Dawn Raffel. Carrying the Body. 2002.

Opaque, insular, dark, vague melodrama about a dysfunctional family's unexplained reunion in a decrepit house.

(With thanks to the other students of EL202, Brown, Fall 2003) According to the jacket's oddly specific Cliff's Notes style flap, the plot involves a gem of some value. The presence of this object is announced rather clunkily in an extra-narrative burst, but remains elusive.

She took a sip, or, to be blunt, a gulp. In this narrative fragment we are told that the character Aunt drinks to excess. But why, in this fragment, does the narrator at first try to obscure this fact, and then dispense with the niceties? Who is the implied reader of this book, expected to unravel from the stylized language that serves to obfuscate rather than reveal a story that is more of a portrait but has a contrived plot involving some unexplained hidden gem? Is it a book for mystery fans and enthusiasts of woodenly plotted genre fiction. The author has worked for O and Redbook, this book is about a family, the cover has a purse. Is the implied reader a woman? The book is stylistically virtuosic with a story revealed in a collage of fragments, including a retelling of a folk tale and knock-knock jokes that never quite get off the ground. Is the implied reader a graduate student living in the twilight of postmodernism? Does the author know who the reader is?

Interesting to consider if she removed the titles from the disjointed sections, it would be like taking the training wheels off, the reader would have to learn to shift gears as quickly as the writer.

The book is 126 pages long and, before its publication, parts of it appeared in periodicals and anthologies 14 times. Let that serve as an example for ambitious professional fiction writers everywhere.