[ Counterpoint, 165 pp.]
Noy Holland has an uncanny ability to write about almost anything and make it seem elemental. Like many from the Lish school (and this novel is dedicated “For Gordon”), her sentences generate their weight often from the incidental, the fragmentary aspects of existence, to the point that telling a story is less a plot and more a way of speaking, of connecting language in surprising manners to dig in far beyond the surface of the event.
As someone who has read a lot of Lish-influenced work over the years, I’ll admit to having finally acquired a fatigue for his approach. Sure, sentences are great, and can do anything at any given time, but sometimes the musicality and whimsicalness of the stance—seen sometimes nowhere better as capable of flimsiness in Lish’s own writing—feel as if you wish it’d shut up with babbling off of combined vowel sounds and slippery verbiage and just actually say something sometime, or even just let the “magic of the sentence” thing take a pill and move to the sidelines as we allow some other aspects of narration to have effect. We get it, your sentences are beautiful, but sometimes they feel like being strung up to dry like laundry in fat sunlight. Fine, it flows, it’s uncanny, it bristles and pops a bit, ok.
Holland, though, isn’t one of those who has a problem with ending up with work that falls short of its own grandiosity of diction. She is an incredible stylist, for sure, and one that fearlessly enables her texts to sting not only from the sound of them, but from what rises up beneath; like a platform we are being lured to cross, and nevermind the cracking, the the fire in our hearts about to really burn us, the ambient light that makes it hard to look quite straight ahead, to see.
Bird is a novel told in flashes, of immense pain, loosely wired together like a cage around the narrator, also named Bird, from the pet name given to her by her obviously abusive lover, Mickey, with whom she has recently lost a child. The fluidity of motion in the sharp, unwieldy scenes she clusters together in the perspective of Bird, trying to hold it all together, to keep going despite the obviousness of wrongdoing being done to her, never mind the weight of her own grief.
Bird herself is a lode of secrets, which come out almost as happenstance, often, dredged up in sentences that narrate their pain casually, rather than onerously, rarely repeating or allowing a full narrative around them to congress. Because Bird isn’t begging us to listen, and doesn’t even seem to be able to name how fucked up her life has been, become, we are allowed inside the nature of the darkest kinds of inner violence, abuse, grief, longing, in a way that more straight tellings could never accomplish: both on the sentence level, yes, but also in the fabric that Holland’s brilliance for shifting gears and going off ramp in the midst of itself creates as the multivalent passages intersect, collide, erupt.
We learn of Bird’s mother’s recent death in this passage, early on:
“Her mother came to her in dreams. She was dead but in dreams, she lived.
I smell fire, she said, your toilet froze. I made you my nice kitten soup.”
Here the dreams, the matters of communication between the living and dead, are not a relic, but an active aspect of Bird’s understanding of reality; as if the loss of her mother has fused her into a catatonic state where reality and unreality are one. This feels true to me, in the mode of feeling that constricts itself around a person in the deepest sort of grief; beyond even recklessness, to the point of no longer bothering to differentiate, and therefore, in Bird’s case, to protect herself from further harm.
Pages later, Holland writes: “Because wasn’t surviving the worst part? The dreadful onset of the cure? There was nothing you couldn’t get over. You could sorrow all your life, but still you lived, you lived. You hoarded. You flew your mother on a string like a kite.”
The mother continues to crop up throughout the text like this, a buoy on the bizarre waters of the daily life of Bird as she continues being a mother, a friend to another, a woman waiting for the father of her child to come home and stay there, despite how all he ever seems to do is rotate between extremities of his own battered longing and sadistic abuse.
And Holland’s knack for the crimping detail, for the strange underlining of a fragment within a moment that doesn’t wear its significance outright, but as an image, a cluster of sounds, is just so brutal here; so heartbreaking, like a handwritten note you find from someone you loved after they died. She is astonishingly able to sit within the mindset of pain and not try to catalyze it or even contextualize it, but to bleed it. Her language itself bleeds, becomes like red wet blots on a Kleenex you find in the trash, maybe, same as the notes. It is imagistic, yes, but it also works as if controlled by a conductor who knows when to pause, when to frenzy, when to joke, even if the jokes come out as if off the palate of someone with cotton swabs stuffed in their mouth, healing half numb.
You can’t reach Bird, on the page, you find. You can see her reeling, see her in need, but continuously we are returned to Mickey’s damage-on-damage treating of her, sometimes twisted into supposed playtimes, other times just cruel for cruel’s sake. The novel even begins in this state, depicting Bird as left home tied up by him, without knowledge of when he will return, if ever. She seems aware that he could leave forever at any time, but finds refrain in feeling grateful when he does come back, even though nothing is ever different with him.
“‘When do I get to kill you?,’” he asks her. “‘What do I get to use?’”
“The answers came to them in the bedroom, sprung from the heat of fucking—bed talk, potty talk, not a plan so much as a feeling, needling, the watery sloppy hum and drift of a grief in her, unhelpable. Something had to give. They would fly off a bridge, dusk coming down; they would slam the car into a wall. Nothing lasting. A moment’s impulse, three.”
Impulse. There’s a tool beyond sentence, one that allows work like Holland’s to crack open and clam up at turn, as it might wish, most often never sticking to any one sentiment so long that it becomes tedious, but rather leaving you tilted, searching for footing. And still the larger strokes of active violence and misdirection in Bird’s life alone becomes enough to carry us forward, searching for the grace between the lines that have allowed her to survive this long, to find some form of sustenance in a life that never seems to stop abusing, clawing the ground.
Even Bird’s friend, Suzie, who becomes a device in the novel where we are able to see Bird in daily order, in conversation, trying to logic forward, has fucked Mickey, run off with Mickey. She only seems to care about Bird in that she is someone to speak to, to carry a pattern forward with. Suzie’s humanity, like Mickey’s remains distant, an ornament, leaving Bird stranded with only the page to speak through, still there enough in her own mind to find the words that tell the story of her life, even as she becomes only left locked behind again and again in her own misery, the silver linings still only silver, like little knives.
And so this novel is sadistic and tender in the same breath; it is symphonic and line-driven; it meanders into enormous fields and backs back out; it drills into the heart of itself so deeply it can’t even seem to feel it any longer, though it remains able to find poetry, to gather its barb hooks and keep fluttering forward, toward an ending that offers no new solace, no dream within a dream that gathers light. It’s as unflinching in its mortality as it is resistant to settling on any one moral truism or means of being; it feels more honest than it would even like to be, besides that Holland has forced the language to reflect its meaning beyond the need for meaning. It just cuts you up and then offers you a window to look back through before it’s ready to cut again. Its pain is its body. Its ability to still speak is its lungs. It has so many kind of eye, opening just enough when the swelling goes down to let it look awhile.
“Bird slickened with blood she was losing still; on her breasts, hieroglyphs of his hands. Mineral seep. Her feet were pewter; a beetle wandered in the swales of her tendons, daubing methodically at the spatter of her blood. A speckled wing, iridescent. Nothing more moved but Mickey, Bird—a shadow fused, a Gorgon’s head.”
Thankful for a novel like this that moves in the dark and light alike; that doesn’t need to explain why we remain in the wake of our own pain so long that it becomes us; that even when we know we should turn and run, we can’t remember where it would ever feel another way. A brave book. A skinbook that outlives.