Dana Killmeyer's novelistic debut was a good way to start out my new year. I've just finished the book; it snared me rather quickly and efficiently so that I wanted to finish it in one sitting. (Okay, okay, I admit I got up and walked around, and noshed on some shrimp and walnuts, sprayed my walking stick babies so they still felt they were in a Vietnamese rainforest, etc.) But you get the idea.
Paradise, this book with the strange rather Leslie Scalapino-ish title, is a memoir of some days of a particular summer spent working an organic farm in Florida. The young narrator is living largely in her own head while tending to the earth, and one senses this farm was a well-considered choice as a way to get some thinking/feeling time subsidized without having to work in a more compromising, stressful and possibly injurious profession. In other words, one senses this tenure taking care of the earth was a moral choice. The narrator's coworkers are few in number and the living situation described feels more like a commune than an employment situation. The farm is owned by Mariposa, a rather New Age figure, who often seems half-hearted in her commitment to this agricultural enterprise as a business, and more seriously committed to a search for some sort of spiritual correctness on this earth. Mariposa appears infrequently in the novel, but when she does she often seems strange and troubled. The narrator is living in a matriarchal social structure and the matriarch herself comes across about as troubled as Antigone. One gets the feeling of a mythic structure lurking behind this; one wonders if this is a subtle acknowledgment of an ongoing cultural war vis-a-vis the earth and its misappropriation.
The novel is beautifully noncomittal. It has little use for the conventions of mainstream fiction (plot, conflict, characterization) as these devices are usually deployed. Rather, the novel adapts these devices in a way that one might see them utilized in non-mainstream cinema or even graphic novels. No, this is not new. Nor is this, however, an attempt to achieve an easy hipness or inscribe a shibboleth for an imaginary target audience. One senses these aesthetic choices are made in service of the writing, in order to be true to the life at the center of this novel. I am reminded in this of the novels of Jane Bowles, and there are moments and scenes in Paradise which are worthy of comparison with that underrated master.
I would like to give you an idea of how keen this writer's sensory apparatus is, with a few devastatingly resonant quotations:
The truth would become irrevocably forgotten, like a copper penny cast into a well, baited with one's truest wish and eternally exiled to the lower realms; a turqoise patina coating the coin like moss, restoring the metal back to earth, a softer bed to rest one's dreams.--pg. 25
Outside my window, the night was puce like the broken blood vessels around a blacked-out eye."--pg. 29
I nodded to confirm that I was listening, but I wasn't paying attention. My gaze had been sidetracked by the curious anomaly on the other side of the fence. A hen had hitched a ride on the back of one of the turtles. First of all, hens and turtles cohabiting in this superficial environment was surreal enough, but watching them in this strange embrace, that was outright weird. It wasn't natural!"--pg. 38
The weather had invoked a deep conflict: a plea to surrender. My skin crawled, but not the way the ants had made it. It was a stagnant stirring, a festering, like a fire smoldering beneath the flesh. I smelt my stench: the mulch, the blood, the welts, the horses, the horseshit, the heavy cream, the Robert, the ripe fruit, the underlying decay, the here, the now. I was knee-deep in it, and sinking."--pg. 46
We walked together towards our campsites, momentarily interrupted by the mangled white ibis's carcass strewn across our path. I said nothing. My hand wanted to reach out for his; reach out towards the ibis's remains; to comfort and to be comforted. I was powerless to lift my leg over its insubstantial weight."--pg. 52
Above the flat panorama, above the crowns of the avocado trees, and above all else, the brazen moon materialized like the cadaverous head of St. John the Baptist exhumed and displayed upon the bruised night sky, gold platter and all.--pg. 96
This is not to imply that the novel does not suffer from certain shortcomings, but to give one some idea of the quality of the writing when it succeeds, and show what kept this reader interested enough to very quickly finish the book.
One problem is the atrocious editing of this particular printing; typos abound with an inexcusable regularity and debase pages of otherwise stellar writing. This is not an inconsequential effect. It's truly galling.
Many novelists seem to suffer terribly with the "he said, she replied" quandary. How does one keep making it go forward without turning into a robot? In the present book, I did find myself conscious of "A asked," "B replied" and "C paused." I'm sure it's maddening for any novelist. How does one work with that? If one tries to go for the unusual locution, one ends up sounding stilted, ridiculous. It seems a lose-lose situation and I empathize with novelists. I guess the best tactic is to just put the dialogue in and not use the predicate at all, except when an undesirable ambiguity would result.
This author has a predilection for the oxymoronic device. Sometimes this works splendidly and we can see the contradictions embodied in a particular character or scene. Other times this device leaves the reader feeling that we are witnessing a malapropism that snuck into the book. Careful editing should have addressed this.
But cavils aside, this is a very readable book from an author one expects to encounter again very soon in what will most likely be a new, devastating incarnation. Killmeyer has a scene in here where the narrator and two other adult coworkers on the farm suddenly seem to break through to an archetypal earthly innocence in their play in the fields. The camera of the mind's eye suddenly flies up into space in an aerial view of this play, and the moment is a Woolfean shiv...just total deathly-beautiful prose. It's moments like that which you can't buy in an MFA workshop for any amount of money, sweat or tears. That's what we call the preternatural, darlin', and Killmeyer's got it in spades.
I look very much forward to her next novel.
You can buy this book here.
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