FROTTAGE & EVEN AS WE SPEAK by Mona Houghton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Two novellas in this short book. But what novellas they are.
They both deal intimately with family — with our orientation and loss of orientation in the universe, the world we make.
The first reaches us in the form of a series of disjointed letters — a woman writing to her psychologist, at first, detailing their encounters, and his lack of response… and in these letters, she is able to tell of the very seminal bonds she had with her two brothers, the trauma that came with the loss of their inner world (the three of them had) and then the healing that starts up again.
The second deals with a collage of a series of characters whose lives by happenstance collide and come together. Family again. But through a series of equally traumatic encounters the different characters down own up to their existence (in different ways) finding their way again.
Both these stories at first, seemed to wander. Where were they going? What were they doing? But then, when you get past half the story, and the worldview of each separate piece seems established in its normality, or at least within its own internal logic of its ‘scene’ you get a rush in which the accumulated disturbances, the small pieces that seemed in place come together out of joint. The displacement takes you further along, faster than you had before to arrive at the breaking point, when the ending seemed too clear, and yet less clear.
And this is where the two novellas parted ways for me. The first didn’t seem completed, as an ending that was befitting (although that was read over six months ago… reading it again now, it seems very much so). The second novella wrapped itself up neatly, almost too neatly for how can characters after encountering so much pain (their own pain, the pain of those around them) — come to a satisfying ending? And yet Houghton does pull it off, by emphasizing the story is closed.
What Susie secretly suspects (she images the scientists will someday come to this) is that there is a giant universe of universes (no exit, no entrance), and that inside it, smaller universes slip and slide against each other, constantly on the move, positions random and haphazard, always keeping the big moves mysterious, yeah, you might exit this universe and come right back in on the other side, but, just maybe (timing is everything) you might exit and slip into a whole other universe just because it happens to be sliding by the one you are escaping, the one you’ve played all the games in that can be played, the one you’ve earned the right to exit for good
By wrapping the larger theme in a metaphysical theme, she echos the structure of narrative structure, in fact, her structure, as you see each partition in the story fragments come together as motifs in a larger tapestry, playing out all the permutations and exhausting the inner voices of her story. Finally, the story then releases us, having imparted its word and completed itself, like a classical piece of music, developed its theme out fully and yet wrapped us back to end on a note that is the essence of itself, sustained by its ending to linger a little longer than after we turn the last page.
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