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November 02, 2006

GUEST REVIEW - THE OPEN CURTAIN

Brian Evenson will be appearing this evening at Beyond Baroque, reading with Maggie Nelson.  Many thanks to Matt Tiffany who alerted us - and who interviews Evenson at his own site - and kindly provides us with this Guest Review.

Opecur The Open Curtain
Brian Evenson
Coffee House Press
218 pp
14.95, trade paper

GUEST REVIEW BY MATTHEW TIFFANY

Brian Evenson's own story is as interesting as the stories he invents: When faced with censorship from Brigham Young University, where he was told that he could only continue in his position as assistant professor if he agreed not to write anything again like his first book, Altmann's Tongue, he resigned. The controversy also led to his leaving the Mormon church, and contributed to the end of his marriage. All of that: loss of job, of faith, of marriage, in the pursuit of an ideal in writing.

That sort of backstory makes one sit up and take notice, and in the case of Evenson's latest effort, The Open Curtain, the attention is rewarded. Drawing from the true story of the 1902 murder by the grandson of Brigham Young through the Mormon blood sacrifice ritual, The Open Curtain gives us Rudd, a teenager in the midwest with his own troubled relationship to the Mormon faith. Rudd isn't depicted as all that unusual – father left his mother early on, disinterested in religion while his mother labors to bring him back to church, adrift in the high school years. Evenson gives us those basics early on and then quickly turns Rudd's attention to the murder via a high school research project, in which the student must find a topic that meets four criteria, the last of which asks the student to name a hero. There's no hero in this story, Rudd is told, and it's not acceptable to write about this further. Sound familiar?

Concurrently, Rudd does a little bit of detective work and discovers a secret half-brother, a link to his father. Lael lives close enough for the two to form a relationship, but Lael only seems to tolerate his half-brother's efforts at kinship until Rudd shares his research project with him. As they learn more about the century-old killings, Rudd begins to experience blackouts, and Lael knows something he isn't telling Rudd.

The Open Curtain is one of those books that you want to tell people about, but end up hedging your words – there's always more you could say without giving away the entire story, and yet this is one of those books that you get the most out of without the constraints of a summary read beforehand. The way Evenson builds upon the confusion Rudd goes through as he loses more and more of his present self to the tragedy of 1902 is suggestive of a number of possible psychological explanations. You know that this is billed as a "literary thriller," so at some point the past is going to intrude in a horrific way on the present. Evenson walks a fine line between use of the usual conventions of the "thriller" genre and a more nuanced, deeply thought narrative in such a way that the oft-used thriller narrative devices come as a welcome surprise, a genuine thrill. The third part (the novel is divided into three sections) is absolutely riveting: Evenson gets inside Rudd's head with a risky approach that, in the hands of a lesser writer, would seem contrived and a let-down. At no point is this book either of those.

Posted at 12:20 AM in Reviews |

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Comments

Angela

Thanks for posting about Brian. I also interviewed him for Bookslut and it will be up on the 6th. He's a great writer and everyone should come out tonight to meet him. I'm going too! The Open Curtain is just one more intriguing piece of work by Evenson and I'm thrilled I had the chance to speak with him about his work!

Posted by: Angela | November 02, 2006 at 12:51 PM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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