Just finished re-reading American Innovations - a slow and careful read, in part for its many pleasures but also in an attempt to work out what it is that makes it so great, or even just why I like it so much.
I found myself back in the kitchen, still not making spaghetti, and wearing a T-shirt. Not the one I had woken up in, but still a T-shirt that would be best described as pajamas and that I wasn’t feeling too good or masculine or flat-chested in, either. Giotto? It was 11:22 a.m. Making lemon chicken for that man would have been a better way to spend my time, I thought. Or garlic chicken. Whichever. I felt as if there were some important responsibility that I was neglecting so wholly that I couldn’t even admit to myself that it was there. Was I really taking that man’s delivery order so seriously?Well, I have some ideas on both fronts, but for all of the artfulness that's gone into these stories, I can't help still feeling that there's a fair amount of flat-out magic going on too. Everything is unstable, haunted, and Galchen has so many ways of jolting and destabilising the reader - with an unexpected backhanded observation, a startlingly original and beautiful image or phrase, a left turn from one sentence to another, a weird juxtaposition. Her perspective is somehow sideways of the world, yet also very much intersecting with it.
I had recently heard someone use the word “poleaxed.” That word made me think back to those years in Kentucky as a child—I don’t know why, that was the thought. I was a fancy citified woman now, and so my life could have properly sized disasters, ones in the comedy-of-manners way of things, rather than in the losing-a-limb-to-a-tractor-blade way of things; that was another thought. If there was no blood on the floor, then it wasn’t a tragedy. That was what “urban” meant. Could mean. Poleaxed. I had also once come across a phrase about a book “lying like a poleaxed wildebeest in the middle of my life.” It was my life that was lying in the middle of my life like that, like a poleaxed wildebeest.I still particularly like the gentle "Wild Berry Blue" and the wilder "The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire", as I did last time, and the precise brilliance of "The Lost Order" and the title story also struck me. Everything feels connected in the end, although the connections are rarely straightforwardly metaphorical or anywhere near the surface - they force the reader to fill in the gaps, but within the architecture of tacit associations and meanings that sustain the story as written, which is a lot of their peculiar brilliance, I think.
Eventually—the sun was still high—I walked out to the gyro place. Those bells jangled in a mediocre way when I entered. That soda fountain was there, also the smell of fresh-cut onions. I didn't recognize any of the patrons. I still haven't seen my father again. Nor have I seen Eddy. It's only been twenty-two weeks or so, though. And the other morning I thought there was string cheese in the refrigerator, and then there it was, actually there. Maybe it's wrong of me, but I do hope that nobody buys this building for a long time. I have the sense that ghosts like to return to the same places. I, anyhow, like to do that. And there is something about the bones of this place; it really is easier to dream here.
