Girl Beside Him

Reading a book by Cris Mazza is like being set down into someone else's life. This is what novels can do for you that non-fiction books can never do. It's what novels should always do, of course, but Mazza does it so expertly that picking up another of her books is like preparing to go on a trip. There's that same anticipation. Whether it's the world of dog shows, or inside a rehab hospital, or playing in a symphony, or in this case doing wildlife research in the badlands, the immersion is immediate, complete, and seamless. Instead of holding your hand and patronizingly explaining the details, Mazza just slides you in next to one of the characters, and the life you're living unfolds with the natural progression of the plot. Would I ever have known all the details of playing in a marching band, without reading Cris Mazza? Would I have ever thought it could be that interesting? Another experience this book affords is the ability to like and understand someone that in your usual life you would either ignore or reject. Mazza's main character in _Girl Beside Him_ is rough, irritable, and unpredictable. He's violent and sometimes mean. By all indications, he should be the most unlikeable main character in the history of novels. Not only do you not like the guy, but reading along, you have no doubt that if he met *you* he would definitely *not* like you either. However, by the end of the novel, I was really cheering for this guy, really wanting him to have something resembling a normal, healthy interaction with another human being. I'm not sure, in the end, if I got that, and I'm not entirely sure I understood the ending. However, putting the book down, I felt like I'd been somewhere and had seen something that I never would have looked at before.

If dialogue is what characters 'do' to each other, then they're really 'doing it' in Girl Beside Him. They do it with suspense, with fear, with humor and with chilling intensity. The psychological depth of the protagonists--and their awareness of their own emotional occultation--is alone worth the read, but the save-the-cougars plot line really keeps the pages turning. That and the weird group of dudes back at the bar. From a sociological perspective, the content is fascinating; from a literary perspective, the formal structure is impressive. The documents-within-documents technique provides a lighter rhythmic counterpoint to the actual or potential emotional violence of the dialogue. It makes you want to read everything else this woman's written.

Cris Mazza, author of eight books of fiction, explores the shadowy, often brutal, always disconcerting psychological zone where we humans teeter on the verge of becoming something other than strictly human, whether it's in the short story from her previous collection, Former Virgin (FC2, 1997), where a woman in the midst of surgery falls into a fugue about, not her husband fondling her body, but her doctor fondling her internal organs, or in Dog People (Coffee House, 1997), her last novel, which limns six characters' vaguely dissatisfied lives in suburban San Diego as they connect through the dogs one of them is attempting to breed into a super-species. In the latter, the protagonists' actions continually parallel those of their canines, which go in and out of season, are artificially inseminated, whelped, groomed, and shown, all the while competing with each other, striving to establish a natural hierarchy based on strength, poise, primping, and a simple innate hunger to attack and survive. Here, in her deeply unsettling new novel, she continues to investigate the boundary between human and animal, but this time the comparison is drawn between people and cats. A forty-three-year-old wildlife biologist, Brian Leonard (note the feline embedded in his last name), flies to Wyoming to conduct a study of relocated cougars. Soon after he hires an assistant, Leya, a sensitive woman prone to victimization following an ugly divorce, things turn as turbulent as his flight into Cheyenne. Brian begins to abuse Leya emotionally, threatens to do so physically, and uses her to probe his haunted past. The bedrock of his impassive, sexually inhibited character, it turns out, is founded on his unhinged relationship with his lesbian sister, Diane, who one night long ago committed suicide in the next room at their home while Brian, a teen at the time, masturbated to the gunfire. Overlaid atop this plot is another involving a plan by one of the local ranchers to have a rogue cougar kill one of his horses for insurance money, then blackmail Brian to kill the cougar in turn. Both plots converge in a shocking crescendo that italicizes the nexus between violence and sexuality in the world according to Mazza, and culminates with a final sentence that reminds us that, like cats, we are all at the end of the day either the predators or the hunted-and more often than not some bedeviled complex of both. On the way to that revelation, Mazza's tightly crafted novel creates a resonant sense of the severe non-urban west, takes a number of engaging narrative chances (including several post-mortem dialogues between Brian and his long-dead sister), and reminds us again and again why anyone interested in first-rate alternative fiction should be familiar with Mazza's admirably and unnervingly transgressive work.

Cris Mazza has once again proven herself to be a master of the psychological novel. Brian, a man with a troubled past, enters the Wyoming wilderness ostensibly to track cougars for a wildlife study. He hires a young divorced woman, Leya, who unwittingly becomes a part of Brian's own dangerous experiment: to test his sexual deviancy. Brian believes he might be a sexual predator, and, as he trains his rifle sight on idealistic Leya, he discovers the pith of who he really is.But this novel is not only about plot. Mazza's language evokes a savage landscape where predators of all types lurk. She takes us into Brian's psyche through creatively constructed flashbacks and into Leya's edited version of reality (which is often hilarious) through letters she sends home to her best friend. Although Mazza is often named among an elite list of experimental writers, her testing of fictional boundaries is never obtuse. GIRL BESIDE HIM is as accessible as any strong selling literary novel.If you've never read Mazza, start here. You'll wonder why you haven't picked up one of her books before this.