Lust Series
Stephanie Dickinson
Spuyten Duyvil Novella Series
ISBN 978-1-933132-87-7
Fiction. Paperback, 82 pages
Spuyten Duyvil, 2011
Reviewed by Lucy Biederman
Much of the great American fiction concerning sexual violence is set in a specific region, and as suspense and cruelty are evoked, so is a sense of place. For writers like Flannery O’Connor, Mary Gaitskill, Dorothy Allison, and Gayl Jones, the work of world-making contrasts with—or, even, is undone by—human acts that feel fundamentally disruptive. Out of this tradition comes Stephanie Dickinson and her excellent Lust Series, beautiful and terrifying in its portraits of girls unmoored “from state to state” (as the book’s first line has it).
Lust Series mashes together the earth and the body—particularly the female body. Descriptions of bodies bleed into descriptions of the landscape. “Leaves parachute into my mouth that squirrels eat so I no longer know if what they gather is some remnant of my flesh.” Natural settings are often depicted with such lush language of emotion, while scenes of passion or torture are depicted flatly, without affect: “He cuts me around each knee.”
The confusion here between body and landscape, pain and pleasure, help and hurt, the living and the dead speaks to the ways in which, for Dickinson’s doomed, blurry characters, the very condition of selfhood is untrustworthy, dubious, ill-advised. Late in the book a man wonders, “Did she really in Texas, Oregon, Louisiana—all the states she claims?”
In its unblinking treatments of danger, pain, and abuse, Dickinson’s writing feels in conversation with those American masters, like O’Connor and Gaitskill, who have depicted brutality with a clarity that manages to be both stark and lyric. But formally, Lust Series takes place in the dark alley between poetry and prose. Each page offers a discrete prose block, some only a few lines long, the longest taking up the whole space of the page. Each of these prose pieces could be read as a separate “encounter”; not every one of them depicts sex or violence, but each presents an opportunity, an opening, an exchange.
The vast variety of tone and perspective from page to page contributes to the sense of each as a separate encounter; Dickinson moves between various narrative perspectives, including an epistolary first-person; a close second-person; an omniscient narrator; and a removed third-person. One page begins with the laconic challenge, “Tease, he smiled.” Another starts with a lyric directive: “Listen Gulfport, Mississippi, a girl’s no washout if she can still buy her liquor nor straight three-in-one shoe polish through a powder puff.” Those shifts of tone, narrative voice, syntax, and diction between pieces can make the movement through the book feel bumpy, jarring—a ride on a local bus as opposed to an express train.
And that is only one of the many ways Dickinson unsettles the reader. She plays with the reader’s sense of self-consciousness, using it to underscore some of the book’s most trenchant themes. The reader, I found myself thinking for the first time, is always something of a surveyor, an opportunist, a creep, even, looking for a way in. There is always the possibility that a passage’s designated I or you will be a sexual predator, and we will have identified with him before knowing better. A prose block that begins relatively harmlessly—“It is cold in this room, the food shivers, coffee growing a skin”—ends with a dreadful sense of foreboding: “I nod, then bite my tongue so I don’t cry out. Your little finger’s loose nerve twitches like a fishhook. Chastity’s silk fan clatters.”
But among and beside horror and fear, the spaces Dickinson carves out for beauty—specifically, for the lyric—are fascinating and gorgeous. She is much too deliberate and clear-eyed a writer to give us beauty for beauty’s sake, especially in a book shot through with physical and psychological horror. There is a pose or posture of blankness that many of the speakers or characters possess—a kind of emotional numbness or coolness that I read as an attitude of necessary self-protection adopted by victims of abuse. “I pinch a fold of skin above my belly button, all the babies I didn’t let live,” or “Me, psychotic? Who do you think you are? My father’s gold card?” In both those moments, issues of extreme emotional complexity are folded (literally, in the first quotation) behind tonal gestures that obscure any of the speaker’s real feelings. Meanwhile, the physical landscape bursts with Technicolor emotional resonance. It is as if these characters have externalized the feelings they will not allow themselves because of the pain it would bring. “Desire and appetite on the sidewalk,” Dickinson writes. Or, later, “The oak shivers and sun whitens the shed roof, slicking the tin until it flows like a river.”
Dickinson also uses sound to create a sense of meaning beneath and beyond the literal, a suggestion of foreboding or scheming. One prose block includes the following particularly rich sonic effects:
His unfinished manuscripts, Mon Hysterie, Chorale,—
______the reams of famished weeds and belly dancers.
______Wading through the soft sea with an eye of iron.
______One fragment. Like reading Revelation on the first day of a decade. He’s a genius, she thinks. The next Rimbaud. His excess fills her larynx, loosens her heartbeat. If he wants her bones, she’ll gladly give those.
Here Dickinson creates a thick net of sound via assonance and near-rhymes—unfinished/famished/manuscripts; reams/weeds; famished/dancers; eye/iron; iron/one; iron/Revelation; he’s a/genius; next/excess; excess/larynx; if he/gladly; bones/those. These over- and under-lapping pairings convey a sense of meanings-within-meaning, abducting the ostensible purpose of the passage, kidnapping its plot and tone.
For all the ways in which Lust Series departs from conventions of fiction, however, it also speaks strongly to the work of more traditionally inclined writers, particularly Joyce Carol Oates. In its disordered, or perception-based, chronology—circling back between memory and trauma, immediate danger and memory, trauma and danger, and its confusing present and past in the stress and adrenaline of the moment—Lust Series strongly recalls (and at times seems to allude to) Oates’s Black Water. For example, Dickinson’s loosely discernable narrative returns, at ostensibly random intervals, to a girl who seems to be buried alive, or maybe she is already dead. “Leaves are sweating in her throat.” In another prose block, “What could I trade to have my hand for an instant?” Later, “Death. It’s supposed to be a bright white light instead there’s a girl shouting, her pouty mouth a spoiled gardenia…”
The book’s envoi is a more traditionally plotted and presented short story, in which a prostitute and her pimp arrive in New York City to hide and make some money after torturing and killing a girl in New Jersey. The story is narrated by the prostitute (the you in this story is the pimp), and we follow her as she wanders around a department store, gives a blow job to a truck driver for cash, converses with her pimp—as childhood memories and thoughts of the dead girl swirl around her. “You’re just as guilty as me. Remember that,” the pimp tells her. He wants to express how stuck she is, how fully a part of the crime.
The placement of this longer and more detailed story at the end of the book, where it casts retrospective depth onto the preceding sketches, feels innovative and brilliant. In quoting the story’s, and Lust Series’s, final line here I hope I am not offending any no-spoilers sensibilities. That line—“Why hadn’t I run?”—feels essential, utterly and beautifully significant, in the way it bends the book back on itself, putting into relief the mess and mystery of its plots. There is so much we do not know, but of what we do, we have read and accepted passively, inured to its ugliness. This line implicates the reader at the last possible moment, or, maybe, too late. And as, inevitably (at least for this reader), we turn back to the beginning, that question now feels built into every page, a watermark.
About the Reviewer
Lucy Biederman (lucybiederman.blogspot.com) is a doctoral student in English Literature at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. She is the author of a chapbook, The Other World (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), and has poems forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, Handsome, The Literary Review, and other journals.