Book Review

“Ostensibly I write novels and stories,” Danielle Dutton writes at the start of “A Picture Held Us Captive,” the long essay on ekphrastic writing that makes up the third section, “Art,” of her book Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, “yet I often find myself more interested in spaces and things than in plots. The world is astonishing.” No surprise, then, that Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is full of astonishing things.

“These Bad Things” is framed as a story that almost coalesced and was lost, or that was thought about at length, but not written down (the anxiety dream of a writer). The story was supposed to happen at night, we learn, on a camping trip taken by a mother, a father, and their son. There was to be a man in a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat, the recent death of a college student from China, and a painter who painted a black “so light-absorbing it bends your brain.” The second part was to be a campfire story told by the son, a rambling story whose creepiness—“like watching a horror movie and waiting for the terrible thing to happen, kind of wishing it would happen, like wishing you could get it over with, but then you realize you’re inside the movie, so this is your actual life”—seems to spread throughout the larger story in which it dwells.

“These Bad Things” is typical of the first section of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, “Prairie,” which consists of short pieces with simple premises that scaffold constellations of not just “spaces and things” but characters and episodes and haunting images. The constellation, instead of plot, is what holds each piece together. In “Nocturne” a woman is driving cross-country with her son. At some point an old man appears in a darkened lot, moving toward them “like a glacier,” along with billboards reading HELL IS REAL and JESUS RECYCLED HUMANS. The woman remembers the occasion for the drive, two weeks at her mother’s house, but we get only dreamy images from which “she’d woken back-to-front,” which she likens to facing “the ass-side of your mind.” In the end, the various elements crunch together almost musically:

“Look!” she calls, she can’t help herself—sparks from that refinery are drifting through the night sky like luminescent plankton. The old man’s toothless mouth expels cool air and bats. “Where are we?” cries a voice in the car. The road begins to curve. They are driving upside down on the bottom of the planet. She wishes she could tell him the truth. She says, “We’re almost home.”

The second section, “Dresses,” consists entirely of a litany of sixty-six literary dresses, drawn from a diverse array of writers: Ovid, Austen, and Sei Shōnagon, to name just three. As previously mentioned, the third section, “Art,” is a long essay about ekphrastic writing. (For Dutton fans, a note: the essay, “A Picture Held Us Captive,” has been published before, as a chapbook.) The final section, “Other,” contains an entire one-act play, “Pool of Tears,” based on the famous early scene in Alice in Wonderland. Its presence seems incongruous until the reader realizes the play is meant to be read; indeed, it could never be staged. The italicized stage directions are much too long and include obscure directions aimed not at the performers but at the audience. “Simultaneously, every member of the audience thinks of what Amitav Ghosh says about recognition,” the play commands in just one of several references to ideas about art. The length of the stage directions increases, in a joke-like escalation, until the audience is given dialogue within the stage directions and uses the opportunity to complain about the show. The only actual dialogue comes from Alice, who, treading water among the animals, delivers speeches not unlike microfictions that might easily have appeared elsewhere in Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other. One speech concerns the so-called New Avocado, which has no pit, Alice tells her audience. By the end, “Pool of Tears” might be thought of as a counterpoint to “A Picture Held Us Captive,” in that the two cover similar ground but in very different modes.

In addition to “Pool of Tears,” the “Other” section contains microfictions that stand alone. Vivid and playful, they might remind readers of J. Robert Lennon’s shorter work. “Not Writing” begins:

“Doubt equals writing.”

That’s Marguerite Duras in her essay “Writing.”

I could write something called “Not Writing.” I am writing it. Soon, I’ll have been

the one who wrote it.

“Acorn” opens on a writer’s friends, all of whom like to talk and write about the body, telling the writer that they wish her stories weren’t “all words. Bring the body into your writing, they said.” Along the same lines, the second author in “Writing Advice” tells the first author, “But if you keep writing little books that nobody reads, it’s like, ‘what’s the point,’ you know? Like, truthfully, where’s the impact?” Thankfully, the first author goes on to murder the second author. And the unmentioned third author, Danielle Dutton, will go on, we hope, to write more “little books” like this one.