Off the Beaten Track

Together, FC2 and Dalkey Archive probably represent the most concerted and successful effort in American publishing to present an alternative to mainstream “literary fiction” that is at least as “literary” without being stylized and “serious” in a conventionally earnest way.

Rikki Ducornet | The Word “Desire”
(Dalkey Archive; 193 pgs; $12.95)

Ronald Sukenick | Last Fall
(FC2; 200 pgs; $15.95)

The American novelist Ronald Sukenick died of a degenerative muscle disease in 2004. His legacy includes not only his numerous works of fiction and criticism but also a collection of publications and presses that attempt to maintain a place for innovative writing in contemporary literary culture. Directly, Sukenick founded the Fiction Collective (now FC2) as a publishing venue for experimental fiction, as well as American Book Review, which focuses its attention largely on new works of experimental fiction and poetry and in general works to remind us that the sort of book discussion to be found in The New York Times Book Review or The New York Review of Books does not begin to get at the variety of serious writing to be discovered at smaller presses more dedicated to literature than to commerce. Indirectly, Sukenick forged an alliance of sorts with the Center for Book Culture, which publishes the journals Context and the Review of Contemporary Fiction and helped to subsidize Dalkey Archive Press, which both publishes new fiction—especially fiction in translation—and preserves an invaluable backlist of important if unjustly neglected innovative fiction published during the last century or so.

Together, FC2 and Dalkey Archive probably represent the most concerted and successful effort in American publishing to present an alternative to mainstream “literary fiction” that is at least as “literary” without being stylized and “serious” in a conventionally earnest way. Unorthodox storytelling (as well as imaginative reconsiderations of storytelling itself) and challenges to the dominance or realism are the norm at these presses, and both qualities can be found in two of their recent releases, The Word “Desire” by Rikki Ducornet (actually a reprint by Dalkey Archive of a 1997 book first published by Henry Holt) and Sukenick’s own final novel, Last Fall (FC2). Both books will provide readers with something other than familiar reading experiences, and both will introduce new readers to authors whose other works are well worth seeking out. (Five of Ducornet’s other books are available at Dalkey Archive, while many of Sukenick’s previous books—including such seminal experimental fictions as 98.6 and The Death of the Novel and Other Stories—are also available on FC2’s backlist.)

Ducornet writes erotically charged fables and fairy tales to some degree reminiscent of the fiction of the British writer Angela Carter. As its title suggests, The Word “Desire” is indeed focused on love and sex, especially on moments of sexual awakening, of recognition of the irresistible power of desire. In “The Chess Set of Ivory,” the book’s first story, a young girl is confronted with the fact of her mother’s infidelity and its effect on her father, a professor teaching in Egypt. In “Roseveine,” a man tells the story of his childhood infatuation with a mature woman (his mother’s friend) that has, to say the least, contributed to his apparent insanity. While telling the tale of her own sexual awakening, the narrator of “The Many Tenses of Wanting” sets forth what might be the primary theme of the book: “I believe it is so that one’s sexuality is fixed at an early age. One is impressionable and a visual experience has the impress of a firebrand. I mean one sees something so puissant it sets the mind on fire, an inextinguishable fire that—if it cools to embers with the passage of hours and days—can be rekindled by a random word.”

In one of the collection’s best stories, “The Foxed Mirror,” a priest otherwise repulsed by sex (“the thought of a woman’s thighs is terrible”) becomes sexually obsessed with a male artist. Perhaps the most outrageous stories (which is saying something) are “Fortune,” narrated by the pet dog of Napoleon’s Josephine, and “Opium’” about a dying Pope who is suckled by a wet nurse. While plot descriptions such as these do begin to suggest the extraordinary qualities of Ducornet’s fiction, the reader will also find her stories replete with vividly rendered scenes, etched by Ducornet’s incisive prose style, and satisfyingly bizarre plot turns.

Sukenick’s Last Fall shares something of Ducornet’s surrealistic approach, although in this case the novel’s skewed perspective on specifically contemporary reality—the novel is set in New York just before and just after the events of 9/11, and contains a very compelling account of the immediate aftermath of the Trade Tower collapses—might more accurately be characterized as what the novelist John Barth called “irrealism.” The characters and events depicted in Last Fall are located just on the other side of the line separating the plausible from the implausible (although one might say that 9/11 represents the moment when the unreality of American life can no longer be exaggerated), but not so far as to make them unrecognizable as a version of the world we readers must otherwise inhabit. It tells the story of the “Museum of Temporary Art” and those associated with it, its plot (which is mostly displaced by the ongoing historical events) centering on an ostensible theft from the museum’s collection. This theft remains the novel’s unresolved mystery, since a museum of “temporary” art has no collection:

It was a matter of theft, but the problem was that nobody knew what had been stolen. The museum was banking on my expertise as a professor of post-contemporary art both to identify the stolen work and, if possible, to get it back.

None of this had been made public and, in fact, even the personnel of the museum were unaware, except for a vague feeling of unease, which was itself part of the evidence. Because the feeling that something, something important, was gone was a factor. That is, how else, other that through feeling, were they to know that something was gone when they didn’t know what it was?

Last Fall is a more straightforwardly rendered narrative than most of Sukenick’s fiction (although it does move from character to character in a way that requires the reader’s careful attention). It does not much feature the kind of play with typography and sentence boundaries typical of Sukenick’s other work, and while readers new to Sukenick might find this beneficial and Last Fall a more accessible introduction to his brand of experimental fiction, others might prefer his less explicitly allegorical, more formally challenging work. Nonetheless, the posthumous publication of Ronald Sukenick’s final novel is a valuable reminder that he was a figure central to the flourishing of American postmodern fiction, an important writer whose achievement is now complete and available for discovery and rediscovery by readers looking for an alternative to the “mainstream” in American fiction.