Rebecca Brown's Evolution Toward Minimalism: A Beckettian Poetics

Abstract

Rebecca Brown is best known for her 1994 novel The Gifts of the Body, which recounts the experiences of a home-care worker assisting people with AIDS, and which earned her several awards (such as a Lambda Literary Award).1 Reviewers are in the habit of placing this contemporary Seattle-based author in the tradition of Samuel Beckett. A remarkable blurb on the back of Brown’s The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary (1998) is a case in point: “If Samuel Beckett were a woman in late 20th century America, he might have written stories like Brown’s,” Publishers Weekly speculates.2 Charles Mudede calls Beckett an “ancestor” of Brown,3 and the author herself has affirmed that she counts Beckett among those “writers who have inspired me, fed me, writers who have saved my life. Writers I learn from.”4 I have elsewhere noted the thematic concerns that Brown shares with her literary forebear, such as a fascination with confused minds and decaying bodies,5 yet I would like to argue that another significant way in which Brown’s work can be said to parallel Beckett’s lies in the evolution of her writing style toward minimalism.