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Andrew McNabb lives with his wife and
four young children in the West End of Portland, Maine. He grew up in
Massachusetts and is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst and New York University.
Read
an interview
with Andrew McNabb
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"It
was confusing the way she wouldn’t let him penetrate her but would wrap
herself in all sorts of unusual positions to make him climax, each more
lurid and depraved that the next; and then, not more than an hour or a
day later, she’d have no problem going up and sticking out her tongue
to receive her Christ."
Reviewed by Elizabeth Rutherford-Johnson
The title of this tightly packaged collection captures the tension and the contradiction at its heart: The Body of This
deliberately echoes religious phrasing, while simultaneously
foregrounding the notion of bodies, in all their messy, embarrassing
corporality. The book appears to be pitched as a Catholic book by a
Catholic writer. However, while many of McNabb’s characters are indeed
Catholic – from priests to ordinary people struggling with faith – the
religious dimension did not seem to me to overwhelm the writing and
never descended to dogma. Admittedly, I was born in Ireland and raised
Catholic, so my frame of reference prejudices me, but I felt McNabb
avoided doctrinal nitpicking in favour of a wider, more inclusive
spirituality.
Certainly, McNabb seems keen to show that despite
any spiritual achievement we may attain, we are still very much flesh
and blood. His writing has a Rabelaisian enjoyment of physical
grotesquerie, corporeal frailty and, particularly, the indignities of
age. Several stories focus on female aging, which on a first reading
made me wonder if this was not mere distaste or even disgust with
female physicality and/or sexuality. Their Bodies, Their Selves describes “the revealing heaviness of that sagging breast, pointing south to the melting of her inner thighs”; in Bride of Christ, “her breasts were…flat and dangling”; in Habeas Corpus,
Dee Dee holds her “paunch in hands”.
It’s a close call. Sharp
observation makes this more than a vehicle for misogyny; who could
resist a presentiment of fat in the “hint of a shimmer” in Dee Dee’s
teenage thighs? More, importantly, there is balance. Male bodies too
are unreliable and prone to decay: in The King of the Tables
it is Frank who wakes “soaked in his own urine”, while Rose “just
seventy” is “so carefree, banging the tray against her leg like a
schoolgirl”. Finally, the structure prevents these grotesque
descriptions from being mere acts of degrading voyeurism; within the
stories they are transformed to moments of triumph. There is tenderness
in Their Bodies, Their Selves
where Sarah’s geriatric striptease saves her husband from
mortification, and opens the way to of intimacy after a marriage devoid
of “romantic undressing”.
There is also, most appealingly, a
gleeful, mischevious lightness in much of McNabb’s writing. From the
naming of John Thomas, a character desperate to circumvent his
girlfriend’s prohibition on pre-marital sex, to the conclusion of Habeas Corpus
where Dee Dee’s anxiety about being overweight vanishes when she
realises that her beautiful friend has aged and thickened also:
“paunched and primed, and on she came, throwing open her
arms, lunging herself into physical human contact. They touched,
deepened belly button to deepened belly button like two mouths engaged
in a French kiss; and the result was no less profound.”
It’s What it Feels Like
is a lighter, more rambling tale, after the tight poetic control of
shorter pieces. In this portrait of small-town life, bodies swell to
roundness with happy appetite or slim to a brittle, unfaithful
thinness. Eventually Lance gives up a winning lottery ticket to keep
his unfaithful girlfriend, preferring to enjoy the sensuality of
fingers that “glisten with oil and when they reach a maximum grease
level, she licks them and goes back for more.” The bible may condemn
adultery but rather than judge, Lance continues to love simply and
steadfastly, finding his answers in the comfort of rounded flesh.
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