Page 30 American Book Review Constant Inconstancy Michael Axelrod It Might Do Well With Strawberries David Matlin Marick Press http://www.marickpress.com 236 pages; paper, $14.95 As I flipped through the pages of David Matlin’s It Might Do Well With Strawberries before reading, I was immediately reminded of two things: 1) David Markson’s brilliant novel This Is Not a Novel (2001) and 2) René Magritte’s brilliant painting This Is Not a Pipe (Ceci n’est pas une pipe). If one knows anything about Markson’s work, then one knows This Is Not a Novel is definitely a novel; and if one knows even a bit of French slang, then one knows This Is Not a Pipe is definitely not a pipe. That said, one immediately wonders at the title of David Matlin’s book, It Might Do Well With Strawberries, what might do well with strawberries? What might it be that does well with strawberries? Perhaps, cream. If one knows the source of the quote (or not since Matlin tells the reader in the preface which is not a preface), then one remembers, recalls, recollects Herman Melville’s lines from Moby-Dick (1851): The Sperm Whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob:—a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolor the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute more hominum. It might do well with strawberries. What is telling about this quote and its relation to Matlin’s work is that there is kind of poetic affinity in that quote and much of what Matlin writes. One might, in fact, read Melville’s lines as poetic discourse fraught with the munificence of whales, a kind of nonfiction treatise that absorbs one’s sense of purpose while simultaneously laying bare the art. “Making strange,” as one Russian literary critic once wrote. And “making strange” is what Matlin does in the text and does rather brilliantly primarily because the text goes against the grain of categorization. As readers, we are wont to open a text and know from the blurb or some such accoutrement that what we are soon to be in the process of reading is a novel or a collection of short stories or a collection of poems or a book of nonfiction. But one is given no help in that regard. Even the cover of the book offers no assistance. In that sense, reviewing such a book is difficult. Something akin to “skydiving.” If one hasn’t done it, then how does one explain the experience? Clearly, one’s initial attempt at categorizing Matlin’s text would be that it is poetry; after all, the text does begin that way: Trapezoid’s weight of facial planes pulls the cheeks flattens muscles around lips. Eye sockets stretched by storms of miraculous hands carry the permanent sneer of the butterfly’s complex age in this woman of ancient Uaxactun engaged…. But then, as a reader, one would be incorrect in assuming it is “merely poetry” since the poetry stops and another discourse begins, a kind of prose, albeit poetic prose, that engages one politically, that begins discussing things like the California Correctional Peace Officers Union or a day in the life of San Quentin or the fractured fallout of Abu Ghraib. We read of “deuterium in his piss,” of plutonium infested semen, of “[u]ranium so far up his asshole even the local preacher threw the church plunger away.” Perhaps , all of these things might do well with strawberries. Certainly, one would need strawberries to get...
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Jan 1, 2014
Lora Mishra 
