T13:45:51","modified_gmt":"2013-10-25T17:45:51","slug":"what-were-loving-marionettes-ducks-and-connell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/10\/25\/what-were-loving-marionettes-ducks-and-connell\/","title":{"rendered":"What We\u2019re Loving: Marionettes, Ducks, and Connell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"clown_marionette_2_grande\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I was about to describe Barbara Comyns\u2019s hyper-vivid little novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead<\/em><\/a> (1954) as Ivy Compton-Burnett on acid. Then I googled Comyns. Top result:\u00a0\u201cBarbara Comyns Is Not Anyone on Acid<\/a>.\u201d Thank you, Emily Gould. But why do so many readers reach for the same clich\u00e9? Who Was Changed<\/em> is trippy from sentence one: \u201cThe ducks swam through the drawing-room windows. The weight of the water had forced the windows open; so the ducks swam in. Round the room they sailed quacking their approval; then they sailed out again to explore the wonderful new world that had come in the night.\u201d The real trippiness of the novel\u2014about an English village struck by a mysterious epidemic\u2014lies not just in its eye-rubbingly bright details, but also in its moral sensibility. Flood, fire, madness descend on Comyns\u2019s characters without any of the usual narratorial handwringing, occasionally accompanied by ducks. Comyns is so matter-of-fact as to be surreal, and irresistible.\u00a0\u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Until recently, I had never read Evan S. Connell; quite the faux pas when you consider that Mrs. Bridge<\/em><\/a> originated as a short story in the Fall 1955\u00a0issue of The Paris Review<\/i>. In this, his first novel, Connell paints a brilliantly handsome and moving portrait of a woman by the name of India Bridge and her unspectacular\u00a0Kansas City family.\u00a0We follow the quotidian concerns of a woman plagued by upper-middle-class luxury, and while her obsession with all things bourgeois lends humor to the novel, Connell refuses to pass any sort of judgment on his protagonist. And yet we feel the muted despair of a family divided by perpetual boredom, isolation, and the complete inability to connect. We ache for a mother\u2019s attempt (and failure) to mother, a wife\u2019s desperation to be loved, a woman\u2019s unending struggle with herself. Connell\u2019s prose is decisively, and artfully, quiet; yet the silence he weaves into the novel\u2019s 117 chapters brims with the same fervor and frustration buried in his characters.\u00a0\u2014Caitlin\u00a0Youngquist<\/strong> <\/p>\n

The instructions seemed clear enough: \u201cRead A Tale of Two Cities<\/i>. Think about Breaking Bad<\/em> when you read it.\u201d This was my first assignment in John Freeman\u2019s class at Columbia University. Freeman had strolled into the room wearing torn blue jeans and a blazer; within minutes he shed the jacket to reveal a white tee. \u201cI\u2019ve never written a novel,\u201d he said, \u201cso if that\u2019s a problem you\u2019re free to go.\u201d As he scribbled diagrams on the white board and considered various metaphors for the structure of stories, all the while pacing the room, an image of a mind emerged, like a real-time MRI. It was a mind that had thought deeply<\/i> about the architecture and accelerants of stories. A former editor of Granta<\/i>, and, before that, a prolific book reviewer, Freeman has seemingly read everything and interviewed everyone, and now he has collected fifty-five profiles in How to Read a Novelist<\/i><\/a>, newly published in a handsome volume by FSG. I\u2019ve been reading with delight his lucid and curious descriptions of writers ranging from Philip Roth to Ayu Utami; each profile begins with a biographical note and then sets the scene of the interview\u2014he meets Toni Morrison at her apartment \u201cnestled between SoHo and Tribeca\u201d and Aleksandar Hemon while walking amidst a looming ice storm in Chicago. Freeman begins the book with a cautionary tale of idolatry in which he arrives late to meet John Updike at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and proceeds to break every rule of interviewing. He says it is his intention to \u201creinstate some atmospheric context into the legend of a writer\u2019s life and work.\u201d This is not another lecture on so-called craft. \u2014Adam Winters<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think it was Jude Law who said that conscience makes cowards of us all. Unfortunately, conscience can also turn us into boring dancers. This occurred to me yesterday night after I failed to include even a single pelvic thrust in a karaoke performance of Bruce Springsteen\u2019s \u201cDancing in the Dark.\u201d Perhaps it was the close quarters, or the presence of new colleagues, but I was too self-conscious to give my choreography a Boss-worthy flourish. For a more sophisticated take on the detrimental effects of consciousness on dancing, I recommend Heinrich von Kleist\u2019s short essay \u201cOn the Marionette Theater<\/a>.\u201d The premise of the piece is that a marionette can be a purer (and thus, superior) dancer than even the world\u2019s most accomplished virtuoso, because a marionette will never be guilty of affectation; where there is no thought, thought cannot get in the way. According to Kleist, us poor, postlapsarian folks will always be playing second fiddle to puppets unless we attain a state of God-like knowledge, which would be \u201cthe final chapter in the history of the world.\u201d Until then, we will all just have to be, well, dancing in the dark. \u2014Fritz Huber<\/strong><\/p>\n

The stories in James Salter\u2019s Last Night<\/i><\/a> end as soon as I start to realize that there is more to them than I realized, as though dodging my scrutiny. \u201cThere was not much more to her than met the eye, but that was always enough,\u201d Salter writes of the modelesque Kathrin in \u201cSuch Fun.\u201d Adele nudges her husband Phil (\u201cCasanova Here\u201d) to tell dinner-party companions how he left his first wife for his retarded son\u2019s twenty-year-old tutor. Lovers pile up like Bergdorf coats. Caviar (beluga) on crushed ice is eaten alone. Of rotund, Malibu-vacationing Teddy in \u201cEyes of the Stars\u201d<\/i>: \u201cShe had a one-piece black bathing suit, the same one every day, and an abortion that fall.\u201d<\/i> Tragedy, like cruelty, is casual. \u2014Nikkitha Bakshani<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was about to describe Barbara Comyns\u2019s hyper-vivid little novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) as Ivy Compton-Burnett on acid. Then I googled Comyns. Top result:\u00a0\u201cBarbara Comyns Is Not Anyone on Acid.\u201d Thank you, Emily Gould. But why do so many readers reach for the same clich\u00e9? Who Was Changed is trippy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[7033,9735,9686,369,10204],"class_list":["post-61723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-barbara-comyns","tag-evan-s-connell","tag-heinrich-von-kleist","tag-james-salter","tag-john-freeman"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat We\u2019re Loving: Marionettes, Ducks, and Connell by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 25, 2013 \u2013 I was about to describe Barbara Comyns\u2019s hyper-vivid little novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) as Ivy Compton-Burnett on acid. 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