Sample Book Reviews
Waste Not, Want Not
Vanessa Place
Waste
Eugene Marten
Ellipsis Press
http://www.ellipsispress.com
116 pages; paper, $10.00
Eugene Marten is a writer's writer, a writer after whom many other writers would be happy to clean up, his books provoking the sort of breathless admiration usually reserved for the deceased. Bloggers with handles like “Three Guys One Book” and “Closterflock” say things like “one you need to read,” and “more powerful than Hemingway.” Gordon Lish loves him. Chuck Palahniuk pales in many readers' comparisons. Marten writes precisely. He writes to the point. His sentences are crisp and clean as fresh cider. His paragraphs unfold with the grace of small paper swans. He writes of things in their thingness, abject in their sobbing objectivity. If his books were marsupials, they'd be opossums. If furniture, Ottomans. He eschews similes and metaphors like these, preferring the raw truths of things simply said.
In Waste, Marten writes the story of Sloper, a janitor's janitor. Sloper cleans up the anonymous buildings that house lonely men with striped ties and nice-enough women in low heels, and horizon our great Waste Land. Sloper comes after the day's unfinished business is done, and proves that the night's work is more thorough. He empties trash cans, scours toilets, and sanitizes kitchenettes. He rakes smooth the plush carpets of the Board of Directors and jerks off in the castoff stockings of middle management. Sloper is a paragon of efficient consumption, eating what remains to be eaten-mostly leftover burgers and Chinese-and, when the opportunity presents itself, mating with the work pumps of the nice “girl on 24.” Later, luck being temporarily on his side, Sloper gets the girl herself, reclaimed from the dustbin her recently murdered body's been chucked in. He recycles her corpse into his objet d'amor, carefully preserving her, draining the blood, refrigerating the body, spackling up the cuts, and freshening her increasingly foul mouth, trying in short to keep decay at bay, and loving her all the livelong day like no other lover. Sloper occupies the dusty divide between what's wanted and what's no longer desired, reminding us that dust is rumored to be mostly human skin, not needing to remind us that it's also all our befores and hereinafters. Who besides Sloper will eat our spurned potato salad, or still cradle our chilly backsides? When Sloper backflashes to his job at the morgue, the other workers are a blast of crude jokes and dark-humored camaraderie (it is unfortunate that they are actually black); they blow reefer through busted nasal passages and leer about the female bodies they've bothered. But Sloper loves what is no longer wanted, and that is his great composing gesture, and the source of his undoing.
" Eugene Marten is a writer's writer, a writer after whom many other writers would be happy to clean up."
This sense of absolute composition is the fault and grace of Waste. It is most admirable in its construction, and is ultimately all constructed. Marten writes expertly within what is now a tradition of experimental literature, a genre with its own conventions and clichés: the claustrophobically close third person, the transgressive sexual act sans dialogic sentiment, the pithed observations about human nature (rotten and rueful) that are all the more touching because they've been so carefully noticed. And Sloper is an archetypal romantic male of the genre: he suffers the quiet ache of disaffection with (it's true) more crippling sentiment than Ernest Hemingway's über-men, plus with the auld sang-froid of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Bardamu, all couched in the taciturn phrasings of The Dude. And in all this, I felt like I'd felt it all before, down to the same cleaned-up ejaculate in these same insensible shoes. I felt that I was being practically ordered to stand on the sidelines and cheer for the deep, deep feeling of the presumptively unfeeling in a presumptively unfeeling world. To huzzah the antihero as he behaves obligingly antiheroically, and yet, runs no risk of real alienation, for the trope here is to make sure the tell-tale heart's in place, beating strongly and unmistakably human, beating loudly enough to create the proper counterpuntal note to the inhuman corporate/consumptive/cretinous/crazy fancily fetishistic world in which we live so temporarily. As Sloper caresses his castoff love, cleaning fuzzy fungal bits off her inner thighs and plucking her maggots from his mouth, I sensed nothing but a senior slump, watching a very good writer make excellent hash out of what might have been a steak. I learned nothing from Sloper's nightshifts that I'd not been taught by history's Nachschrift, was privy to nothing I'd not encountered in other privies. What's worse is I had hoped for more-Marten is palpably smart and his sentences sturdy and shining as clean chrome. Waste, however, left me with nothing but Jane Austen all over again: “There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.” No charm indeed, for Sloper's tenderness is as dully masturbatory as his sexual engagements, and as our ever Green heroine, he is pointedly charmless and pointedly male.
I don't want to drag gender into what seems to be a purposefully penile world, but it does rankle a bit when a whole book, duly populated, slots its female characters into Mother, Caretaker, and Corpse. Though it may be objected that this is indicative of the puny psychological world of Sloper, purposefully and authorially crabbed, I wasn't born yesterday. Vladimir Nabokov managed quite well to animate the women Humbert Humbert nuzzled and snuffed, and Sloper's no slouch when it comes to picking up on the smaller points of humanity extruding from the men around him. Some of the best passages in the book detail a senior partner's slide into madness born of loneliness born of too much family law, not enough family. Still, Sloper's our saver. And this savior will save via the same sorry route as so many saviors: self-sacrifice for the sins of others. And like many previous deities, his failure to see so many others means only those already predisposed to follow him will be saved. Put another way, there's a reason most of those bloggers are guys' guys.
And while I don't begrudge any gender from having its icons, I wonder if there's a better game we can play at this stage of the game than which shell has the pea or which plebian personae will now cuddle our mean secrets and souls, mopping up after us, plunging our shitty toilets and selves, converting what was lost to what was found, playing, in sum, Jesus in a jumpsuit. In my melancholy, I compared Waste to Yedda Morrison's recent Girl Scout Nation (2008), which was admittedly unfair. Morrison's book is a conceptual poem rooted in the anonymous murder of three Girl Scouts in Oklahoma in 1977, an all-American pastiche of lyric notes and Google motes and lists of native birds and industrial chemicals and cuts from The Amazing Race. Murder, in Morrison's hands, is not metaphor, not plot device nor character developer, not something tapped out for the euphonious machinations of existential examination, but meat, a wild keening thing. The thing, perhaps, that reaches us as the scream of death before death itself. The thing that makes our crude extravagances and brutal excesses understandable, even salvageable. The thing that crows, “What a waste.”
Vanessa Place is a writer, lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press.
