One D.O.A., One on the Way
by Mary Robison
2009, Counterpoint
In college, I read Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever. I can't recall who or what recommended this book to me (I suspect it may have involved by obsessive perusal of Amazon.com listmania! pages). Whatever the circumstances were, they were fortuitous.
Why Did I Ever is a brilliantly funny little book, collected in hundreds of scraps of ideas (the longest chapter was several paragraphs long) and scenes and anecdotes and sketches. Alone each of these was a marvelously cynical little gem and together comprised a very witty novel whose plot was abstract at best but that packed quite a punch.
(A sample chapter:
One D.O.A., One on the Way, Robison's first novel in the eight years since Why Did I Ever was published, shares a lot in common with its chronological predecessor. The chapters are remarkably short (the longest this time a little over a page) and these chapters do not develop a plot so much as they immerse the reader in an experience, the experience of how frustratingly hard it is to know someone intimately despite being privy to their most emotionally revealing experiences.
The object for our consideration is Eve Broussard, a location scout for a movie studio (the main character of Why Did I Ever was a script doctor) who lives in post-Katrina New Orleans. Eve is prevented from fully exploring her work because of the ruins in which Louisiana has been left since the storm and also because her husband, Adam, is sick with a grave illness. (The awkwardness of the coupling's names is mined for all the humor it's worth throughout the book; the main character of Why Did I Ever was named, amusingly, Money.)
Robison's observations about daily life - both its mundane activities and its moments of incredible importance - preclude the need for a traditional plot. If there is one, it's that Eve, while in love with her husband, conducts an affair with his indistinguishable twin brother. This plot is interesting for thematic reasons but the plot is not traditionally structured and the novel is the better for it.
One of the novel's great pleasures is Eve's sarcastic nicknames for the twin brothers: "Smash & Grab are here to join us for lunch"; "I'm with Rhythm & Blues and their parents at an eatery called The Half Moon"; "Here are the twins, I've Seen Fire & I've Seen Rain, propped on their sides on the bed, a chessboard between them", etc.
The novel's subject is ostensibly the collision of the aforementioned facets of life: the trivial and the significant. Because the chapters are so short and alternate so rapidly the discordance between scenes of emotional turmoil and domestic routine are jarring and produce a sense that both of these things are farcical in their own way; the trivial is made more trivial by demonstrating the time we waste on it when there are more important things to consider, and the significant is muted by the distraction of the trivial.
Here, for example, is a scene of the mundane:
The book is punctuated further by listing statistics, mostly about public facilities, about a post-Katrina New Orleans. These facts are at the very least disturbing and contribute at length to the murky tone of cherished-things-lost that pervades the novel.
Framing the novel in terms of the wider perspective of exploring what it means to live in New Orleans years after the storm lends considerable gravitas to the book; it feels much less slight than Why Did I Ever but the trade-off is in creating a substantially more morose tone. What's humorous is made darkly so, and what is ruminative or nostalgic is made doubly so.
Eve seems to be a woman dissatisfied with a life that should be satisfying. Her observations are colored by her disenchantment with her husband; even her affair with his identical brother has none of the spice that hackneyed love affairs are usually flavored with; at some points in the novel Eve is unsure which brother she's bedding.
Eve's voice is freighted with reluctant urgency. She is attuned to the world around her and takes in its beauty ("Her champagne hair, immaculate skin, a gargantuan sweater," she observes of a friend), all the while attempting to extricate herself from it.
One D.O.A., One on the Way reads like Eve's journal, a melange of observations of the world and of half-revealed emotional truths. Reading it feels like the intrusion of reading someone's diary and is marked particularly by that sensation of the incredible distance that is maintained even when seemingly engaging in such an intimate act. What is strange, and sad, about reading a diary is in how much is left out - reading between the lines of someone's painfully real emotional experiences. Robison creates the sensation of feeling close to someone while remaining distant, of knowing someone but not wholly, of understanding the why's of someone's life, but not exactly the what's.
The experience of reading One D.O.A., One on the Way is steeped in melancholy, but it is the kind of melancholy I am most familiar with: nostalgic for what once was and can no longer be, acutely observant of the comedies of life, appreciative of the vast, heartbreaking beauty of what it means to live.
by Mary Robison
2009, Counterpoint
In college, I read Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever. I can't recall who or what recommended this book to me (I suspect it may have involved by obsessive perusal of Amazon.com listmania! pages). Whatever the circumstances were, they were fortuitous.
Why Did I Ever is a brilliantly funny little book, collected in hundreds of scraps of ideas (the longest chapter was several paragraphs long) and scenes and anecdotes and sketches. Alone each of these was a marvelously cynical little gem and together comprised a very witty novel whose plot was abstract at best but that packed quite a punch.
(A sample chapter:
Why Did I Ever was apparently published at the end of a decade of writer's block and it reads as such; Robison's frustration is evident in the sharp, jagged edges of her worldview.16.
Something else that makes me angry is that I got too old to prostitute myself. I wasn't going to anyway but it was there, it was my Z plan.)
One D.O.A., One on the Way, Robison's first novel in the eight years since Why Did I Ever was published, shares a lot in common with its chronological predecessor. The chapters are remarkably short (the longest this time a little over a page) and these chapters do not develop a plot so much as they immerse the reader in an experience, the experience of how frustratingly hard it is to know someone intimately despite being privy to their most emotionally revealing experiences.
The object for our consideration is Eve Broussard, a location scout for a movie studio (the main character of Why Did I Ever was a script doctor) who lives in post-Katrina New Orleans. Eve is prevented from fully exploring her work because of the ruins in which Louisiana has been left since the storm and also because her husband, Adam, is sick with a grave illness. (The awkwardness of the coupling's names is mined for all the humor it's worth throughout the book; the main character of Why Did I Ever was named, amusingly, Money.)
Robison's observations about daily life - both its mundane activities and its moments of incredible importance - preclude the need for a traditional plot. If there is one, it's that Eve, while in love with her husband, conducts an affair with his indistinguishable twin brother. This plot is interesting for thematic reasons but the plot is not traditionally structured and the novel is the better for it.One of the novel's great pleasures is Eve's sarcastic nicknames for the twin brothers: "Smash & Grab are here to join us for lunch"; "I'm with Rhythm & Blues and their parents at an eatery called The Half Moon"; "Here are the twins, I've Seen Fire & I've Seen Rain, propped on their sides on the bed, a chessboard between them", etc.
The novel's subject is ostensibly the collision of the aforementioned facets of life: the trivial and the significant. Because the chapters are so short and alternate so rapidly the discordance between scenes of emotional turmoil and domestic routine are jarring and produce a sense that both of these things are farcical in their own way; the trivial is made more trivial by demonstrating the time we waste on it when there are more important things to consider, and the significant is muted by the distraction of the trivial.
Here, for example, is a scene of the mundane:
Now compare that observantly funny (but ultimately insignificant) scene with this shorter observation, which delivers a stronger emotional wallop:[65]
It's 6:30 in the A.M. Collie's opened my bedroom door a little. I see her eye.
"Where do you keep the paper cups for baking cupcakes?" she asks me.
I say, "This is Mars and we're on it."
"They're colored paper cups," she says.
I say, "Oh, those. They're in the drawer with my parakeets."
"Nevermind," she says, and steps in and leans against a wall.
Scooting along the wall now.
I say, "You could go out and rock the porch swing off its chains."
She heaps herself onto the end of my bed as if to climb it. "What's the difference between lying and when you're making things up?" she asks.
"I know of none," I say.
"What about stories in books?"
"They don't count," I say. "They're made of writing."
To say that these are separate moods would be true; however, the narrator is one and the same. Eve's feelings of disenchantment with her husband are cutting and color all her observations about life. These two perspectives do not really need justifying because they present a beautifully rounded, realistic sense of character.[180]
I have memories of being in love with Adam, sure. Of the music we were listening to before its sound became a ting in a bucket.
The book is punctuated further by listing statistics, mostly about public facilities, about a post-Katrina New Orleans. These facts are at the very least disturbing and contribute at length to the murky tone of cherished-things-lost that pervades the novel.
Framing the novel in terms of the wider perspective of exploring what it means to live in New Orleans years after the storm lends considerable gravitas to the book; it feels much less slight than Why Did I Ever but the trade-off is in creating a substantially more morose tone. What's humorous is made darkly so, and what is ruminative or nostalgic is made doubly so.
Eve seems to be a woman dissatisfied with a life that should be satisfying. Her observations are colored by her disenchantment with her husband; even her affair with his identical brother has none of the spice that hackneyed love affairs are usually flavored with; at some points in the novel Eve is unsure which brother she's bedding.
Eve's voice is freighted with reluctant urgency. She is attuned to the world around her and takes in its beauty ("Her champagne hair, immaculate skin, a gargantuan sweater," she observes of a friend), all the while attempting to extricate herself from it.
One D.O.A., One on the Way reads like Eve's journal, a melange of observations of the world and of half-revealed emotional truths. Reading it feels like the intrusion of reading someone's diary and is marked particularly by that sensation of the incredible distance that is maintained even when seemingly engaging in such an intimate act. What is strange, and sad, about reading a diary is in how much is left out - reading between the lines of someone's painfully real emotional experiences. Robison creates the sensation of feeling close to someone while remaining distant, of knowing someone but not wholly, of understanding the why's of someone's life, but not exactly the what's.
The experience of reading One D.O.A., One on the Way is steeped in melancholy, but it is the kind of melancholy I am most familiar with: nostalgic for what once was and can no longer be, acutely observant of the comedies of life, appreciative of the vast, heartbreaking beauty of what it means to live.
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