“Secrets have come to seem quaint,” writes Christian Lorentzen in his punchy essay “Tell Me Everything: Fiction in the age of radical transparency.” As recently as the 1990s, he says, “personalities were still constructed out of whispers and glances rather than public utterances and little clicks of affirmation.” But it isn’t that secrets have disappeared; they’ve just been commoditized into those utterances and clicks. Lorentzen’s central question sets my thoughts awhirl about fiction and memoir: “What do we learn the most about under conditions of total exposure?” Secrets used to be unstable elements, and as Lorentzen says, they are “the engines of plots” in conventionally constructed novels. If it’s true that “the inner soul is an obsolete concept in a society that’s more and more post-sacred and post-secret,” then what exactly are our poetry, fiction and memoirs trying to illuminate?
Amanda Goldblatt’s debut novel Hard Mouth makes self-exposure its sole gesture – or rather, it portrays the moment of speaking in which its main character, Denise aka “Denny,” first captures the language required to tell her story. Goldblatt may be an emerging novelist, but she is already one of our most canny and sly writers as well as a unique stylist. Clearly, she nudges us to empathize and, for some of us, to closely identify with Denny as she attempts to describe her life and devise one of her own. But Goldblatt invests her writing with the density of the actual – meaning that this bildungsroman gone atilt doesn’t fit snugly into the genres of fictional or memoirist narratives of grievous dilemmas and triumphalism. What occurs in the run-time of the narrative – in the speaking of the words themselves – supercedes any drumroll take-away one may be tempted to hear. And Goldblatt not only tempts such conclusions, but points to credible take-aways, too.
Denny’s first sentences read, “In this story I do not mean to hide myself. Rather I want to be obvious I want you to see, at least, me.” She had tried writing her story as a teenager: “I wrote about all this in English class, a time otherwise without catharsis, a time when I was merely battling to blot out my own angsty ruminations.” Coming on page 14, the sentence above seems to set our expectations: the story lying ahead will describe a time with catharsis. She speaks with a clever immediacy. But will she be so enthralled by her sudden fluency that she will fail to hear her own meanings – and if she does hear them, can she apply them, and if so, how?
A product of the suburbs outside D.C., Denny is now in her late 20’s and mentions but three significant persons in her backstory: her mother and father (“My parents were distant by sickness or disposition”) and Ken, an ex-high school boyfriend and sex partner (“my crush on Ken transformed into respectable family love”). The father, long ailing from cancer, is now apparently beyond remission. The narrative shrewdly draws in the reader through the expected tropes and tones of disgruntled post-post-adolescence – a knowing insouciance, discontentment with family relations, and a desultory approach to transgression. Goldblatt writes with an ear attuned to the culture’s conventions of self-exposure, neither to adopt nor mock but to probe them. Once in the harness of her prose, one trots along to her terse rhythms and feels the whipped tip of her attitude. She’s got you where she wants you – but she’s not done with you.
Denny relates her former job tending fruit flies in a research lab. One evening after work, she meets two men and a woman named Monica in a bar across the highway. They decamp to an apartment. About Monica she says, “If you like to be liked, a new friend can make you feel immortal. If you don’t, the whole thing is exhausting.” I thought: Denny is telling this story to us, her new friends, because we make her feel immortal – thus, she likes to be liked. Then I asked: is she really likeable? If she is telling this story in the wake of a catharsis, why bother with strangers like us? Are imaginary friends the only ones she will accept? She goes on, recalling waking up drunk on a sofa: “In the last little dregs of waking, I thought how I did not fear an end to the world as I knew it, the way these people did; for I did not know much of the world, and what I did know I did not connect with joy. I was filled to the brim with dread; it threatened to spill blackly from my mouth.” A hard mouth.
More about imaginary friends: Denny has one named Gene who appeared when she was fifteen. He is styled “on a failed character actor from the early twentieth century, a fat man who played sheriff and dad, judge and dupe … He had known where to land his punches. He had known, too, how to pet me, gently enough for me to miss him when he left the room. I’m not deluded. Gene was me and not me: the right tool for the job.” It’s an egalitarian relationship – he quips, queries and cautions, and she tells him to buzz off. I sensed that Gene has something to do with me – that I should pay attention both to his companionability and his skepticism.
Denny ensures that she will lose her job – and its sudden closure triggers a plan to escape from her whole environment, dying pa and all: “This felt in some way exhilarating. I was unemployed, moving swiftly from harmless kook to edge-dweller. I was ready to end this day. I was ready to discover how next I would degrade.” And then 20 pages later, at mid-book, she says, “Better to save my loved ones from this monster I was, a person who’d run off with her own imaginary friend, addled by everything in sight.” As an exposee with esteem deficits, her plan comprises reading books on survivalist techniques and running off without goodbyes to a cabin in the woods. “On the mountain it became clear that I had no obvious art,” she says. “Of course my talents were compulsion and self-haunting.” But also, exposure for her means behaving like a permeable membrane for incoming danger. It soon arrives in the form of a man named Haw with whom she strikes up “a rancid brand of domestic partnership.” There is hope and more dread: “I thought maybe this was me finally having my own life in the nick of time, here at what had so recently seemed like the end of things.” In the nearby lake, she glimpses something like redemption: “I was surprised when out from a thick stand of evergreens my lake revealed itself, surprising me for the second time in two days. Still, it was like encountering a friend in a foreign city … If only, all the rest of my life, I could rediscover this lake, over and over, and within this ritual discover also an endless, deepening knowing. It seemed possible.” Big if.
The thing that kills the possibility of having that recurring, rare, surprising glimpse – that’s the thing Denny is motivated, in the end, to confront. To strike back at what oppresses in that regard. In a semi-comical-analytical aside in the action, she says, “I noted that there had been a distinct lack of confrontation in my life. It’s almost biblical, isn’t it? How I, toasted so gently in the oven of the suburbs, was forced to climb a mountain in order to see a conflagration with my own eyes?” At the outset of the story, Denny remarks, “I’m not of mutable stock. Or, it takes a lot of get this big, boring boulder rolling.” Does one somehow hope for or expect mutation, to change by unloading one’s secrets and breathing freely? Lorentzen says, “The horror of exposure is matched by the horror of others’ indifference.” Denny speaks in a way that precludes our indifference. She risks the exposure not only of her secrets but her banality. She dispenses with the notion of mutation and discovers her own body and its penetrating if momentary power of vision. But this thing she strikes back at — is it only external?
Denny is the flawed raconteur of herself. There’s an umbral joke hidden in all of this, a serious playfulness with words. While working at the lab, Denny says, “I tried to talk to people. I mean, I didn’t try. But sometimes I opened my mouth, silently, just after they passed. I was working on the idea of being alive.” Confronting life on the mountain may be a victory for Denny. But in talking to us, her receptive imaginaries, she has succeeded to be alive. Amanda Goldblatt knows this signal achievement occurs in the moment of language, often beyond intention and forethought – and has created a most artfully spirited novel to let us hear what the idea of being alive sounds like.
[Published August 13, 2019 by Counterpoint Press, 272 pages, $16.95 paperback]