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Closer to the Ground

Caren Gussoff's short stories map feminine experience of contemporary reality from the inside, and offer jolting rides through disturbed, damaged lives and minds. Her fictional worlds are fractured by emotional pain, criss-crossed by barely-healed scar tissue, gnarled and knotted by frustrated desires and thwarted ambitions. Her characters are partially traumatised by the realities they conflict with, partially wrecked by the people they're condemned to mix with, partially stunned by their own failings, but wholly strangers to themselves, floundering through seas of words to try to make sense of who and what they are.

The narrator of 'Unpretty' typifies the Gussoff scenario: "When I was twelve years old, my sister offered me to a Frenchman for a kilo of coke", the story opens, and things do not get better. Gussoff, a New Yorker with a novel, Homecoming, already published by Serpent's Tail, critiques the brutality of a contemporary world-view that represents people as exchangeable commodities, that sees the worth of the individual solely in terms of price, and that encourages everyone to act out its own consumer fantasies on a daily basis. Characters seek self-assurance, self-reflexivity, but find only blankness:

When I was twelve, I felt capable of change. You could become anything you wanted. I knew this from television and novels in translation. Secretly, I savored the possibilities. I could be pretty. At thirty, I stare into my compact, blinking back exactly who I have always been.

Here the 'I' is fixed, condemned to its own identity, circumscribed by the inevitability of the mirror image. "Television" and "novels in translation" offer a code to crack, a series of tantalising opportunities that hammer home the impossibility of change. Gussoff summarises in such moments the trivial, violent existence of a dispossessed generation.

Sometimes her writing slips into the easy contemporary mode of the born postmodernist, the lessons of the generation of American writers of the sixties and seventies -- Kathy Acker, John Barth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon -- wholly assimilated into a kind of post-No Wave, post-Blank Generation blur of incompletely mediated sensation. I