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[All Fall Down] [By: Caponegro, Mary] [July, 2009]
"Mary Caponegro is one of the most imaginative, daring, serious and playful writers alive. All Fall Down is her best book yet.—Jonathan Safran Foer"Mary Caponegro's headlong tales chronicle our generation's internal trajectories; she's robust, crude, drop-dead funny, tender, and heartbreaking as she navigates the tragicomedy of our middle age. She goes straight to the bottom of sex, love, romance, and all their travesties. The way David Foster Wallace used and claimed and forever changed footnotes, Caponegro has branded parentheses. She charts the 'oldly-wed game' of the long married using 'not a laugh but a cry-track.' Playful, but never shirking, Caponegro's stories are a deep balm."—Mona SimpsonIn two novellas and four shorter tales of love and healing gone awry, we meet caregivers and lovers, muses and skydivers, mothers and minors—all headed toward “ninety mile-an-hour psychic crashes euphemistically referred to as epiphanies.” As William Gass says, “The music of Mary Caponegro’s stories is to the mouth what wine is.” And through exuberant lyricism, remarkable characterization, and settings as elaborately detailed as any in Hollywood, these dramas of failure, resilience, and transformation linger long after the wine is gone.The author of The Star Café, Five Doubts, and The Complexities of Intimacy, Mary Caponegro lives in the Hudson Valley and teaches at Bard College.
- GenresShort StoriesLiterature
Paperback
First published July 1, 2009
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About the author
Mary Caponegro
25 books25 followersMary Caponegro is an American experimental fiction writer whose collections include Tales from the Next Village, The Star Cafe, Five Doubts, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down. Her stories appear regularly in Conjunctions and in other periodicals. She was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature in 1992, and is also the recipient of The General Electric Award for Younger Writers, the Bruno Arcudi Prize, and the Charles Flint Kellog Award in Arts and Letters. She has taught at Brown University, RISD, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Syracuse University. She is the Richard B. Fisher Family Professor of Writing and Literature at Bard College. Her work has been praised for its syntactic complexity and its surreal, fabulist content.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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January 25, 2024The title of this collection, All Fall Down is taken from the longer title of the second story in the book, Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down, a story which is a perfectly paced account of the cycle of life from birth to death and back again. We rise up for a while but eventually we all fall down, there’s no escape and this story tells it beautifully and from an interesting perspective: a son caring for his dying mother while his wife gives birth to their son.
As I read through the book, I found that the 'falling' theme could be applied to the other five stories too - and I really liked that I could find a common theme between them because they are otherwise very different in style and content.
In Last Resort Retreat, a middle-aged couple at a marriage counselling workshop somehow end up not closer but further from each other, fleeing through the snow in different directions by the end, literally on their last legs.
In Ill-Timed, another couple, young and same-sex this time, who used to skydive together, have fallen on less sublime times. Climbing the stairs safely, and together, becomes instead their greatest challenge.
A Daughter in Time is a brief little snapshot of 9/11.
The Translator, a dense novella set in Rome is about failing to see what is before our eyes and consesuently falling into the trap we thought we’d set out to avoid.
Junior Achievement is about another kind of fall entirely (but this might be an example of where I, like Caponegro, have tried to push a metaphor just a little too far).
Metaphor is at the heart of Caponegro’s techinique. She clearly loves words and meaning, sometimes stretching meaning so far that it collapses under the strain. Ill-Timed is the longest piece here and the one that tested my patience the most. It is almost entirely composed of snappy dialogue full of double meanings and it wears the reader out, even as the characters themselves seem to be worn out by it. No real life conversations could possibly be so pun-laden, so tirelessly and tiresomely sharp. There are a few reflective paragraphs between the dialogue sections, and they are a real relief for the reader but they are unfortunately too few.
The other long piece, The Translator, is almost the opposite of Ill-Timed in that there is hardly any dialogue but the reader desperately wants the reflections of the very pedantic narrator to be broken up by some dialogue; the density of it all is just far too intense. But there are puns and double-meanings enough all the same, not least the ‘denseness’ of that same pedantic narrator who fails to see what is before his eyes.
Still, I enjoyed this collection for the semantic stylistics and for the knowledge that Caponegro knows how to laugh at herself.
As I read through the book, I found that the 'falling' theme could be applied to the other five stories too - and I really liked that I could find a common theme between them because they are otherwise very different in style and content.
In Last Resort Retreat, a middle-aged couple at a marriage counselling workshop somehow end up not closer but further from each other, fleeing through the snow in different directions by the end, literally on their last legs.
In Ill-Timed, another couple, young and same-sex this time, who used to skydive together, have fallen on less sublime times. Climbing the stairs safely, and together, becomes instead their greatest challenge.
A Daughter in Time is a brief little snapshot of 9/11.
The Translator, a dense novella set in Rome is about failing to see what is before our eyes and consesuently falling into the trap we thought we’d set out to avoid.
Junior Achievement is about another kind of fall entirely (but this might be an example of where I, like Caponegro, have tried to push a metaphor just a little too far).
Metaphor is at the heart of Caponegro’s techinique. She clearly loves words and meaning, sometimes stretching meaning so far that it collapses under the strain. Ill-Timed is the longest piece here and the one that tested my patience the most. It is almost entirely composed of snappy dialogue full of double meanings and it wears the reader out, even as the characters themselves seem to be worn out by it. No real life conversations could possibly be so pun-laden, so tirelessly and tiresomely sharp. There are a few reflective paragraphs between the dialogue sections, and they are a real relief for the reader but they are unfortunately too few.
The other long piece, The Translator, is almost the opposite of Ill-Timed in that there is hardly any dialogue but the reader desperately wants the reflections of the very pedantic narrator to be broken up by some dialogue; the density of it all is just far too intense. But there are puns and double-meanings enough all the same, not least the ‘denseness’ of that same pedantic narrator who fails to see what is before his eyes.
Still, I enjoyed this collection for the semantic stylistics and for the knowledge that Caponegro knows how to laugh at herself.
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January 18, 2016Disappointed in this ; too much in the direction of the conventional, even more so than The Star Cafe. But it should be noted that the final piece here, the novella “The Translator”, originates from the same Italian sojourn as her fantastic Five Doubts. So you see her range.
Mostly stuff about relationships here, of the marital or fore=marital type. I don’t know that the subject matter demanded the more conventional tone/structure/style. But that might be because I think there’s some parody of some recent assumptions in a few of these ; noted below.
“Last Resort Retreat”. Left right right. A dead deer and a joke about guys asking for directions. Try to save a marriage with a woodsy retreat. eh.
“Ashes Ashes We all Fall Down”. A man facing a triple threat of mother wife daughter. The mother about to die. The wife about to give birth just about the same time. And he’s not getting any, kind of joke. So, yes a woman can write from a male pov, and women’s lives and mortal bodies can appear thusly refracted, perhaps as a threat(?), source of despair(?). Or, family life is difficult.
“Ill-Timed”. A novella. So it’s a lesbian relationship. Interracial :: one albino(a?) ; the other not black enough yet not credited with whiteness, and Harvard=privileged. The latter is also decapacitatingly depressed. Seriously disabled. It’s an ordinary abusive relationship. And there’s a really sweet ending to this one ; sweet enough to make me a believer in spoilers. Please don’t miss it just cuz you despair over the characters’ ridiculous mutual abuse.
“A Daughter in Time”. Gives one the sense that every 9/11 story is written with the same precious self=regard tone.
“Junior Achievement”. If you knew what was going on, this would reallyreally disturb you. The only one in this collection that goes into that experimental territory.
“The Translator”. In which female author Caponegro parodies the male author whose female lead is available to the reader only through the refraction of the male narrator. The technique is widely practiced ; infamous exemplars found in Lolita and Darconville’s Cat. And Caponegro gets that male=narrator’s tone/voice quite precisely.
In sum, the third in my Caponegro ranking. Still have her Complexities of Intimacy to read.
Mostly stuff about relationships here, of the marital or fore=marital type. I don’t know that the subject matter demanded the more conventional tone/structure/style. But that might be because I think there’s some parody of some recent assumptions in a few of these ; noted below.
“Last Resort Retreat”. Left right right. A dead deer and a joke about guys asking for directions. Try to save a marriage with a woodsy retreat. eh.
“Ashes Ashes We all Fall Down”. A man facing a triple threat of mother wife daughter. The mother about to die. The wife about to give birth just about the same time. And he’s not getting any, kind of joke. So, yes a woman can write from a male pov, and women’s lives and mortal bodies can appear thusly refracted, perhaps as a threat(?), source of despair(?). Or, family life is difficult.
“Ill-Timed”. A novella. So it’s a lesbian relationship. Interracial :: one albino(a?) ; the other not black enough yet not credited with whiteness, and Harvard=privileged. The latter is also decapacitatingly depressed. Seriously disabled. It’s an ordinary abusive relationship. And there’s a really sweet ending to this one ; sweet enough to make me a believer in spoilers. Please don’t miss it just cuz you despair over the characters’ ridiculous mutual abuse.
“A Daughter in Time”. Gives one the sense that every 9/11 story is written with the same precious self=regard tone.
“Junior Achievement”. If you knew what was going on, this would reallyreally disturb you. The only one in this collection that goes into that experimental territory.
“The Translator”. In which female author Caponegro parodies the male author whose female lead is available to the reader only through the refraction of the male narrator. The technique is widely practiced ; infamous exemplars found in Lolita and Darconville’s Cat. And Caponegro gets that male=narrator’s tone/voice quite precisely.
In sum, the third in my Caponegro ranking. Still have her Complexities of Intimacy to read.
December 17, 2009
Video review here: http://www.thecollagist.com/archive/D...
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June 24, 2010Best of the bunch: the last story, "The Translator," followed closely by the story immediately preceding it, "Junior Achievement," perversely back-loading this collection.
February 7, 2011
Extremely irritating prose, with bad wordplay everywhere. Could not put this down fast enough.
August 10, 2012
these stories are very well written and captivating, but also the characters are very irritating. I did feel like I knew more when I was finished the book.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews