Book Review

“Why Sea? Why Poison?” asks Cumin Baleen, the narrator of Caren Beilin’s novel Sea, Poison: “There is no actual sea in Philadelphia. Only a veritable sea of hospitals. The medical professionals in their blue and green scrubs aquamarize all our city, at all hours. The flow of medicine, blood, and bedding. There’s poison.” This flow of medicine, like the sea’s tides, can carry you to safety on shore or further out, toward danger. Cumin, newly diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, finds herself caught in the flow of medicine, headed out to sea. A routine medication requires an eye exam that uncovers a dangerous structural flaw in her eyes that may cause blindness. The laser surgery meant to repair this flaw accidentally zaps her brain, leaving Cumin unable to write.

Or perhaps not so accidentally. Cumin’s medical troubles accrue as her life falls apart in a myriad of other ways. When her boyfriend, Mari, falls for their landlord, Janine, she finds herself without a place to live. She moves across town into a literal closet, where she sleeps under the coats of Maron, an actress. Her love—and lust—for Maron’s polyamorous partner, Alix, goes largely unrequited. Cumin feels at the mercy of this motley crew of “polyarmorers,” a feeling that turns out to be entirely accurate, as they are all implicated, to various degrees, in the bizarre conspiracy to convince Cumin (and others) to undergo the surgery that has partially lobotomized her. The surgery, as Alix explains to her, is meant to make her a better writer, one of simpler and shorter sentences, though it seems to have gone too far.

The experiment, we learn, is an exercise in “Medical OuLiPo,” a version of the French school of constrained writing founded in the 1960s by Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais. For the Oulipians, a loose group of pranksters and wordsmiths, constraints could be liberatory; they broke habitual modes of thinking and writing and allowed new forms to emerge. As with any kind of game, these constraints could be formatively complex or frustratingly simple, as with George Perec’s A Void, written without the letter e. “Medical OuLiPo” only takes the idea a step further, moving the locus of constraint from the page to the brain.

For a novel in the Oulipian tradition, Sea, Poison isn’t much interested in wordplay. There’s the name Cumin Baleen, of course, transmogrified from that of the author, Caren Beilin. There’s Sea & Poison, the upscale grocery store where Cumin works, and where someone seems to have forgotten the necessary s in poisson—a French fish. And many of the chapters are titled for autoimmune medications like Plaquenil and Xeljanz and Rinvoq, which seem like modern Oulipianisms, bits of the periodic table scattered over the Scrabble board.

A running allusion to Japanese author Shusaku Endo’s novel The Sea and Poison, about imperial doctors who perform experiments on captured American airmen, seems to promise an Oulipian consonance of form that never materializes. Cumin, listening to a lengthy reading from a stranger’s MFA thesis, suggests it has been cribbed directly from Endo, only to be reminded that Endo himself was cribbing from Madame Bovary. In the end, it’s theme that conquers form; Endo is useful not because it provides Sea, Poison—a verbal form to meddle with or modulate—but because its tale of medical abuse resembles what has happened to Cumin and others.

What if constraints don’t liberate? What if they, you know, constrain? What if they restrain? Sea, Poison ends up running from the Oulipian, whose connotations become sinister. Cumin’s mild lobotomy has kept her from completing her project, a work of creative non-fiction about reproductive abuse—including gynecological rape and nonconsensual hysterectomies. The novel fills with queasily familiar names: USC’s George Tyndall, Columbia’s George Hadden, Larry Nassar of the U.S. gymnastics team, and Mahendra Amin, whose abuse of women at ICE detention centers earned him the nickname “the uterus collector.” In their way, Beilin suggests, these men are all practitioners of “Medical OuLiPo,” restraining and constraining, taking and subtracting. Even Cumin’s nonconsensual lobotomy pales next to these real-world criminals; seeing their names in print hardly makes one eager for word games.

The most Oulipian passage in the novel comes when Cumin rewrites a passage of Endo by removing the letters in the word uterus, but the exercise turns out to be painfully difficult: “Uck!” declares Cumin, rediscovering the irreplaceable u, “A uterus is too glorious, it’s important, I can’t do much writing without a uterus in our ABCs but I’m noticing—wow—how simplistic, how unfoggy I find it instantly to gain it again . . .” The passage, and Cumin, only come to life again when she returns the letters to their rightful place. What would it mean to write with every letter and word, every capacity, every potential, chaque potentiel, returned to you?

Beilin’s prose, rather, seems anti-Oulipo, a freewheeling wildness of abundance, rather than constraint. At its best, Sea, Poison is electrically funny and verbally preposterous. It fills with absurdities, stuffed leopards, “fuck chairs,” sex toys that talk like Teddy Ruxpin. It’s unpredictable, sex mad, the kind of book where—a favorite moment—what seems to be a butt plug modeled after Proust’s infamous madeleine turns out to be a shell shaped Glade Plug-In. It’s a raunchy, even silly book, haunted by its Oulipian other—the ghost of a book so “constrained” that it becomes entirely silent, like a packet of blank pages. Luckily, Cumin gets her words back, and Sea, Poison emerges victorious over its Oulipian shadow.