A Review of Kat Meads' Dear DeeDee

If one does not know what is meant by the experiences of memory in the living presence of an image of things past, nor what is meant by seeking out a memory, lost or recovered, how can one legitimately ask oneself to whom this experience or this search is to be attributed? . . . [I]s memory primordially personal or collective?

– Paul Ricoeur

Wry and deeply nostalgic, Kat Meads’ novel, Dear DeeDee, lands on the cusp between two broad categories of the epistolary novel form. In the traditional construct, the author beckons readers to observe an unfolding of love, the tension in its development, the harrowing moments of near collapse whether by distance, poverty, death or disappearance. Here, think of Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, a novel of letters exchanged between impoverished distant cousins in St. Petersburg, Russia, who live across the street from each other, and yet send daily letters. Fast-forward in time to Nick Bantock’s popular tale of love and art intricately staged in the letters of the eponymous Griffin and Sabine.

The contemporary incarnation of the epistolary novel frames a skirmish in the battle over the position of the reader’s experience, particularly vis-à-vis realism and whatever one might claim as its antithesis, and so is only too ready to upend trust in the authorial voice. Take for example, John Barths’ novel LETTERS, or Chris Kraus’s I love Dick. Both quite exhilarating for the reader who enjoys watching a train speed off of well-worn tracks, engaging the reader in questioning the limits of the form, and especially of how, when, and by whom speech within a contextual milieu becomes authorized, and when speech invites distrust. It’s the “world-making capacity of language,” as Susan Stewart notes, that actively situates and transforms the reader as a narrative declares its intention to either mimic reality or to point to language’s place of origin in constructing everything the reader experiences.

In a series of short letters dated over the course of eleven months, Mead’s Dear DeeDee tells the story of the letters’ writer, Aunt K, born and raised in North Carolina. The stories in Aunt K’s irreverent and often poignant short letters unfold from a rear-view perspective, one developed long after she moved to the West coast. Aunt K addresses her letters to her college-aged niece who also grew up in and remains in North Carolina. Aunt K’s letters seek to bestow sage coming-of-age advice, offer tender descriptions of DeeDee’s father, and select tidbits of uniquely small-town, Southern, White life.

As the novel begins, Aunt K notes the difficulty of getting started with her project, running through a halting series of salutations, only to cross each out before the ink dries: “Dear, Dearest, Darling DeeDee, Darling niece, Greetings.” In the opening letter, Meadstips her hand toward the arch tone she  maintains through much of the novel, referring to the distaff members of DeeDee’s clan as “ancestresses,” each plagued by the effects of the Southern mores Meads makes careful note of, those that shuttle older women into a state of “grumpiness” rather than of “confidence.” In Dear DeeDee, memory unfolds along a matrilineal line. Men come in and out of view but mainly to serve as markers of female introspection: the curious case of the uncle who cries silently at the dinner table for no apparent reason; DeeDee’s father’s black patent leather shoes; a series of nameless boyfriends.

Meads engages in a bit of gamesmanship as Aunt K advises DeeDee that “literature teaches us to lead with force, provocation, mystery, feeling” and then worries whether her opening gambit contains enough of these in any measure to hold her niece’s attention—an undercutting move, one taken to prime the pump of sympathy for the storyteller.

The substrate of Meads’ novel, then, as memoir, enacts memories of her early years in a voice that is at once jaded and swaggering, disarming and joyful; a voice intent upon providing loving counsel to DeeDee, but one that seems to want to unknow the very same emotional wrangling with adolescence, spoken and unspoken family disagreements, admiration and shame of her small-town roots: “Recalcitrance. Pretty standard Southern hiccup”; “Digging in one’s heels, affably appearing to agree. Both regional staples. What I reiterate here, you no doubt figured out rolling in your crib.” Aunt K occasionally askes DeeDee a direct question: “And how are you spending your undergrad Sundays? Cramming for Monday midterms? Throwing back Tequila shots?” These direct addresses bring DeeDee to life in tiny spasms of presence that break, for a moment, the cadence of Aunt K’s storytelling.

Dear DeeDee mimics the movement of a certain type of social discourse—a banter of Southern, snappy retorts one might expect to hear spoken among those who haven’t left home, those who are overqualified but continue to slug it out in a series of dead-end jobs. Until leaving for the West coast for good, this was Aunt K’s world, with the exception of a brief stint in NYC—and ostensibly Meads’ as well.

The depth of field Meads painstakingly develops in Dear DeeDee creates a kind of Geertzian modality, a thick description of the valences of time, place, mood—all of which make it a pleasure to read, full of local color, brimming with remembrances of a certain strain of American family life, with its quirks, snarky asides, and quiet tragedies. Quite interestingly, the letters are full of literary, film, and brand references too numerous to name here, with the exception of Virginia Woolf’s work and life, which have a place of prominence. Aunt K uses these copious references to literary work, and its making, to foreground her own story as fabrication, world creation.

The reader will soon begin to intuit that since DeeDee never replies with letters of her own, she doesn’t exist, nor does DeeDee’s father, whom Meads takes great care to describe. DeeDee is, as Aunt K finally concedes, a conceit created as a reason for the discovery, naming, and parsing of memory: memory at once vividly personal and tangentially collective; the latter unabashedly pointing to a kind of genealogy, to bloodlines writ large as persona. One might assume that a memoirist might choose to keep certain members of the family disguised for the sake of privacy, and while this may be the case, Meads seems to have something else up her sleeve. The simultaneous embrace and refutation of her project—of which she says her “working theory is to pimp nostalgia as connection, a connection with who I was and therefore am. Unfortunately, that face-saving spin ignores a basic horror. The past is set. No revising or improving it.” Meads’ Dear DeeDee declares itself as writing in-and-of-itself, and perhaps with no more allegiance to the past than DeeDee herself.

A Review of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi

Piranesi, the title character of Susanna Clarke’s new novel, has appointed himself explorer and archivist of his world—an apparently endless labyrinth of stone halls lined with enigmatic statues. A vigorous sea sweeps through the lower level of the house; cloud, mist, and rain roam the upper level; stars shine through the windows at night. As far as Piranesi knows, he is the only living inhabitant of his world but for one: the Other, an academic who believes that the House holds a forgotten knowledge which can be used to unlock powers of flight, shape-shifting, and telepathy long lost to humankind.

Like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Clarke’s 2004 bestseller, Piranesi is a novel of enchanting world-building and detail, and a novel that is itself enchanted by the pursuits of knowledge-seeking and knowledge-sharing. Jonathan Strange layered speculative elements over a realist framework of Georgian social dynamics, emphasizing power relations and socially enforced silences. In Piranesi, Clarke has focused on a setting that reconfigures aspects of human experience and the natural world into abstract forms; a setting that recalls the parallel world on the other side of the rain to which the magicians of Jonathan Strange disappear.

Jonathan Strange is heavily footnoted, so that the novel itself could seem to be one of the volumes of magical history to which the narrator refers. Piranesi, too, is conceived as a found object, as if it has grown freely out of its own setting. The novel is structured as a series of journal entries, leaving the reader reliant upon Piranesi’s observations as a window into his world. Luckily, Piranesi is a generous observer and a meticulous notetaker: “As a scientist and an explorer,” he tells us, “I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World.” Clarke narrates so brilliantly through Piranesi as to turn his keen eye for detail and tendency toward pompousness into stylistic flourishes.

Piranesi’s frequent interrogatives make the text rich with a kind of loneliness more akin to wonder than to moodiness. “When I feel myself about to die, ought I to go and lie down with the People of the Alcove?” he writes, referring to a set of skeletons that he has discovered in the House, and to which he—like an acolyte—administers offerings of food, drink, and flowers. “What is a few days of feeling cold compared to a new albatross in the World?” he writes, as he sacrifices the dried seaweed that he burns to keep warm for a family of albatrosses that has made its home in his Halls. Piranesi’s narration is fascinated by the interconnectedness of things, and by Piranesi’s own place in the web of being that includes skeleton, albatross, statue, and sea.

The pages of the novel are studded with clever details and found objects, and part of the delight of wandering Piranesi’s Halls is in finding and listening to them. Listening to them because—though Piranesi is a distinctly quiet novel, punctuated by terse conversations between characters who tend to conceal as much as they share—every object that we discover in its pages is gorgeously in conversation with Piranesi’s universe. There are the pieces of torn-up notes found stashed in birds’ nests—evidence of a human mind in distress. There are the bottles of multivitamins and slices of Christmas cake that the Other occasionally offers to Piranesi, which suggest the existence of a world external to the House. There are the “seashells, coral beads, pearls, tiny pebbles and interesting fishbones” that Piranesi weaves into his own hair, physical manifestations his oneness with the House, which other characters would likely call his madness.

Piranesi is a thriller at times, with moments of fast-paced action and occult intrigue—but it is the interaction between Piranesi and his setting that makes the novel illuminating and memorable. Like one of Borges’ labyrinths, Clarke’s infinite house of statues is a meeting point between human consciousness and indifferent cosmos; between meaning-making and wild-beyond-meaning. As Piranesi and the Other navigate this liminal space, Clarke shows us different ways of thinking about knowledge and the natural world.

Piranesi identifies himself as an explorer and a scientist, but also as the “Beloved Child of the House”—because Piranesi’s way of knowing is also a way of loving, a way of receiving love. Piranesi’s ways of knowing are numerous: he explores the Halls by foot and notes the statues he encounters; he records patterns of star and sea, and so makes sense of the terrible tides; he talks to, and receives messages from, birds and statues. Clarke uses Piranesi as a model of knowing, and reminds us that there are areas of overlap between knowing and loving: Both ways of relating to the world can involve attentiveness and wonder.

Piranesi soon comes into conflict with the Other over the latter’s search for exploitable knowledge. Piranesi worries that this model of knowledge-seeking leads the seeker “to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted.” This objection to the Other’s motivations is not a denunciation of scientific pursuit (Piranesi, after all, is an avid mapper of stars and predictor of tides); instead, it is an intellectual cringing-away from the kind of science that views the universe as dumb stuff. To Piranesi, the universe is active—infinite in its beauty and kindness—and the worthwhile ways of knowing the universe are those which put him into greater harmony with it.

One of the few missed opportunities in Piranesi is the novel’s failure to locate its literary discussion of “madness” in relation to contemporary discourse about mental health or cognition. Clarke’s romantic treatment of madness (which is related to both childhood cognition and melancholy, and which opens the mind to magic) feels at home in the Georgian context of Jonathan Strange. It seems disappointing, though, that Clarke’s treatment of madness has not evolved in Piranesi: Though several characters are contemporary academics, discussions of Piranesi’s state of mind are conducted in the same, general, poetical terms as in Jonathan Strange.

Piranesi’s prolonged stay in the House, we learn, has caused him to suffer from memory loss and other side-effects. Piranesi, however, does not sense any disconnect between his consciousness and the totality of things. “The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly,” he writes. “Nowhere is there any disjuncture where I ought to remember something but do not, where I ought to understand something but do not.” Piranesi’s state of mind (his memory loss, his dissociation from his former identity, his familial feelings toward birds and statues), which other characters call madness, seems to go hand-in-hand with his ability to understand the House.

Madness figures into Piranesi as a literary device, as it does in Jonathan Strange or the Romances of Chretien de Troyes. Given the cleverness with which the novel resolves some of the other puzzles of relation between the normal, human world and the House, it seems a shame that Clarke has not weighed in more explicitly regarding the extent to which Piranesi’s cognitive state might connect to something literal.

There are also moments of awkwardness toward the end of the novel, when the action between characters becomes the central focus of the narrative, and Piranesi’s relationship with the House seems to take a backseat. The narrative’s sudden insistence on straightening out Piranesi’s literal circumstances (on the Resolution of the Plot, as Piranesi might write) feels a rude awakening after we have been so happily immersed in the mysteries of the House, which ought to evade resolution.

Piranesi is a shapeshifting, dynamic creation that keeps the reader guessing as to what kind of thing, exactly, it is. It is a book about magic and alternate worlds, and also a book about science and learning. At the core of the novel is an abstract conflict that transcends human action; yet the pages are too saturated with Piranesi’s emotive consciousness to read as a straightforward, disinterested allegory. Gorgeously imagined and meticulously constructed, generous and sharp, it is one of those rare books that cuts through the heart of things but leaves that heart beating.