Girl Chaos

Abstract

Girl Chaos Susan McCarty (bio) Machine: A Novel Susan Steinberg Gray Wolf Press www.graywolfpress.org/books/machine 160 Pages; Print, $15.00 I read Machine first in a pre-pandemic world. It may have been the week I stood in the mall, near the H&M, pushing my sleeping toddler in a stroller and reading the New York Times headline after it dinged my phone: "China Reports First Death from New Virus." The subhead was a reassuring hand-pat in smaller, lighter font: "The coronavirus, which surfaced in the city of Wuhan, has put the region on alert, but there is no evidence that it can spread among humans." I remember feeling skeptical at this claim and slightly worried. A novel virus. Then the toddler woke up and pointed at the MALL JUMP set up in the middle of the concourse, at a black-haired boy who was soaring in his harness toward the ceiling of the mall, so improbably high. The mother in me gasped with fear, but the girl in me thrilled and wished the toddler gone so she could roll a jay and strap in too. The fear from the Times article evaporated like so much smoke, and I did not follow my heart at MALL JUMP because I couldn't. So much was like that in those days—the girl self-resurfacing after what felt like a long period of evanescence to push the mom self aside and demand, in her girl way, some kind of fucking fun. While I breastfed in the twilight hush of the nursery, I had fantasies of sneaking away to New York to dance at Pyramid and touch a stranger. I read Machine in the bath, after a workday of teaching classes and attending meetings, and at my office desk, quickly. I read it in the comfort of my home while my husband worked at his office on campus and my toddler played at day care. I read it alone, with all selves present. I gobbled it up. I loved and hated the girl in the book, the narrator. She was me and every girl I knew and loved and hated. And I read the book in a girl way, in huge gasping chunks until it was gone too fast, as someone nostalgic for their own fucked-upness and mistakes. I also read it as a lover of Steinberg's previous work, Spectacle (2013), and in particular the story "Superstar," where Steinberg's narrative reverses itself over and over, where the questions about who has control (The reader? The author? The girl who wants the guy? The guy who has the girl?) and the frustration with the limits of gender performance and binaries (a smashed radio, a scraped car, a "generic performance of guy") and syntax (hypotaxis, parataxis, line break, repetition) coalesce to form a pulsing narrative that writhes with contradiction and liminality. I noticed form, in other words, as I often did when I read Steinberg. I love her take on form and control—explicitly iterated in her short essay on the Graywolf Press blog titled "Susan Steinberg on Punctuation," in which she writes about being "desperate for rules" after a trauma and how the practice of those rules, in the form of punctuation and grammar, became "an attempt to control devastation." Then, like many of us, I spent three full months not alone. I re-read the book in fits and starts, slowly: after four months of quarantine, at home with a family and an iPhone, through a low-key long illness and the attendant anxiety and depression, during the daylong ushering of the words and moods of a toddler. I encountered [End Page 10] Machine again as someone whose life, both pragmatically and existentially, had lost form and I found in Machine a matching dissolution: of girlhood, of family, of class, and of the colonialisms of American shore life that lead to the death of a local girl—the mystery at the heart of the novel. What thrilled me this time was not the structures that Steinberg employs to show us the ways words and labels confine, but the way the novel ebbs and throbs...