August 31, 2006

Published February 8, 2006

BOOK REVIEW:
Regrets, They’ve Had a Few

The Last Time I Saw You
By Rebecca Brown
City Lights, 2006
Paperback, 97 pages, $12.95

Review by ADAM HYLA
Editor

Regret is the coin of the fictive realm created by Seattle author Rebecca Brown in the 12 stories that comprise The Last Time I Saw You. Regret and as part of that, remembrance, and also selective forgetfulness.

Each of the 12 first-person narrators in these shorts is a little twisted: twisted and then fixed into position, with their eyes unblinkingly staring backwards in time. They’re speaking, addressing a you that turns out not to be there, or saying how they’re unable to speak: how they may appear to be speaking but it’s not them, not their words. Lost love is a common theme, or the lost innocence of childhood. They’re looking back in anguish at a long procession of misery, or they’re looking back in torment at the lost thread of pleasure.

With misery and pleasure being relative, each use the other for a foil: the pleasure lost making for the deeper, present misery. One character fixates on a lost lover, “insistently regretting, reliving, whatevering, wanting… despite (because of?) (and here’s the real shame) the fact that I have a stable, good, decent, solvent, healthy, well-rounded, satisfying — and I really mean that, I am not being ironic — life.”

In other stories, the recognition of what’s been lost comes on like a cold bucket of water. A man or a woman — one of the most intriguing things about Brown’s writing is this lack of clarity — perhaps due to the rape fantasies s/he indulges or perhaps because his/her gay-dar is fully attuned, goes to a violent movie with an old girlfriend, Jilly. Or thinks s/he does; then s/he remembers her old friend was attacked by a man not unlike the Hannibal Lecter up on the screen. One minute, Jilly’s joyously munching popcorn; the next she’s weeping, silent and bloodied. Then she’s gone and the theater is empty.

Brown’s characters also consciously use memory as the tool of their undoing. One says it’s usual to think of obsession as something accidental, unwanted. Not his. He admits, perhaps boasts to an old (and absent) lover that “there are moments when some relatively benign thought of you wafts casually across some outskirt of my brain but rather than merely glance nostalgically… I instead after an heroic labor of picking scratching worrying digging around the scab of it, unstaunch unleash launch forth what I’ve been itching to get back to, the one sharp thrust like the poke of a poker up a hole, thereafter which I, gouged, twist writhe struggle but do not let go. No, rather I invite the jackhammer gatling gun tongue swallowing spit flailing furniture breaking seizure that crashes hurtles spews bursts over into me.”

Such self-knowledge extends even to the novelist and critic E.M. Forster, who shows up as the subject of a literary expositor in the short “Aspects of the Novel.” Forster, we’re told by the lecturer (who’s also obsessing over someone lost), formulated the difference between the making of fiction and the writing of fact: fiction is the evidence of what happened, plus the author’s percieving of it, minus her ability to fully say what she saw — an “unknown quantity” which “always modifies the effect of the evidence and sometimes transforms it entirely.”

Case in point was Forster, cut off from “the most passionate and pleasured aspects of himself” by the homophobia of his times: when he was a young man, gay Britons were sentenced to hard labor. He quit writing fiction while still in his prime, and — you guessed it — lives with the regret for the next five decades.

Americans of all sexual orientations are unchained today from the harshest legal fetters. But they’re not free, for there must be a reason why Brown’s characters have so often lost the ability to speak, or talk to people who aren’t there about memories of things past: they can’t break out of the hard memories of pleasure or of pain. n