Four Sides, at Right Angles All of Them

“I hate to saddle her with the epithet ‘writer’s writer,’ but Fierce Attachments demands honor as the work of a breathtaking technician, one whose control of a distilled form of scene and dialogue, of withheld punchlines, and of the use of the white spaces on the page, makes me still wonder why she has never tackled fiction…” (vii)

This, in Jonatham Lethem’s introduction, introduces, for the second time in this still-young semester, the idea that the divide between fiction and memoir needs to be explored. Brett Lott was the other. I’m not interested in pursuing the question here (Lott’s thoughts seems wholly satisfying, while Lethem’s suggestion that technique is something borrowed by the memoirist from the fiction writer seems somehow backhanded), but the repetition of the thought itself tuned me in to the idea of shape from the first page of Fierce Attachments.

And I believe that in the writing of this book, Vivian Gornick was specifically interested in shape. In concrete terms, she represents her creative freedom as a definite shape, the rectangle that opens and closes based on the activity of the oppressors in her life. On the first page, the first image we see is that of Mrs. Drucker standing in a doorway, which we see as a rectangle that opens and closes, waiting for her husband to shower, a man who oppresses her with sex. When he does, the door will close behind her. On the last page, a window, which we see as a rectangle that opens and closes, lets in the light and noise of the city in summer. Gornick (the narrator now, and for most of the rest of the way), stopped not by her mother but possibly because of her, professes to being “half in, half out” (204). Panning out, we see the novel itself, a rectangle that opens and closes, open when we have the time to read it, closed when that time is stripped.

Shape.

In more abstract terms, the shape of the novel is given by its frame (frames coming in what shape now?), the present framing the past, but bleeding into each other from the first page. The first words: “I’m eight years old” (3) – the first of many flashbacks, distinguished from so much of the past by tense. Not, “I was eight years old.” The past, of course, almost too of course, is the present.

I should admit now, there’s something I find almost trite about writing all of this. I don’t want to talk about how these events “shaped” Gornick into the woman she is today. It’s true, but it’s sort of obviously true. And I’m not sure that’s what the point of all these textual flags is. The book is explicitly interested in shape. Gornick’s writerly rectangle, the rectangles that open and close the book, the careful use of a frame to situate the past with the present – these all tell us so. What they indicate, though, is not so much that the events of Gornick’s past have shaped her, but rather that Gornick in the writing is shaping them.

I think there’s something close to traumatic about the way that Gornick shapes her past. This is suggested so stunningly by that first line, “I’m eight years old,” trauma being the past which is lived in the present, that I can’t ignore it. So it makes sense to me, that if I’m going to look for shape, I should look for it in moments of trauma.

The most traumatic scene that comes to mind is Richie strapped to the chair. This horrifying scene told (admittedly to my surprise, and, actually, to my pleasure) in the present tense, formally signals the trauma of the event. “I’m fourteen years old” (91) – mirroring so well that first line of the book, we see the shape Gornick chisels out of her trauma, the past, the words themselves, repeating. The first thing we see in this scene should come as no surprise: “I push open the door…” Again, the rectangle. From there, Gornick takes us carefully through the scene. First, as the scene dawns, we get only the facts (“She is naked, he is dressed. He is flat on his back.”). As comprehension dawns, the brain begins to make connections (“She moves across him like a cat”), and then the body (“I can feel them both. Inside me.”). And finally, the full horror, already delayed by the scene, is further delayed by its execution. “There beside me is Richie, five years old” (at this point, we think, maybe he’s just walking by innocently.) “strapped into a chair” (oh, God. Maybe at least he isn’t looking.) “staring at the scene on the bed” (Oh, oh, God. Oh, God.)

There is something flawless here, about the way this was shaped. The careful parallels with the first page that open the scene. The way the scene moves through what is seen all the way to comprehension, and, finally, trauma. This, I think, is what so enraptures Lethem and what makes, I think, that all-too-subtle suggestion that technique is fictive impossible to believe.