Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions by Sheila O'Connor

Abstract

Reviewed by: Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions by Sheila O'Connor Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) evidence of v: a novel in fragments, facts, and fictions Sheila O'Connor Rose Metal Press www.rosemetalpress.com/books/evidence-of-v/ 280 pages; Print, $16.95 Sheila O'Connor's maternal grandmother wanted to be a star of the stage and screen but is relegated to the pages of her granddaughter's compendium of remembrances and reconstructions. Evidence of V is a Dickensian tale of teen pregnancy and punishment that begins during the Depression and stretches out for nearly a century. In demonstrating the inheritability of family trauma, it risks cliché, though O'Connor is always aware of this. "I create from clippings. Scrapbook work," the author writes in a poem marked off by parentheses, as though her explanation is a mere footnote to the larger text. Her grandmother must be "collaged," or "paste(d) into a girl," since her story has been lost. "V mirroring my mother,/pregnant at fifteen because/the daughter must resemble—" O'Connor continues in the same poem, as if acknowledging the rules of relating the progress of a girl deemed a rake. O'Connor's task [End Page 72] will eventually require her to rewire what she thinks she knows about her family and the language she uses to render it. Despite a wealth of documentary evidence, language will be all that O'Connor has, and she deploys it starkly and strategically. The initial "V" is how O'Connor identifies her grandmother, based on documents from the Minnesota courts and the state's system of dealing with the so-called immoral girls snagged in its merciless grip. A complete reading of the book reveals that not all characters' names are true to their real-life inspirations, however. O'Connor acknowledges that "V" may stand for any number of names as well as traits. The form of that initial suggests a vacancy which her family and readers might fill in their own way. Such is V's legacy: speculation justified by how her descendants reveal themselves. In other words, the fictional past is proved by the factual present. V's obsession with numbers—the number of days in her six-year sentence for immorality and incorrigibility—is borne out through the career of accounting her daughter, sometimes called June, takes up. O'Connor imagines V "loathing" housekeeping, just as June "despised all things domestic/who could not cook or clean or sew or iron or care for a sick kid." O'Connor's son is "consumed" by a "song and dance obsession," just as both V and O'Connor's brother "burned with the stage-dreams." O'Connor's "sibling"—it's not clear whether this is the same stage-struck brother, or the one "lost" in his "heroin and his blues" is "in the psych ward." Most importantly, O'Connor attributes her own artistic ambitions to V, who starts off singing in school plays and junior competitions and comes to dance in a nightclub, "Because the artist must begin her work where she can," O'Connor says. By the time she is fifteen, when O'Connor first places her grandmother's story, V has already been molested by her stepfather; a man her mother married for help with the rent. In 1935, V is discovered while singing on the sidewalk by "Mr. C," a nightclub owner. He hires her as a dancer, dubs her "The Little Fox," as if V is for Vixen, although he later calls her Venus. Mr. C's nature is so malleable as to be maddening. He is a tender lover, a pathetic patient, as well as a cad and a gangster. He is the "misspelled Mr. C," though later V thinks of him as "a man named Sammy K." He is most definitely Jewish "in a town that hates Jews (GENTILES PREFERRED, V has read the ads)." This fact is confirmed through O'Connor's excavation of court [End Page 73] records: "the many mentions of 'Jews' in V's file?" The cryptic, if not tenuous nature of other characters' identities, is a theme throughout V's...