Book Review

A path through this thinking is clearing. Stay with me. Events will fit themselves to themselves. Stitch along and proceed.  – Lia Purpura

Children can terrify you. Jump scares and Children of the Corn aside, they seem to invoke an adult consciousness, suddenly, staring at you in an unguarded moment, judging you for your hypocrisies, or interrupting an ice cream outing to ask, “Are you really happy?” But their ability to creep us out stems from our inability to remember what it was like to be a child. It’s easy to forget what it was like to “[gain] a selfhood,” in fits and starts as author Lesley Jenike writes, our memories skipping over those “little, hermetic cruelties of family life, the impatience we feel when no one is looking and we want them to look.” While some children mirror adults simply to be seen, others have no choice but to become adult themselves, having lost their innocence to a world that repeatedly exploits its voiceless and vulnerable. If children terrify us, they do so by reflecting that part of us we are loath to confront.

In City of Toys, Lesley Jenike close reads our relationship to childhood (and our terror thereof), using along with her own life, a dizzying array of historical figures and events for her texts, from Edward Albee and Harambe the gorilla (rest in peace), to Jane Eyre and the Great Exhibition of 1851, to Build-a-Bears and Werner Herzog. In what could be described as lyric essays owing to her craft as a poet, Jenike in her associative prose finds an internal rhyme in her subjects that sings a felt truth about childhood and the human condition, specifically through the lens of the exploited: children and animals, even toys—insofar as toys (artificial intelligence, included) embody the repressed desire of adults and the violence that lurks in its shadow. Reading Lesley Jenike is a philological jaunt; with quantum leaps through history and historical materialism, wordplays that iterate new meanings, Jenike’s essays would induce vertigo if they weren’t grounded by her own poignant self-exploration as mother, daughter, artist, and human being.

In “Enter Time, the Chorus,” Jenike opens with Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, alluding to the entrance of Time, abruptly announcing a gap of sixteen years after play’s consequential events, before disappearing offstage. Time, also, is abstracted (though not embodied) in poet Kenneth Koch’s 1962 play, The Construction of Boston, a chaotic, single-use performance that elides the pivotal moments of the city’s history: the “Little Ice Age” of the seventeenth century, in which the earth experienced a mini deep freeze, as well as the displacements, witch trials, and busing riots. When it comes to performance, time is conveniently manipulated to obscure inconvenient truths.

As author Lia Purpura writes of her own work, “Without the site of [the] essay, these moments are nowhere,” so Lesley Jenike, with her own essays, pulls us along with her historical subjects into the orbit of the personal, from kairos to the chronos of common time. In other words, she lays bare the human cost and consequence of history’s glossed-over gaps: the arduous fallout of divorce on a family, for example, or our daily, unacknowledged conniptions of grief and shame. When she writes that “motherhood is a time-fuck . . . a play performed inside a walled garden on the greater property of historical time and geologic time,” we feel that it is an ineffable truth that can only be summoned by the metaphorical resonance of the essay.

In “Maybe It’s Just Show Biz,” Jenike, herself once a child actor, juxtaposes Haley Joel Osment in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a young Jodie Foster, and Pinocchio, to triangulate on society’s fascination with—and exploitation of—childhood. “One could argue performance takes their childhoods away,” she writes of child actors, “if we define ‘childhood’ as separate and apart from the child herself, precious and worth putting under glass like a pinned butterfly.” A statement in the collective first person like this would risk being performative, if it weren’t for Jenike pinning her own emotions beneath the glass, as she does when, recalling in her youth watching another girl braiding her hair, she captures the simple, un-adult-erated joy of childhood, even in a fleeting moment. “Watching her,” she writes, “was like watching a play without asking it to mean anything which is to say, it was a pleasure.”

Like “Creative Nonfiction,” the lyric essay as a genre, buckles under the weight of its multitudes. Between poetic discourse and discursive poetry, lyric essays entail all sorts of hybridities, which, according to John D’Agata, invoke at best “new possibilities and new paths of inquiry, helping us to shape our experiences in the world in ways we have not yet imagined.” At worst, they give license to a kind of sprawl that lacks the armature of an essay and the resonance of a well-crafted poem. One sometimes wishes writers would make up their mind. If Jenike doesn’t always sustain that sense of novel inquiry in her essays, whether by rushing a metaphorical association or by an unearned aphorisms here or there, she commands our attention by her persistence of vision (to use her own words), an ability not only to locate a thread of the human condition but to weave it deftly through time and space. It is a form of reception, to borrow from Edward Said, a philological virtue that explains “obscure or invisible frameworks in which they exist,” while moving “to their historical situations and the way in which certain structures of attitude, feeling, and rhetoric get entangled with . . . social formulations of their context.” It is a virtue we could all use to recover a sense of self from an otherwise lost or effaced childhood. But it is also a movement toward understanding, liberation, and a fearless reception of what we loath to confront in ourselves.