Probably the biggest surprise of my summer reading was
Patient Women by Larissa Shmailo. Shmailo is a highly
accomplished poet, editor, and translator (see my review of her poetry in
Issue # 169) . She does a lot of so-called "mixed" media, and she blogs at
larissashmailo.blogspot.com. She is productive and successful, and lives a rich life in the arts.
She is also a survivor and child of survivors, and in her new novel Patient Women,
she fictionalizes pieces of her life and recreates passages from her
parents' lives as well as creating searing poems ostensibly written by
her character Nora Nader.
There is plenty of recreational sex and
drugs and drinking and also sex work, and brilliant recreations of the
downtown milieu of New York City in the nineteen seventies. Much, much
sensation and despair and struggle. There are whorehouse discussions
during down time about what you want in an ideal client, and there are
stunning shocks: at one point, Nora finally finds a man who has
potential as a long term partner. They marry-- and he drowns on their
honeymoon.
Nora's life is out of control, but the
novel is completely in the novelist's control. In her great confidence
in her own powers, Shmailo moves towards the end out of the straight
narrative into a series of experiments in story telling and genre.
The bulk of the book is the grim
narrative of Nora's dive into the lower depths and her grumbling return
to sobriety through the efforts of a saintly trans friend who is dying
of AIDS. Then, Nora begins to press her mother to repeat and explain
family stories of their time in concentration camps under the Nazis: how
they survived intact. She includes her mother's stories as
free-standing short works, and it becomes increasingly clear that the
family was not intact at all. The stories throw Nora into a near
psychotic state of remembering that seems like too much for one person
to bear. She says goodbye to Chrisis, her dying sobriety sponsor. She
gives support to a dying stranger, money to a beggar. She notices that
the world is still around her. And then come the poems, which act both
as a reprise of the themes and events of the novel and also also as
unnarrated evidence of Nora's talent and hopeful future. It is a
gamble, to end a novel with so many passages in a different genre, but
it pays off beautifully: Nora doesn't forget, perhaps doesn't even move
on completely, but she can be with people. She can create.
