Fragments of Tragedy and Pleasure
SMITH, SARAH HARRISON
Fragments of Tragedy and Pleasure Why Did I Ever By Mary Robison Counterpoint. 200 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Freelance writer and critic ONLY THE most deft hands can...
...She could just as well be said to be maximizing the novel's potential to convey the contents of a chaotic mind...
...Money's humor prevails...
...In the next, she's actually trying to get down to work, ordering herself around like the mother of a teenager whose grades are falling: "I follow myself outside, asking, 'Where do you think you're going...
...She pushes her way...
...Ranges...
...But while jobs and partners may prove expendable, Robison's people are largely confined to their particular lives by their loves, especially their love for their children...
...The more Robison gradually reveals of Money's family life, the more the habits of her darting mind seem to be a perfectly reasonable defense against drowning in tears...
...Stuck as they are, they get by on banter, letting themselves reflect on longerperspectives only occasionally...
...She's MADE OF MONEY!'" Money finds Dix exasperating, in part because he feels a joy in language that she, a writer, seems to have lost, though her facility remains intact...
...Robison's protagonist may be a writer, but her difficulties are more human than specific to her vocation...
...Kicks through...
...Stomps...
...In the following fragment, she's writing a damning-with-faint-praise fan letter to Sean Perm...
...Wanders through...
...No, hikes...
...Even with the help of the Ritalin she takes as often as her doctor will permit, she has trouble concentrating on anything for very long...
...Banter and the fragment form keep Why Did I Ever from the maudlin tone that might seem to be unavoidable given Robison's subjects...
...In a hotel someplace in New York, Money's son Paulie, who has survived a prolonged sexual assault, is living under police protection, waiting to testify at the trial of his torturer...
...At one point when she has just arrived at her local airport from an exhausting trip to Hollywood, her boyfriend Dix begins what will become a seemingly endless stream of bad puns on her name: '"YOUR MONEY BACK!' he calls out...
...It comes and goes, interrupted or suppressed by household chores and goofy word play...
...This makes her struggles with her writing partner over a revision almost unendurable...
...On her f___ing feet...
...Walks...
...My very first stories, of 25 years ago, were written like that and they're the few of mine that still interest me...
...Intense emotion can't be sustained, Robison suggests...
...Folding it dozens of ways...
...The passage of time and the machinations of fate (in the form of a swarm of wasps, or an unexpected death) ring slight but significant changes...
...Her daughter Mev, who lives hand-to-mouth in the same town in Alabama as her mother, commutes six days a week into Louisiana, where she can dose up on methadone legally...
...Impulsive road trips and a collection of crazy friends help keep her mind out of trouble...
...Drags herself...
...Whereas the blacks in the paintings at the Rothko Chapel can look a little steely and cold, my blacks are rich with the colors of hot embers and dark earth...
...In a recent interview she said that initially she "had intended something...
...Her new novel is composed of 527 short fragments— snippets of conversation and anecdotes in the clever, rueful voice of a middleaged mother and script doctor—that flash and dazzle as they fly past the reader, amusing despite their heavy matter...
...Backpacks...
...Strides...
...These epiphanies are always understated, and always temporary...
...Are you finished with your work?'I have to admit, 'No.' Then you're not allowed out, get back inside,' I say...
...like a deck of cards that would read the same in any direction...
...Rambles...
...This kind of foolery helps her to pass the time waiting for the sex crime trial to begin, and for Mev to sort out her life...
...He'd run from everything he couldn't change about what he'd been calling his life...
...There's a lot you can do with just paper...
...In Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks she writes "Party girl...
...And trick yourself out of thinking about anything over at the side of your mind, all the stuff that's there throbbing, or whimpering, whichever's worse...
...Tramps...
...This is largely a matter of Robison's style—a style that reflects the fractured interior life of her protagonist, who is named, improbably, Money...
...I probably knew all along this day would come...
...There's my HARD-EARNED MONEY!' says he...
...Through the f___ing snow...
...these characters have, or at least use, very little of their own agency to any effect...
...It is a rare novel that can manage to convey the coexistence of tragedy andpleasure so immediately without lessening the reader's enjoyment of either...
...And hang up yourjacket.'" Money has compelling distractions in the form of two adult children...
...Robison demonstrates one way to write good fiction, but she does not analyze it at the same time...
...Marches...
...Roams...
...He won't look at me...
...Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Freelance writer and critic ONLY THE most deft hands can toss around weighty subjects like drug addiction, sex crimes and the death of beloved pets, yet make them seem light as air...
...At the end of the story "Adore Her," in Robison's 1988 collection entitled Believe Them, a character decides that after he finishes drinking the beer in his hand "he would leave and he would run...
...Bring back my VCR...
...Pounds...
...She journeys...
...Paulie may or may not have been infected with HIV But as is so often true in real life, the intensity of Money's love for her foundering children requires her to distract herself from them as well as to be distracted by them...
...In her next fragment she concludes, "There isn't a right word...
...Robison's strengths have always been her ear for dialogue, and her knack for suppressing the emotional heat of a story until just the right moment...
...If Why Did I Ever is a kind of stream of consciousness novel, it is a far cry from Mrs...
...Shoves...
...run from the unalterables: from Chloe, the apartment building, Baltimore, his job at Tidewater Assurance...
...I can sit here doing this until my periods cease...
...One moment she's procrastinating about working on her latest script —for a film about Bigfoot—by painting "everything in the place, everything, especially the hideous mint-green spine of this Thomas Pynchon book which I do intend to read at least some of...
...Back in the sitting room, Penny reads a line aloud for me...
...Dalloway...
...Advances through...
...She autographs all her books with signatures and inscriptions she feels are appropriate to the authors...
...Money spends more time making lists of favorite songs and watching inane videos than she does mourning over Paulie and Mev, in part because she seems to realize that there is little she can do to help them...
...Marches through,' I say, 'or, moves.' He says nothing...
...Thankfully, Why Did I Ever is not metafiction...
...The fragments are just cohesive enough to give Money's meandering thoughts a plot-like trajectory that in turn propels the reader's curiosity...
...ALTHOUGH Mary Robison has published two other novels, she is best known for her short—sometimes supershort—stories, which the New Yorker began to publish in 1977...
...Mary Robison is just such an accomplished juggler...
...Robison eventually abandoned the idea of writing this novel without a linear chronology, and it was a good decision...
...His fingers are stopped, frozen in the air over his keyboard...
...Eschewing traditional narrative links between the fragments could be considered "minimalist"—a label often used to describe Robison's prose—but with so much rich detail and ephemera left in, the term is misleading...
...She forges paintings to hang on her walls and prefers them to the originals...
...Paces...
...Perhaps he will and perhaps he won't...
...Traverses...
...Treads...
...The fragment chapter form she adopts in Why Did I Ever is a successful development of her earlier style and themes...
...Robison tosses up these tiny, seemingly disassociated pieces so quickly that they take on the appearance of a coherent, entrancing whole...
...After descending Mount McKinley, Justine trudges through the...' He says, 'We need a better verb.' 'Wades through,' I say...
...I say, 'She lugs herself...
Vol. 84 • November 2001 • No. 6
