Author Archives: Dactyl Review

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

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Though I spent a not inconsequential portion of my early-twenties leisure time at Bay Street in Sag Harbor, where such reggae luminaries as Steel Pulse, Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, and Lucky Dube frequently performed, I did not know that not far from the concert venue was a neighborhood that had been built by African-American families after World War II. That neighborhood, made up of Azurest, Sag Harbor Hills, and Nineveh, is geographically and existentially at the center of Colson Whitehead’s  Sag Harbor  (Penguin/Random House, 352 pages).

Early in the novel, the now grown-up narrator Benji recalls his fifteen-year-old self settling into Sag Harbor for the summer of 1985 and contemplates the mythical aura that surrounded some of the people who came before him:

“What I did know about DuBois was that he fell into the category of Famous Black Folk—there was a way people said certain names so that they had an emanation or halo. The respectful way my mother pronounced DuBois told me that the man had uplifted the race.”
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Remedia: A Picaresque by Michael Joyce

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Three Explorations of Michael Joyce’s Novel Remedia, A Picaresque (Steerage Press 306 pages).

This review takes the form of three colloquies between two readers who seek to understand the multiple meanings of this enormously rich novel.

I. Scenes and Adventures

You finished Remedia.

Terrific novel—characters, places, drama, linguistic acrobatics, mystery. But I would’ve read it just to get to that great ending.

Very elegiac. The whole book resonates in it. Made me think of those last minutes of Mahler’s Ninth.

I need to talk about this book. Continue reading →

Brother Carnival by Dennis Must

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In Brother Carnival (Red Hen Press, 209 pages), a fiercely engaging literary work, Dennis Must plays with time and character, leading the reader into a special world of space and time, almost a quantum universe, where characters can be in two places at the same time–or can they? Laced with an intense investigation into the nature of divinity and deities, Brother Carnival weaves an impressive litany of human weakness into the warp-quest for the divine. These lines point to the nature of Our Problem: Continue reading →

Liam’s Going by Michael Joyce

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Three Approaches to Liam’s Going

You find in your hands a work of great beauty, like Michael Joyce’s novel, Liam’s Going (McPherson, 207 pages). It makes you uneasy. You feel like one of those Trojan elders chirping the perilous beauty of Helen. Send her back. You warily mention to a friend that you have discovered a 21st century novel of great lyric beauty. Right, she says, a baby born with a beard. That kind of fiction went out with Virginia Woolf. What about Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, you say.

OK, moments of lyricism, but very provisional and nervous. Continue reading →

A Decent Woman by Eleanor Parker Sapia

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In The Age of Insight, Eric Kandel writes about the role of the observer in art: “Not only does the viewer collaborate with the artist in transforming a two dimensional likeness on canvas into a three-dimensional depiction of the visual world, the viewer interprets what he or she sees on the canvas in personal terms, thereby adding meaning to the picture. Riegel called this phenomenon the “beholder’s involvement.” Kris’s study of ambiguity in visual perception led him to elaborate on Riegel’s insight that the viewer completes a work of art. As a neuroscientist, Kandel focuses on the plastic arts, but his discussion brings us to the question of writing and specifically to the question of the “historical novel”. What does historical writing demand from the reader in order to “complete a work of art”?

There are three dimensions involved: Time, the writer’s mind, and the reader’s perception.
We know that writers filter reality, compress time, squeeze events, introduce ‘fictional’ aspects to such an extent that often the historical novel masquerades as a “quasi-memoir” splicing together documentation from time past with the writer’s art and craft of invention.

In other words, how much of an historical novel is history and how much is literary fiction? And, really, does it matter? And what has Eleanor Sapia Parker done in A Decent Woman (Scarlet River Press, 364 pages)? Continue reading →

Citadel by Jack Remick

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Citadel (Global, 372 pages) is a much needed, unforgiving and unapologetic evisceration of the idea of female inferiority we have so primitively accepted today and throughout history. Remick shows tremendous skill in the way he attacks such a heated and complicated subject. He never shies away from the atrocious acts of violence against women, but neither does he lose the magic of his whirlwind storytelling in favor of lecture. Citadel is an honest, sometimes savage look at the relationship between men and women, and what the world could be like if women were in control.

Trisha de Tours is an editor at Pinnacle Books and has been directed by her boss to find a bestseller. When she finds out the new resident in her condos, Daiva Izokaitis, has a manuscript called Citadel, she agrees to read it. Trisha soon finds out Daiva is a literary rebel, refusing to adhere to the fundamentals of writing and later refusing to participate in the editing process, yet she has created a revolutionary novel that overcomes Trisha so completely we see her drown in the story, and reemerging a different woman. Continue reading →