Sample Book Reviews
Simultaneous Role Playing
Laird Hunt
You Are Here
Donald Breckenridge
Starcherone Books
http://www.starcherone.com
144 pages; paper, $16.00
You Are Here by Donald Breckenridge is all about aftermath. In abstract, the narrative deals with a small swirl of unsuccessful relationships that bloom and fade in New York City during the years just before and after the 9/11 attacks. Alan and Stephanie, James and Janet, and Janet and Cindy come tentatively together over the course of the narrative, have a few laughs, engage in some half-ass fights, then come tentatively apart. All are players in dramas of muted disintegration and have read their scripts through to the end. Theirs are well-worn roles: Alan the drunken philanderer; Stephanie the ostensible ingénue; James the young would-be writer looking for material; Janet the well-heeled, field-playing, older woman fresh from a tricky breakup (with Cindy). Sound like maybe you’ve seen this one before? Well, you haven’t. You Are Here offers something much more complex than a retread of Woody Allenesque Big Apple tropes.
For starters, Breckenridge’s characters are, at least in part, just that: characters, in an incomplete play that unfolds in fits and starts across the pages of the novel that contains it. They are also a fictional offshoot of this play—characters in the surrounding novel—and thus are in a position to serve as audience members and critics. Further complicating matters, Alan and Stephanie also figure in a short story written by James, and both the play and the narrative passages that surround it have been written by one Donald, not quite the author of the book we hold in our hands, who announces his presence at the opening of the book:
“The light from my desk lamp fell upon the conversation between Janet, ‘Oh, it’s for my benefit,’ a childless divorcee in her mid-forties who was living off a substantial monthly stipend from her second husband. And James, ‘Do you think,’ a twenty-four year old aspiring writer who worked part-time in a used bookstore, ‘I should write that down?’” |
It would have been far from uninteresting to set a cast of characters variously affected by 9/11 adrift in a kaleidoscopic cosmos of self-reflexive, split and attenuated identities (the sort of thing postmodern praxis, too often unfairly critiqued for being interested only in giddy gamesmanship, is well placed to deliver) and leave it at that; however, it is not just in its larger scale structural mechanisms that You Are Here distinguishes itself. Indeed, as the above-quoted text indicates, Breckenridge has brought his exploration of context and character to the level of the line, creating passages, like the following, in which the characters seem to be existing just before or after themselves, beautifully centerless mash-ups of past and present:
"The inhabitants of this important novel seem similarly stuck in one of the great, still-unfolding dramas of the early twenty-first century."
“‘Why aren’t you staying in Beacon?’ She awoke alone from her nap in a tastefully furnished bedroom, ‘I like it here,’ overlooking a broad expanse of the Hudson around five o’clock, ‘and besides it’s only a cab ride away,’ as the amber sunlight flooded the windows opposite the broad sleigh bed and fell upon the Turkish carpet covering a portion of the pale oak floor, ‘then I’ll take the train back from there tomorrow,’ and simply assumed her surroundings were a lingering extension of the dream she hadn’t quite woken from.” |
You Are Here contains many variations on this core motif of simultaneity. Episodes separated by months and years sit side by side on the page. Fragments of the play interweave with fragments of the larger narrative. Conversation and passages of description are fused. Newspaper headlines are splashed across the pages. The image that results, of the city as a vast stage in which the echo of disaster continues, however quietly, to trouble the terms of daily existence, is a powerful one.
It is worth pausing to note that the New York City we encounter in the pages of You Are Here is more lyrically, perhaps more tenderly drawn than the people who inhabit it. In fact, the reader of You Are Here will be forgiven for thinking that either Breckenridge or his textual doppelgänger, Donald, or both are more in love with the great wounded city—smelly mystery puddles and all—than with its transitory denizens. Take the following description, in which a minor player (and there are a number of them that dance in and out of the book) is leaving his apartment.
“The front door locked behind him as it closed. A bulging, semi-transparent shopping bag smelling of bacon grease was knotted up outside the neighbor’s door. A diffused block of sunlight covered a portion of the dark blue-green and gray floor tiles as he walked down the hall.” |
Still, even if Breckenridge is terrifically adept at lifting a tender thumb to New York City’s lovely, filthy cheeks, You Are Here is first and foremost an examination of lives that have been knocked off kilter by the catastrophe that everywhere haunts its pages. References to the attacks, to the subsequent invasions, bombings, killings, and 9/11 anniversaries abound, and it is little wonder that James, Janet, Alan, and Stephanie and the text of You Are Here itself might be compelled to play out narratives of illusory cohesion and subsequent dissolution.
This pattern calls to mind the many individual acts of mourning that sprung up across the city over the years: for example, the man who some months after the event suddenly felt compelled to scrape all the peeling plaster off the ceiling of his apartment only to break down into tears when the room filled with dust; or the witness to people leaping from the towers who found herself spending more and more of her waking time on her Williamsburg fire escape. The inhabitants of this important novel seem similarly stuck in one of the great, still-unfolding dramas of the early twenty-first century. And, although they may not be happy about it, play their roles all too well.
Currently on faculty in the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program, Laird Hunt is the author of a book of short stories, mock parables, and histories, The Paris Stories (2000), from Smokeproof Press, and four novels, The Impossibly (2001), Indiana, Indiana (2003), The Exquisite (2006), and Ray of the Star (2009), all from Coffee House Press.
