Passions, Sentiments, and Sympathies

Abstract

Page 22 American Book Review The Equation of Loss Christina Milletti The Blue of Her Body Sara Greenslit Starcherone Books http://www.starcherone.com 144 pages; paper, $16.00 “Blue,” William Gass writes in his extended meditation on the shade, “is…most suitable as the color of interior life.” Blue turns up everywhere: it is cool in ice and water, hot in a flame. There is blue in smoke inasmuch as light. Blue is sad. It has memory and therefore bitterness. We swear in blue streaks. We become black and blue. Perhaps because blood waxes blue beneath our parchment of flesh, we feel blue (whereas we only see red). The color blue, in short, has great emotional range. Being “blue” is a state of mind. Greenslit explores a veritable spectrum of blue consciousness. Throughout her first novel, The Blue of Her Body, Sara Greenslit explores a veritable spectrum of blue consciousness in her unnamed narrator’s long musing about a failed love affair. Initially, the plot of Greenslit’s book seems familiar: girl gets dumped, becomes depressed, and retreats to a pastoral landscape to lick her wounds. Yet, Greenslit’s novel quickly disrupts weary renditions of troubled relationships. The Blue of Her Body is as much about failed love, as about the array of forces that collude to push lovers into untenable positions—the forces, in other words, that make love fail. It is not just Kate’s body, we learn, that the narrator is after but, even more so, her own surprisingly foreign body as well: to which “her” the title refers, after all, remains opaque. Greenslit’s book (the winner of the Starcherone Press Prize for Innovative Fiction) is less a novel than a collage of poignant narratives culled from many different discourses. It is a book informed as much by the body as by the pharmakon—by the science of the aviary as much as the history of language, of thought. On one level, the reader is led through a series of achronological vistas that showcase the women’s relationship. We catch them in bed, relaxed on a sofa, eating dessert , driving off on vacation—the simple moments that characterize a life together, which is to say here, a life lost.While these insights into their affair capture an intensity of feeling that ebbs and rises in the novel’s diction—sometimes with sexual urgency, at others more serenely, like a sleeper’s breath— the narrator’s reflections on Kate’s ever-present absence begin to slowly peel back other narratives that are equally innate to her life. In particular, we learn about her mother’s illness which prefigures her own: an inheritance of genetics that approximates the cultural legacy with which she is, similarly, at odds daily. What she begins to discover is that her identity has been shaped by a host of factors outside her control: that her blueness is as much a problem of biology as of language. In many respects, The Blue of Her Body represents an investigation of the many idioms that color the narrator’s personal life: the opaque pharmacological diction of side effects (“dysthymia,” “anhedonia ”), the poor language gamesmanship of religious sloganeering (“Feeling Down? Look to the son!” a church ad reads in the novel. Elsewhere: “Fight Truth Decay Brush up on Your Bible”), even the symbolic language of physics that describes the flight and velocity of the birds at the aviary where she works. Greenslit’s narrator struggles to corral all of this information together, tries to use it to make sense of Kate’s departure in a probing language that takes flight without becoming fanciful, a lyricism grounded in the very earthy lexicon of the naturalist. What arises is less an explanation or a story than what the narrator refers to as “the equation of loss.” But what language can illustrate an algorithm of blueness? While the narratives of The Blue of Her Body weave and bob, at times meshing with one another, at others gently resisting, what the narrator begins to suggest is that their lines of flight don’t in fact “add up”: that more information doesn’t equal more story, that stronger dosages cannot realize...