Hangings: Three Novellas

It becomes very clear from reading Nina Shope's work that no one publishing fiction today writes anything remotely like her. Hangings, In Urbem, and Hagiographies, the three novellas that comprise this collection, cover a wide variety of subjects, from breast cancer to incest, first loves to college roommates, from ancient Rome to modern day Alaska. Yet the singular triumph here is Shope's devastating prose. Like in Cormac McCarthy's seminal novel, Blood Meridian, she has absorbed the violence of disease, of creation, the treachery of friendship into her language. It is as if instead of using a keyboard or typewriter, she attacks the page with a drawerful of knives hoping to re-open existing wounds and create new ones on her readers. The act of reading will never be an extreme sport, but Hangings takes us close. In Urbem in particular, a sort of Calvino-esque construction/destruction myth, thematically binds the architecture of the body to that of a city in which, "pedestrians trip over pelvic bones and stumble over clavicles that litter the streets like cobblestones." Shope combines this innovative use of language with innovative structure and syntax. Her novellas have more in common with musical structure than they do with traditional novels or stories; her repetitions of phrase and scene act as refrains or choruses, gaining meaning and texture through their placement between the verses. Starcherone Books should be commended for publishing Hangings and for bringing this supremely gifted writer to our attention.

I won't pretend I understand everything that Nina Shope writes about in the novellas that make up HANGINGS, but what I do know is that she writes beautifully and precisely about a lot of issues I care about. After all, we don't go to books to read the work of people who are dumber than we are! I get enough of that in real life. I go to books written by people whose intelligence shines through in every word. I started with the last novella, HAGIOGRAPHIES, sort of a creative anagram of HANGINGS, and found it to be a beautiful story of loss, lust and forbidden sexuality, which takes our modern day MTV world and shakes it up, like one of those little snow domes, and when the flakes settle we feel transported into the opalescent world of Anais Nin, where "sex magic" rules the lives and loves of a trio of impassioned adolescents, the "girl with the pixie haircut," "the girl with the black eyes," and a mysterious boy, dead at sixteen, who reaches out to them both. Once immersed in Shope's language I found myself watching as these identities shift with the implacable narrative force of a native-grown Abbas Kiarostami, so that the humanity of these young people began to shine through their dilemmas like when you put a candle in a Jack O Lantern. I then read through HANGINGS itself. This is the story of mortality encroaching on a young woman who has to sit there and watch her mother dying from cancer. The two women, mother and daughter, share as through osmosis, some of the same physical habits. "When they speak it is through silences metered out like music. Mammogram. Mother. Mastectomy." She (the daughter) becomes obsessed with a certain painting by Joan Miro (the one pictured on the cover), of a man dangling from the ceiling by his feet, a large red moon hanging on the corner like a bullethole red with blood. And she meets a cute guy who is always writing in a notebook, called Daniel. His physicality arouses her, "the red hair on his knuckles, the thin moons of his nails wrapped round his notebook." She dreams about someday finding his book and reading all he has written. IN URBEM, the third novella, loses me a bit because this one is more futuristic and anti-human and, as you have probably gathered, I feel Shope's greatest strength to be her poetic connection with ordinary human beings. However, those who admire Pascal Quignard's fictions about imperial Rome, or Alex Irvine's amazing science fiction remixes of 20th century life, will enjoy this interesting visit to a place unknown. Perhaps she, the author, decided to intersperse her more personal style with a piece with a different tone. Or maybe she feels that this middle novella is putting her best foot forward stylistically. Don't get me wrong, I like it indeed, there's a lot to admire about IN URBEM, it's just not all about character. Inventive Starcherone Press has published another winner. I realize books of novellas aren't necessarily surefire commercial hits, so I congrat