JOSHUA COREY: BEAUTIFUL SOUL, AN AMERICAN ELEGY
By Joshua Corey
Spuyten Duyvil, New York City, 2014
Joshua Corey is an accomplished poet, blogger, professor and literary critic. With Beautiful Soul, he adds novelist to his list of accomplishments. Corey struggled, publicly, with the seemingly rigid constraints of narrative writing. He has overcome these restraints, and embraced them as well, writing a stunningly beautiful, moving book of a daughter’s search for her mother. It is a poet’s novel. Poets have often produced tedious, experimental work that is so language obsessed it leaves readers of story behind. Happily Joshua Corey has avoided this. Language is fundamental to Beautiful Soul, but it never takes off into pure abstraction. What is so brilliant about the language of this book is its precision. It suggests not the arid abstractions of Language Poetry but rather the exact visual descriptions of Imagist and Objectivist poetry, with the sonic eloquence of Wallace Stevens. This book is rich with sensual detail, incident and emotion. It is also a book of stories.
It begins with a young mother lying in bed while her husband sleeps, in a reverie of rain, a two page paragraph which is a tour de force of description:
“In the heart of the night the new reader lies awake with the lights turned off listening to the rain tapping on the skylight. If she opened her eyes she would see the darkness of the ceiling and a differing quality of darkness above her, a rectangle gradually reorganizing itself into a gray filmy gleam, glass surface blistered by streetlamps, and the little shudders of water whose shadows she can feel moving across the bedspread, her husband’s sleeping body, her own face.â€
Ruth, or Elsa (she appears with both names) has been receiving letters from her dead mother, M. Whether or not she has actually been receiving letters is hard to determine, as much else in the narrative, which shifts between dream, desire and incident. In any event, either the sleeping or the waking Ruth/Elsa hires a detective out of central casting, Lamb, to find her mother, or the letter writer. Lamb goes to Europe, in search of the author of the letters. It is thought the author is Elsa’s biological father. What forms the heart of this novel is the ‘confession’ of Ruth’s biological father, Gus, to Detective Lamb, and the letters written by M. These stories lead deeper and deeper into Europe, and to the holocaust, which M’s parents survive. The romance of M and Gus transpires in Paris, in 1968, where Gus is an art student, and M a disaffected expat. Corey brings 1960s Paris to life, as he does contemporary suburban Chicago, Queens, New Jersey, Trieste and Berlin. Point of view and narrative tense are constantly shifting through the course of the book, but the action is not obscured by method. Only the use of an imagined camera in the scenes with Lamb was problematic for me. It read well enough as a noir movie, and Lamb was an acceptable if obvious literary creation. But I did not need to feel I was watching a Goddard film (because Corey’s detective, despite both author and character being American, is definitely through the European filter) to be engaged with his detective or his story. It almost felt like a compulsory use of what has become a convention of unconventional literary novels, the use of the crime novel as a device. All along Corey tips his hat to numerous literary and artistic monuments and his narrator indulges in quasi-philosophical aesthetic speculations about the nature of memory, reality, and narrative. Again, these present tense, often second person, post-modern, metanovelistic intrusions are conventional, unnecessary, but ultimately innocuous. Corey’s strengths as a writer are such that he has kept them to a minimum. Beautiful Soul in the end is a deeply Romantic work, despite its credentials, its Francophone tics. It does not suggest Sartre, Robbe Grillet and Goddard so much as Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, or say Under the Volcano. There are Hungarian and Austrian novelists I think of, Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight, or Gyula Krudy’s Sunflower. There is a powerful, subjective lyricism, a profoundly serious inner exploration in these pages, giving rise to a complex representation of reality as multilayered event, the complexities of style serving subject matter.
I owe a public apology to Joshua Corey. I append it because I didn’t want this to distract the reader from reading the review. I read Joshua’s blog, and grew impatient with what was evidently a necessary process for him. American literary culture is embattled and often nasty. I have no fight with Joshua. I aspired at one time to write books like Beautiful Soul and went in the opposite direction. I judge literary works on their individual merits, not on the school they are a part of. This book stands on its own and is excellent, as I hope my review shows. I think the anonymity of the internet fuels the nastiness of our literary culture, especially the poetic avant-garde, which is still dominated by hormonal young men spoiling for a fight. Corey has never played this game. He is collegial, kind and sincere. Most writers are like this, but they don’t dominate the airwaves. I think I’ve too often fell for the snarl and engaged in polemics with dogs, straw or otherwise. The beautiful, amazing thing about the novel as an art form is it’s capacity. The novel contains multitudes, and has, from the start, been experimental, wayward. The problem isn’t with narrative, it’s with what, and how, we narrate.
