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Death Is Not An Option
by Suzanne Rivecca
W.W. Norton 2010
hardback
First collection
Awards: Shortlisted, 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
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Suzanne Rivecca's fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices,
and has received the Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, she lives in
San Francisco, where she worked in the homeless-services sector for
several years. In July 2010 three of her stories were
performed in Los Angeles’ New Short Fiction Series.
Read
an interview
with Suzanne Rivecca
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"I usually hated it when
men used the term 'make love'. It sounded so squishy and
earnest, like some kind of craft project."
Reviewed by Scott Doyle
Earlier this year, I told the Editor of The Short Review I wanted to
take a break. I needed a book I could rave about. Though I believe in
writing tough reviews, I take no special pleasure in being critical. In
fact, I find it draining: I know how much it takes to complete a story,
much less publish one, much less publish a full collection. But in
Suzanne Rivecca’s Death Is Not an Option
I have a book I can unabashedly crow about. My only challenge is to
avoid having the review sound like book-jacket hyperbole. It’s that
good.
Where to start? Language? Story? Insight
into the human condition? The question is pointless, because in
these stories the achievements in one are inseparable from the
achievements in others. Not since Charles D’Ambrosio’s Dead Fish Museum
have I encountered prose with such sustained freshness and precision -
word to word, sentence to sentence, moment to moment. I read this
collection riveted on every conceivable level: never sure where a
sentence or a character’s thoughts might lead. A fresh turn of phrase
was inseparable from a fresh insight into character, was
inseparable from an unexpected and uncomfortable revelation. To
enter these stories is to stumble into the best kind of minefield - the
kind readers and writers live for, search out, dream of, rarely find.
So,
yes, the prose is often remarkable, and strikes a delicate
balance. On the one hand, it’s some of the most precise, literate,
intelligent prose I’ve read in a while. It might almost be
described as brainy. But brainy prose usually sends me running for
cover, and Rivecca’s does not. There is never the sense of
the author showing off, or reaching for effect - only digging down,
seeing just how far into a moment she can burrow. Just as
important, she avoids the great trap writing this intelligent often
falls into: the overly self-aware narrator, who always seems to
know what she’s feeling and why. Rivecca’s hyper-articulate
characters may at times be too smart for their own good, but the author
is not. She never loses sight of the fact that it is emotions,
messy emotions, that drive a good story. She knows, as Harold
Pinter did, that the stronger an emotion, the less articulate its
expression. Despite their intelligence, sometimes because of it,
her characters are constantly blindsided by emotions they don’t see
coming and don’t fully understand. The remarkable balance Rivecca
strikes is to craft prose that shimmers with great intelligence on the
surface, but simmers with raw emotion underneath.
Intelligence is often a double-edged sword with Rivecca’s characters - something one senses in Yours Will Do Nicely as the narrator recalls an ex-boyfriend breaking up with her:
"telling
me I was manipulative and capricious, and I remembered how taken aback
I’d been, despite my grief, by his correct and unassuming use of the
adjective. Big words were my province. It was like being shot
with my own gun."
In addition to deftly revealing her
characters, the author’s prose captures moments with a freshness and
precision that can be startling. Here Rivecca describes a young
girl learning to take charge of her bed-wetting problem:
"In the
middle of the night, she peeled off her wet pajama bottoms and
underwear and remade the bed with the oiled, expressionless poise of a
Kabuki dancer." In It Sounds Like You’re Feeling,
the narrator is thrown off by the combination of her blind therapist
and his service dog:
"Because it’s unexpected, you tell
yourself: the double vulnerability of them, their twinned soft
mildness." These stories are also notable for their
length. There are only seven stories in the book, all of them over
twenty-five pages, and one, the two-part Very Special Victims,
over forty. But there is no sense of the author needlessly
stretching things out, no filler, nothing gratuitous. Neither is
there the expansiveness or the bold leaps in time that mark the stories
of Alice Munro, the first name that comes to mind when one thinks of
the long short story. There is in Rivecca’s work what I would
simply call an unhurriedness. She is content to sit with a story
until it yields its secrets, and she seems to understand that rich
emotional truths aren’t given up easily, and can’t be rushed. One
story is interrupted by a two-page letter that is, in retrospect,
utterly essential to the story, but is the kind of thing many teachers
or editors would urge to be cut or whittled down. In an interview,
Rivecca challenges the generally accepted notion that "tightening" is
always a virtue, and her work is testimony to what can be achieved when
stories aren’t, as she puts it, artificially foreshortened for punchy
effect.
These stories are hardly aimless, but neither do they
feel aimed, and I didn’t realize until reading them how pervasive and
restrictive that feeling of being aimed is, especially in short
stories. A reader should feel led, and in sure and capable hands -
but feeling aimed is another thing. So many literary short stories
these days fall into a predictable pattern: the hook up front, a
bit of backstory to set the scene, cut back to the present,
etc. One senses at times the presence of a basic template. Death Is Not An Option
offers a welcome reprieve from that feeling. The unhurried quality
of these stories allows them to take on fresh shapes and fresh
rhythms. Rivecca gives her work room to breathe.
There is
much more to say about this collection. Rivecca pretty much pulls
everything off. There is a long story in second person, another
about a writer - both usually bad ideas in my book; but not
here. She writes with great candor about sexuality: from
harassment and abuse, to a teenaged girl having trouble negotiating the
mechanics of a tampon. But the sexual content never feels
self-consciously provocative. In an interview accompanying the
press notes, the author says, "I feel that we need a language for that
part of ourselves that is mysterious, subjective, and fraught."
These
are funny stories, sometimes dark stories. But they are also
compassionate stories. They are not explicitly about faith, but
there is an attunement to, and respect for, the life of the spirit, and
the careful reader will note words like "mercy" and "benediction"
surface in key moments. Like its title, this collection is, in its own
way, hopeful and affirmative.
Is this book perfect? A
masterpiece? Not quite. There is for me one story that falls just
a bit short. And if I had the author’s ear, I’d say, be less
fine. Pick moments where you allow the language - right down to
the syntax, the word - to become as unruly and untamed as the inner
lives of your wonderfully flawed characters. But as a debut, this
collection is a marvel, a challenge and standard for readers and
writers alike; and a promise of greater things to come, for the author,
for all of us.
Read
a story
from this collection in Blackbird
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