I dramatize small moments of my life on the phone or in a public restroom. I am all sorts of things in themselves: I am in character, I am in mint condition, I am in my head, I am in luck, I am in need, I am in vogue, I am in the red, I am in deep, I am in tune, I am in trouble, I am in control, I am in the way.
It feels oddly fortuitous or serendipitous to come to this book (truth be told, it came to me, but so be it) at a time when a healthy amount of literary oxygen is being consumed by an enormous novel which, depending on how you wish to slice it, consists of one sentence unfolding over 1000 pages. The narrator of Lucy Ellman’s ambitious Ducks, Newburyport is a housewife who stands, according to reviews, and thinks—about the mundane details, matters of political curiosity, family affairs and, apparently, Little House on the Prairie though I’m not certain if it’s the television series or the books on which it was based. I haven’t read it and likely won’t for the simple reason that 1000 pages, no matter how compelling, no matter how many sentences it is divided into, is a good 750 more than my typical comfort zone. 500 if I really feel inclined to tackle the length. But, it does serve as a fitting counterpoint to Danielle Dutton’s SPRAWL, a tidy 115-page single-paragraph narrative also centred around a suburban housewife.
However, Dutton’s unnamed narrator exists in a strangely self-contained universe. In an unbroken monologue her observations, desires, interactions, and actions—often broken down to distinct poses or placements of her body in relation to space or other objects—spill across the page. But we know little about who she really is beyond what we can glean from some childhood memories and odd comments about her marriage. She is an abstracted everywoman, existing in a series of tableaus, described with precision like a still life painting, in a community of (preferably) identical lawns, tedious backyard get togethers, nameless kids, and collections of objects on tables or countertops. Imagine flipping through copies of Oprah and Woman’s Day and piecing together fragments of an idealized suburban reality and trying to step into it. The absurdity of the two dimensional American dream subverted into a wonderfully surreal, almost otherworldly narrative. One that is disturbingly recognizable if not especially desirable: “While it’s been proposed that we are more interesting than characters on television, one day soon we will be characters on television.”
SPRAWL’s narrator is invested in a kind of performative domesticity, a search for a certain model of feminine perfection measured against the other women in her neighbourhood (with their pies, casseroles and perfect flower arrangements), and executed with the assistance of her husband Haywood who seems equally adrift in this world of prefabricated products, crumpled paper napkins, passionless sex acts and strange stilted allusions to conversation. Like real-life distorted through a glass of water. Fragmented and elongated at once.
In one sense, the town in which the narrative (can it really be called a story?) is set, is understood in historical and geological terms. It was not always there. And what presently exists has moved farther and farther from what might have been the natural state of the land. The strata of geological time is mirrored in the (perfectly iced) layers of a cake as the inexecrable pressure of conformity takes hold. It’s a world of gossip and prejudices and peculiar notions of social cohesion and natural preservation. At the same time, there is a sense that chronological time is at once stretched out and bunched together, as if this town, all of America perhaps, is perched on the edge of a black hole. Dutton’s narrator, in her suburban technicolour irreality knows that feeling well and delights in these exaggerated bubbles of time. Her days are compressed, distorted and often very lonely:
We identify with metaphors about need and space. It is central to our values, which range from sexual depravity to temperance to melodrama. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, someone sends a rake against the asphalt. I grab my hat, full of enthusiasm, and head outside seeking kinship with others, but the street is deserted. Instead, I continue to function alone in the house. I am essentially productive and genuine and important. I bake banana bread and paint the ceiling. On the TV is an interview with a young woman saying loudly “Could I? Could I?” Later, a little boy in a driveway tells me he has three superpowers: eating yogurt with his eyes closed, reading upside down, and breathing warm air. A smaller boy drops a plastic gun and runs over to say: “Even my superpower is jumping on one foot.” But anyone can do that. So I jump on one foot for fifteen years, and he jumps too, and the other boy watches blandly from the seat of his bike, and no one walks down the sidewalk or drives down the street at all. I might as well think of this as the period of jumping.
Because there is an intentional feedback loop quality to the days that unspool and blur into one another in this most unusual novel, this Walden for an increasingly sterile modern age, it may be easy to wonder what it is like to read. With its compendium of lists and descriptive vignettes, the real or imaginary letters the narrator composes to various neighbours—generally to gently express her concerns about their behaviour—and her own endless efforts to coordinate herself, like any another object, with her environment, SPRAWL is enchanting, uncanny and unsettling. And, of course, it’s also very funny.
As the end nears, the narrative grows increasingly abstract and existential, cracks start to appear in the domestic veneer, but Dutton’s hand is so steady, her language so endlessly surprising that one is, as Renee Gladman notes in her Afterword, reluctant to leave this bright and brilliantly realized world behind. It is akin to living, for a time, in a painting—a still life at once realist and surreal—that contains within its frame, a sharp and insightful commentary on contemporary suburban life in America.
SPRAWL by Dorothy Dutton is published by Wave Books.
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