Méthode by Mary Dorsan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Méthode by Mary Dorsan Eilene Hoft-March Dorsan, Mary. Méthode. P.O.L, 2021. ISBN 978-2-8180-5289-1. Pp. 272. We all have our methods for attempting to invest our lives, and perhaps even the lives of others, with meaning. Mary Dorsan's unnamed narrator turns to volunteering for a local union of healthcare workers and support staff in order to do just that: something meaningful. During her very first volunteer shift, she is taken aback both by the personal nature of the aid required of her and by the deep inequalities revealed—with no little irony—in health and human service workplaces. Her first client is a black staff worker of long tenure in a health facility. A tense encounter between him and a man intent on asserting his privilege has resulted in disciplinary action against the staff worker. More terrible still, the sanction comes as the final straw in a lifetime of injustices. The man, whom the narrator will name "Méthode," has a breakdown and contemplates aloud a suicidal car accident. Méthode's revelation of brokenness and the narrator's powerlessness to prevent it thus become the impetus for the journal (i.e., the novel): she will methodically invent the supportive influences Méthode will need to be able to rise from the nadir of his life. She imagines for him a wife, family, and friends who will lift him out of depression or at least redirect him away from self-harm. This magical thinking reminds readers constantly that the novel vacillates along a continuum ranging from "reality" to "fiction." On one hand, the narrator consumes novels that she rates as page-turners and tearjerkers, fully aware that they pander to a readership that does not want to be challenged. On the other hand, the narrator/author draws on a real case of human-rights abuse, a Burundi man named Méthode Sindayigaya who was enslaved in a basement in France for ten years by a Burundi diplomat and his wife. The original Méthode offers knowledge of human cruelty and remedy for it through almost superhuman effort ("knowledge" and "remedy" being etymological origins of "method"). Although the narrator adopts this method—both character and strategy—she implicitly critiques her own occasional lack of method: when she ignores a homeless person or indulges in damaging gossip or refrains from renewing close relationships, especially through writing. This novel has the ruminative quality of an autobiography paired with an acute attention to its own fictionalizing. It has disarming depth if little in the way of rapid or focused plot development. Many of its journal entries describe the dreary decor of the union office, the convoluted tales of woe by aggrieved workers, the hit-or-miss solutions proffered to clients. It reminds us that making good faith attempts at addressing injustice often begins with finding the correct official form(s), listening closely, and even just showing up. [End Page 246] Eilene Hoft-March Lawrence University (WI) Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French