Two Cris Mazza books
Disability: A Novella
I first experienced Cris Mazza’s fiction over a decade ago when I read her novels Your Name Here and Exposed. Like much of her work from the 1990s, these gritty, explicit narratives demonstrate the intrinsic link between sex and humiliation, and I found them worthwhile reading, books that transmitted white-hot anger on behalf of women everywhere. Sexual politics continue to play a role in Mazza’s recent texts (which include the memoir Indigenous and the novel Homeland), but this is not always the dominant thematic focus. Instead, her newer work describes a fuller range of human experience, providing the reader with a richer variety of responses. Now, rather than anger, Mazza’s writing often conveys, in writer Elizabeth Searle’s words, “pitch-black compassion.” Mazza’s stunning recent novella, Disability perfectly fits this description; it is both edgy and empathic, a heartbreak with an attitude. Reading Disability is rather like watching an able-bodied caretaker bathe a debilitated person; both experiences painfully remind us of the human condition’s inherent frailty. Just published by FC2, an independent press dedicated to experimental fiction, Disability, Mazza’s 13th book, uses subtle experimentation with point of view as a conduit for its overarching theme: that all humanity is, at its essence, vulnerable and broken.
The point of view alternates between two main characters, Teri and Cleo, who work as caregivers in a state hospital for severely impaired children. Both characters’ narratives are relentlessly myopic and unflinchingly graphic, choices that could have backfired if made by a less capable writer than Mazza. In the hospital scenes, readers are given no relief from the pediatric residents’ physical helplessness, their urine, feces, and saliva, their twisted legs, seizures, and bedsores. Meanwhile, scenes outside the hospital offer no reprieve from the main characters’ emotional handicaps: Teri’s self-loathing and Cleo’s crippled self-esteem. Rather than create a claustrophobic experience for the reader, however, Mazza’s deft shifts between the characters’ thoughts, experiences and voices enable readers to understand the characters in ways the characters can’t. First, we see that both women are as deserving of the designation “disabled” as are the children in their care. Teri—a 31-year-old woman whose own child disavowed her—is so emotionally stunted that even her narrative is written in the truncated, disjointed shorthand found on medical charts. Cleo—who, at 22, desperately clings to a distant and punishing lover—has a narrative marked by self-conscious revisions, mirroring her disastrous self-image. Mazza is ever adroit in her use of dramatic irony, and the point of view also allows us to see how the women sublimate their experiences with rejection into steadfast loyalty toward the hospital’s mostly-abandoned children, a loyalty which culminates in their unpremeditated kidnap of Teri’s favorite resident.
Further, readers realize that none of the characters are more “disabled” than the systems they inhabit. The hospital’s residents are subjected to a money-seeking “therapy” program incommensurate with their needs; the caregivers make minimum-wage for maximum work; children are appropriated or abandoned, and everyone falls prey to others’ ineptitude, dishonesty, or cruelty. Within these flawed systems, the characters have two possible reactions to one another’s disabilities: they can exercise compassion or look away in disgust. Both Teri and Cleo show compassion for the children and each other, but react to their own brokenness with unmitigated disgust. One of the novella’s foremost accomplishments is its ability to enchant readers into feeling compassion for the characters that the characters don’t feel for themselves. More noteworthy still is that this novel is neither didactic nor moralizing, but a rigorously complex story whose plot ultimately reveals that compassion will sooner lead to loss than fulfillment. Naturally, Mazza fans will recognize loss as a principal outcome for many characters in her oeuvre, but Disability moves beyond the particulars of fictive characters and into a broader human context. This worldview is less grim than cathartic, however, and at the end of Disability, readers may feel more forgiving towards the pieces of us all that cannot be fixed, protected or saved.
Homeland
It's heartening to read a prolific writer whose work grows richer with each new publication. Thankfully, Mazza's customarily unsentimental characterization remains ruthlessly present in Homeland (Red Hen Press, 2004), but this novel also provides the reader with new gifts. Homeland's main character, Ronnie, evokes a reader's pathos. Her unwitting vulnerability and sexual naivete make her a rare figure among Mazza's sexually savvy main characters, rendering her psychological life even more mysterious than Mazza's usually complex protagonists. The story itself grapples brilliantly with themes of family legacy, filial obligation, and childhood guilt. On another level, the narrative also raises important metafictional questions. The novel's principal mystery involves the interface of narrative, truth, and memory, which subtly interrogates the meaning of narrative itself. Ultimately, the reader is left to question the power of narrative and its capacity to shape one's psyche. When the plot's main mystery is revealed, the reader may even wonder whether someone can really exist whose life remains unwritten.This is the rare novel. It offers both a feast of ideas and the immersing satisfaction of more "traditional" narrative elements. Mazza, however, is a terrifically talented writer whose fine work is anything but "traditional."
I first experienced Cris Mazza’s fiction over a decade ago when I read her novels Your Name Here and Exposed. Like much of her work from the 1990s, these gritty, explicit narratives demonstrate the intrinsic link between sex and humiliation, and I found them worthwhile reading, books that transmitted white-hot anger on behalf of women everywhere. Sexual politics continue to play a role in Mazza’s recent texts (which include the memoir Indigenous and the novel Homeland), but this is not always the dominant thematic focus. Instead, her newer work describes a fuller range of human experience, providing the reader with a richer variety of responses. Now, rather than anger, Mazza’s writing often conveys, in writer Elizabeth Searle’s words, “pitch-black compassion.” Mazza’s stunning recent novella, Disability perfectly fits this description; it is both edgy and empathic, a heartbreak with an attitude. Reading Disability is rather like watching an able-bodied caretaker bathe a debilitated person; both experiences painfully remind us of the human condition’s inherent frailty. Just published by FC2, an independent press dedicated to experimental fiction, Disability, Mazza’s 13th book, uses subtle experimentation with point of view as a conduit for its overarching theme: that all humanity is, at its essence, vulnerable and broken.
The point of view alternates between two main characters, Teri and Cleo, who work as caregivers in a state hospital for severely impaired children. Both characters’ narratives are relentlessly myopic and unflinchingly graphic, choices that could have backfired if made by a less capable writer than Mazza. In the hospital scenes, readers are given no relief from the pediatric residents’ physical helplessness, their urine, feces, and saliva, their twisted legs, seizures, and bedsores. Meanwhile, scenes outside the hospital offer no reprieve from the main characters’ emotional handicaps: Teri’s self-loathing and Cleo’s crippled self-esteem. Rather than create a claustrophobic experience for the reader, however, Mazza’s deft shifts between the characters’ thoughts, experiences and voices enable readers to understand the characters in ways the characters can’t. First, we see that both women are as deserving of the designation “disabled” as are the children in their care. Teri—a 31-year-old woman whose own child disavowed her—is so emotionally stunted that even her narrative is written in the truncated, disjointed shorthand found on medical charts. Cleo—who, at 22, desperately clings to a distant and punishing lover—has a narrative marked by self-conscious revisions, mirroring her disastrous self-image. Mazza is ever adroit in her use of dramatic irony, and the point of view also allows us to see how the women sublimate their experiences with rejection into steadfast loyalty toward the hospital’s mostly-abandoned children, a loyalty which culminates in their unpremeditated kidnap of Teri’s favorite resident.
Further, readers realize that none of the characters are more “disabled” than the systems they inhabit. The hospital’s residents are subjected to a money-seeking “therapy” program incommensurate with their needs; the caregivers make minimum-wage for maximum work; children are appropriated or abandoned, and everyone falls prey to others’ ineptitude, dishonesty, or cruelty. Within these flawed systems, the characters have two possible reactions to one another’s disabilities: they can exercise compassion or look away in disgust. Both Teri and Cleo show compassion for the children and each other, but react to their own brokenness with unmitigated disgust. One of the novella’s foremost accomplishments is its ability to enchant readers into feeling compassion for the characters that the characters don’t feel for themselves. More noteworthy still is that this novel is neither didactic nor moralizing, but a rigorously complex story whose plot ultimately reveals that compassion will sooner lead to loss than fulfillment. Naturally, Mazza fans will recognize loss as a principal outcome for many characters in her oeuvre, but Disability moves beyond the particulars of fictive characters and into a broader human context. This worldview is less grim than cathartic, however, and at the end of Disability, readers may feel more forgiving towards the pieces of us all that cannot be fixed, protected or saved.
Homeland
It's heartening to read a prolific writer whose work grows richer with each new publication. Thankfully, Mazza's customarily unsentimental characterization remains ruthlessly present in Homeland (Red Hen Press, 2004), but this novel also provides the reader with new gifts. Homeland's main character, Ronnie, evokes a reader's pathos. Her unwitting vulnerability and sexual naivete make her a rare figure among Mazza's sexually savvy main characters, rendering her psychological life even more mysterious than Mazza's usually complex protagonists. The story itself grapples brilliantly with themes of family legacy, filial obligation, and childhood guilt. On another level, the narrative also raises important metafictional questions. The novel's principal mystery involves the interface of narrative, truth, and memory, which subtly interrogates the meaning of narrative itself. Ultimately, the reader is left to question the power of narrative and its capacity to shape one's psyche. When the plot's main mystery is revealed, the reader may even wonder whether someone can really exist whose life remains unwritten.This is the rare novel. It offers both a feast of ideas and the immersing satisfaction of more "traditional" narrative elements. Mazza, however, is a terrifically talented writer whose fine work is anything but "traditional."
posted by Left of Liberal at 3:51 PM
1 Comments:
Here is a review of Homeland by writer Stacey Levine:
Homeland
by Cris Mazza
(Red Hen Press)
$17.95
This novel has the strength not to point out that its weirdnesses are weird. Instead, it matter-of-factly presents the extremely tense and ill-at-ease character Ronnie Tattori, an Italian-American woman roaming homeless around southern California with her elderly, limping father. Ronnie is too skinny and going bald for no clear reason; she inexplicably carries a small jar of dirt around with her at all times, and, throughout the novel, she is waiting for her period, which seems to have evaporated due to stress. In her 40s, Ronnie is piecing together the facts about her younger brother’s gruesome death thirty-five years before. There is not too much talk about improving their lives, because Ronnie is focused on the past. Though she picks up day labor jobs, she and her father tough out their hardships in a very California pioneer-style way.
At the novel’s start, Ronnie, living beside her father in his room in a nursing home, is planning their escape from the place because it no longer accepts Medicare patients. She and her father—who drags a leg and can’t speak normally—then head out into land that once was rural, and now is covered with malls and subdivision homes. After a troop of disgusting teenagers attack Ronnie, steal her money, and write on her chest in permanent ink, she and her father go underground, living under tarps in the woods, building fires, and meeting up with a community of migrant workers.
Eventually, it becomes clear how the past has affected Ronnie, and why she is so incommunicative and terrified of life. The teenagers’ writing on her body illustrates the extent to which the violent world and its accidents have marked her.
Her aphasic father, Enzo, also marked by an accident pertaining to language, refers to his own dead wife as “Our mother.” As if the personification of a blocked writer, he cannot make words come to him. When he asks Ronnie if they can travel to the site of the old family farm, it’s like this:
“’I do a—Tell I will. Say for me—when I tell I will do. Say it.’
He looks at Ronnie’s mouth.
‘A promise?’
‘Promise…to come back at.’”
Ronnie’s father once had sworn to her mother that he would scatter her ashes on the land, and amidst the backdrop of threats and feints from the neighborhood uglies, Ronnie and her father return to the homestead, and she discovers the secret that her father has kept from her for decades.
Mazza, a professor at the University of Illinois, grew up in San Diego County, and keeps the once idyllic, now-paved California landscape close to the center of her novel. If the heartbreak and horror over the loss of wild land is not overt, that’s all the better: instead, those sentiments are tamped down inside the book’s overflowing catalogue of the land and what lives there, present and past: eucalyptus, tumbleweeds, wild oats, marine grass, picklewort, opossum, pollywogs, pepper trees, wild cucumber, clawed frogs, nopale cacti, swamps, lagoons, gorges, and all manner of wild birds are set into the novel’s texture. The Tattori family’s intimacy with that land comes across as raw and mythic—that is, truer than true.
Like a sweating combat soldier, Ronnie is hyperaware of her surroundings, and simple plans like picking up milk from the store are rendered via her consciousness with extreme detail that is not a burden to read. Instead, the narrative’s constant details are delicious, once the reader gives into them, dreamlike in their excess. In one of her shelters in the woods, Ronnie
“…removes her sweatshirt which has stayed fairly dry because; she’d worn Adrian’s jacket all night. She replaces Adrian’s jacket over her bra and bare skin before emerging again from the sumac and putting her sweatshirt onto her father, in the same manner she used to dress of the other residents at the hospital, but never her father. First each sleeve is threaded onto an arm, then the garment’s body bunched in two hands all the way to the neck hole…”
Mazza’s penchant for hyperdetailed, hyperrealistic description seems to work best in Homeland, out of all her novels. Her way of describing life and experience through thousands of tiny word-pixels is rooted in Ronnie’s suffering character, and so this mythic, tangled, California novel is alive, it seems, with every word.
Post a Comment
<< Home