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You Are Here
In a New York City where time is chopped up like salad and people finish each others' sentences, a dozen characters have love affairs and take parts in a one-act play in the summer of 2001, and the spring, summer, and fall of 2004."You Are Here" is part Fassbinder anti-theatre, part cheap heartbreak a la Brenda Starr, part intertextual hall of mirrors. Donald Breckenridge's stunning prose spins into life a world of ideas and art--that nevertheless can come to a dead halt in a heartbeat.
- GenresFiction
66 pages, ebook
First published May 1, 2009
1 person is currently reading
47 people want to read
About the author
Donald Breckenridge
12 books36 followersDonald Breckenridge has written five novels including And Then (Black Sparrow Press), edited two fiction anthologies, and introduced the NYRB Classics edition of Henri Duchemin and His Shadows by Emmanuel Bove. He was the fiction editor of the Brooklyn Rail for nineteen years, and co-founded and co-edited InTranslation. He lives in Brooklyn with his spouse, Johannah Rodgers.
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February 10, 2009JUL 20 2009 Book Forum
You Are Here by Donald Breckenridge
Quinn Latimer
Writing fiction about September 11 is an activity rife with hazards. According to a character in Donald Breckenridge’s You Are Here, a story about that day “could be read as sensational because the event was.” Though this observation may sound proactively defensive, it is the entirely sincere quandary at the center of this novel, which takes as its subject not only the seismic event of 9/11 but the very act of writing about it. At once a play, a short story, and a novel “loosely based on the production of a performance that never happened” (this claimed by a character named Donald Breckenridge), You Are Here follows a small cast of New Yorkers who move nimbly among these various textual forms in the years spanning 9/11, the Iraq war, and Bush’s reelection. Breckenridge’s intertextual complications serve two purposes: They mirror 9/11’s profound disorientation (and the myriad stories it gave birth to) and shift the reader’s attention from plot (the familiar tragedy and its susceptibility to sensationalism) to form. It is the latter, fractured and kaleidoscopic, that suggests a new way to describe an event that is, in its totality, indescribable.
On the surface, You Are Here is engaged with a few doomed relationships. Janet and James—a vapid, middle-aged divorcée and an eager young writer—are not only characters in the first act of the fictional Donald’s play but also less than riveted audience members; Stephanie and Alan—a sympathetic if aimless young woman and an older, married architect—are characters both in a short story written by James and in the second act of the play. The first couple’s story takes place in 2004; the second, in the summer of 2001. Moving back and forth in time, among characters, and between action and dialogue, the novel possesses an exquisite tidal quality that compensates for the shallowness of some of its characterizations (an effect that Breckenridge, a playwright, seems to have labored for).
In You Are Here’s opening lines, the dueling, call-and-response nature of Breckenridge’s project is established. “The light from my desk lamp fell upon the conversation between Janet, ‘Oh, it’s for my benefit,’ a childless divorcee in her mid-forties. . . . And James, ‘Do you think,’ a twenty-four year old aspiring writer who worked part-time in a used bookstore, ‘I should write that down?’” Bits of dialogue interrupt the exposition, and the resulting singsong is both lulling and enervating, creating a hum that evokes the communal consciousness of the city itself. For, like any 9/11 novel, You Are Here is also very much about New York and its inimitable inhabitants—not the Upper East Side soirees and anecdotal Central Park moments that so entrance filmmakers, aging novelists, and the New Yorker, but Lower East Side bodegas, nighttime baseball games at McCarren Park, and dingy Queens apartments. That is to say, this is the New York of the Brooklyn Rail, the weekly arts magazine for which Breckenridge—both writer and character—serves as fiction editor.
At times, such reflexivity wears thin: a character reading from a fiction-writing manual; an image of Fassbinder (famous for his own experimental pastiches of theatrical forms) stuck to a gallery’s window. But these are quibbles in an otherwise dexterously drawn novel. As You Are Here draws to a close—and ever closer to September 11, which lands on the last page of the book—Breckenridge’s strived-for artificiality begins to fall away: It no longer matters that characters are not who they seem, that they speak words put in their mouths by someone else, that their actions are scripted and accompanied by the screech of a folding chair on a stage. As this arch sensationalism stems, the story—and its characters—gain urgency, and Breckenridge’s novel becomes much more than just an exquisite exercise in form.
Quinn Latimer is a poet and critic based in Basel, Switzerland. Her writing has appeared in Boston Review, Frieze, Modern Painters, and the Paris Review, among other magazines.
Buffalo: Starcherone Press, May 2009.
From Word Riot Review by Andrew Farkas
The title You Are Here is not the helpful marker found on the mall or subway map; it's the alienating one pointing to the microscopic dot on the existentially joking poster of the universe.
Now, to ward off this alienation, Janet and James are seeing each other, as are Cindy and Andrew. On a different timeline, Stephanie and Alan are seeing each other, although Alan's married, so the relationship is complicated. Once, Janet and Cindy were seeing each other; they even lived together, but things didn't work out. Moving through the dating permutations, Cindy comments that people tend to "consume others simply for the sake of the experience."
The poles are set, then, between complete alienation and consumption. On the side of alienation are ineluctable events from the local (a train crash, the World Trade Center) to the national (the re-election of George W. Bush, the ensuing presidency) to the international (the fighting in Fallujah, the Iraq War in general). The reader learns these events are on-going from short lists of headlines spotted on the subway or in passing, by brief broadcasts which are quickly switched off. It's as if the reader, too, by focusing on You Are Here, is ignoring the universe's puissant "You Don't Matter" forever repeated by the news.
Breckenridge's characters make themselves matter by substituting the personal for the geopolitical, by retreating into unhealthy or at least ill-advised relationships, by playing the old meta-narrative game: the May – December romance, the cheater and his mistress, the consumer and the consumed.
But these small attempts at organizing the universe are failures. Rendered in a beautifully fragmented combination of dialogue and description, the characters, in trying to play their selected roles, aren't able to focus on the lines, either because of a continued inner-pain, outright egocentrism, or a seeming attention deficit, as if what's being said couldn't possibly be worthwhile; the lines are mumbled by melancholic actors to ennui-riddled co-actors searching for something to organize or lend meaning to their lives. Furthermore, Breckenridge skillfully splices scenes together, combining present-time conversations and actions with sometimes painful, sometimes banal memories that serve to slightly unmoor the reader, but which also show how plotless the characters' lives are. Any attempt to combat alienation only leads to alienation.
Desperate for organization and meaning, three of the characters try to control their lives by writing semi-autobiographical works, which Breckenridge, ever the splicer, seamlessly includes in You Are Here. There is a short story, a play, an idea for a novel, a novel-in-progress, a guide on writing fiction, all opening onto the metafictional hall of mirrors (there is even a character named "Donald"), leaving the readers to wonder how to solve the puzzle:
"And you're turning this play into a novel?"
"There isn't really going to be any play...it's all fiction."
He furrowed his brow, "Oh really?"
I tried to elaborate, "the novel is loosely based on a production of a performance that never happened." (59-60)
However, I will make no attempt to untie this Gordian knot of relationships and potential textual versions because one of the many joys in this novel is wondering if one of the characters wrote any given section. After trying to put the puzzle together for the first half of the book (who's dating who and when, who's writing what and why, who are the "real people" of the You Are Here universe and who are the characters from the semi-autobiographical works), the reader will realize that the point isn't to assemble the jigsaw (though there is a good deal of fun in that), but to understand that any final assemblage is subjective, that the pieces could go together many different ways.
About the author:
Past works of mine have appeared in or will appear in The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, New Orleans Review, Northwest Review, and Harpur Palate. My first book, Self-Titled Debut, was published by Subito Press in December 2008 after winning the Subito Press Contest.
I am currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I have an M.A. from the University of Tennessee, and an M.F.A. from the University of Alabama.
© 2009 Word Riot
You Are Here by Donald Breckenridge
Quinn Latimer
Writing fiction about September 11 is an activity rife with hazards. According to a character in Donald Breckenridge’s You Are Here, a story about that day “could be read as sensational because the event was.” Though this observation may sound proactively defensive, it is the entirely sincere quandary at the center of this novel, which takes as its subject not only the seismic event of 9/11 but the very act of writing about it. At once a play, a short story, and a novel “loosely based on the production of a performance that never happened” (this claimed by a character named Donald Breckenridge), You Are Here follows a small cast of New Yorkers who move nimbly among these various textual forms in the years spanning 9/11, the Iraq war, and Bush’s reelection. Breckenridge’s intertextual complications serve two purposes: They mirror 9/11’s profound disorientation (and the myriad stories it gave birth to) and shift the reader’s attention from plot (the familiar tragedy and its susceptibility to sensationalism) to form. It is the latter, fractured and kaleidoscopic, that suggests a new way to describe an event that is, in its totality, indescribable.
On the surface, You Are Here is engaged with a few doomed relationships. Janet and James—a vapid, middle-aged divorcée and an eager young writer—are not only characters in the first act of the fictional Donald’s play but also less than riveted audience members; Stephanie and Alan—a sympathetic if aimless young woman and an older, married architect—are characters both in a short story written by James and in the second act of the play. The first couple’s story takes place in 2004; the second, in the summer of 2001. Moving back and forth in time, among characters, and between action and dialogue, the novel possesses an exquisite tidal quality that compensates for the shallowness of some of its characterizations (an effect that Breckenridge, a playwright, seems to have labored for).
In You Are Here’s opening lines, the dueling, call-and-response nature of Breckenridge’s project is established. “The light from my desk lamp fell upon the conversation between Janet, ‘Oh, it’s for my benefit,’ a childless divorcee in her mid-forties. . . . And James, ‘Do you think,’ a twenty-four year old aspiring writer who worked part-time in a used bookstore, ‘I should write that down?’” Bits of dialogue interrupt the exposition, and the resulting singsong is both lulling and enervating, creating a hum that evokes the communal consciousness of the city itself. For, like any 9/11 novel, You Are Here is also very much about New York and its inimitable inhabitants—not the Upper East Side soirees and anecdotal Central Park moments that so entrance filmmakers, aging novelists, and the New Yorker, but Lower East Side bodegas, nighttime baseball games at McCarren Park, and dingy Queens apartments. That is to say, this is the New York of the Brooklyn Rail, the weekly arts magazine for which Breckenridge—both writer and character—serves as fiction editor.
At times, such reflexivity wears thin: a character reading from a fiction-writing manual; an image of Fassbinder (famous for his own experimental pastiches of theatrical forms) stuck to a gallery’s window. But these are quibbles in an otherwise dexterously drawn novel. As You Are Here draws to a close—and ever closer to September 11, which lands on the last page of the book—Breckenridge’s strived-for artificiality begins to fall away: It no longer matters that characters are not who they seem, that they speak words put in their mouths by someone else, that their actions are scripted and accompanied by the screech of a folding chair on a stage. As this arch sensationalism stems, the story—and its characters—gain urgency, and Breckenridge’s novel becomes much more than just an exquisite exercise in form.
Quinn Latimer is a poet and critic based in Basel, Switzerland. Her writing has appeared in Boston Review, Frieze, Modern Painters, and the Paris Review, among other magazines.
Buffalo: Starcherone Press, May 2009.
From Word Riot Review by Andrew Farkas
The title You Are Here is not the helpful marker found on the mall or subway map; it's the alienating one pointing to the microscopic dot on the existentially joking poster of the universe.
Now, to ward off this alienation, Janet and James are seeing each other, as are Cindy and Andrew. On a different timeline, Stephanie and Alan are seeing each other, although Alan's married, so the relationship is complicated. Once, Janet and Cindy were seeing each other; they even lived together, but things didn't work out. Moving through the dating permutations, Cindy comments that people tend to "consume others simply for the sake of the experience."
The poles are set, then, between complete alienation and consumption. On the side of alienation are ineluctable events from the local (a train crash, the World Trade Center) to the national (the re-election of George W. Bush, the ensuing presidency) to the international (the fighting in Fallujah, the Iraq War in general). The reader learns these events are on-going from short lists of headlines spotted on the subway or in passing, by brief broadcasts which are quickly switched off. It's as if the reader, too, by focusing on You Are Here, is ignoring the universe's puissant "You Don't Matter" forever repeated by the news.
Breckenridge's characters make themselves matter by substituting the personal for the geopolitical, by retreating into unhealthy or at least ill-advised relationships, by playing the old meta-narrative game: the May – December romance, the cheater and his mistress, the consumer and the consumed.
But these small attempts at organizing the universe are failures. Rendered in a beautifully fragmented combination of dialogue and description, the characters, in trying to play their selected roles, aren't able to focus on the lines, either because of a continued inner-pain, outright egocentrism, or a seeming attention deficit, as if what's being said couldn't possibly be worthwhile; the lines are mumbled by melancholic actors to ennui-riddled co-actors searching for something to organize or lend meaning to their lives. Furthermore, Breckenridge skillfully splices scenes together, combining present-time conversations and actions with sometimes painful, sometimes banal memories that serve to slightly unmoor the reader, but which also show how plotless the characters' lives are. Any attempt to combat alienation only leads to alienation.
Desperate for organization and meaning, three of the characters try to control their lives by writing semi-autobiographical works, which Breckenridge, ever the splicer, seamlessly includes in You Are Here. There is a short story, a play, an idea for a novel, a novel-in-progress, a guide on writing fiction, all opening onto the metafictional hall of mirrors (there is even a character named "Donald"), leaving the readers to wonder how to solve the puzzle:
"And you're turning this play into a novel?"
"There isn't really going to be any play...it's all fiction."
He furrowed his brow, "Oh really?"
I tried to elaborate, "the novel is loosely based on a production of a performance that never happened." (59-60)
However, I will make no attempt to untie this Gordian knot of relationships and potential textual versions because one of the many joys in this novel is wondering if one of the characters wrote any given section. After trying to put the puzzle together for the first half of the book (who's dating who and when, who's writing what and why, who are the "real people" of the You Are Here universe and who are the characters from the semi-autobiographical works), the reader will realize that the point isn't to assemble the jigsaw (though there is a good deal of fun in that), but to understand that any final assemblage is subjective, that the pieces could go together many different ways.
About the author:
Past works of mine have appeared in or will appear in The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, New Orleans Review, Northwest Review, and Harpur Palate. My first book, Self-Titled Debut, was published by Subito Press in December 2008 after winning the Subito Press Contest.
I am currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I have an M.A. from the University of Tennessee, and an M.F.A. from the University of Alabama.
© 2009 Word Riot
September 16, 2022
The title You Are Here is not the helpful marker found on the mall or subway map; it's the alienating one pointing to the microscopic dot on the existentially joking poster of the universe.
Now, to ward off this alienation, Janet and James are seeing each other, as are Cindy and Andrew. On a different timeline, Stephanie and Alan are seeing each other, although Alan's married, so the relationship is complicated. Once, Janet and Cindy were seeing each other; they even lived together, but things didn't work out. Moving through the dating permutations, Cindy comments that people tend to consume others simply for the sake of the experience.
The poles are set, then, between complete alienation and consumption. On the side of alienation are ineluctable events from the local (a train crash, the World Trade Center) to the national (the re-election of George W. Bush, the ensuing presidency) to the international (the fighting in Fallujah, the Iraq War in general). The reader learns these events are on-going from short lists of headlines spotted on the subway or in passing, by brief broadcasts which are quickly switched off. It's as if the reader, too, by focusing on You Are Here, is ignoring the universe's puissant You Don't Matter forever repeated by the news.
Breckenridge's characters make themselves matter by substituting the personal for the geopolitical, by retreating into unhealthy or at least ill-advised relationships, by playing the old meta-narrative game: the May-December romance, the cheater and his mistress, the consumer and the consumed.
But these small attempts at organizing the universe are failures. Rendered in a beautifully fragmented combination of dialogue and description, the characters, in trying to play their selected roles, aren't able to focus on the lines, either because of a continued inner-pain, outright egocentrism, or a seeming attention deficit, as if what's being said couldn't possibly be worthwhile; the lines are mumbled by melancholic actors to ennui-riddled co-actors searching for something to organize or lend meaning to their lives. Furthermore, Breckenridge skillfully splices scenes together, combining present-time conversations and actions with sometimes painful, sometimes banal memories that serve to slightly unmoor the reader, but which also show how plotless the characters' lives are. Any attempt to combat alienation only leads to alienation.
Desperate for organization and meaning, three of the characters try to control their lives by writing semi-autobiographical works, which Breckenridge, ever the splicer, seamlessly includes in You Are Here. There is a short story, a play, an idea for a novel, a novel-in-progress, a guide on writing fiction, all opening onto the metafictional hall of mirrors (there is even a character named Donald), leaving the readers to wonder how to solve the puzzle.
One of the many joys in this novel is wondering if one of the characters wrote any given section. After trying to put the puzzle together for the first half of the book (who's dating who and when, who's writing what and why, who are the real people of the You Are Here universe and who are the characters from the semi-autobiographical works), the reader will realize that the point isn't to assemble the jigsaw (though there is a good deal of fun in that), but to understand that any final assemblage is subjective, that the pieces could go together many different ways.
Now, to ward off this alienation, Janet and James are seeing each other, as are Cindy and Andrew. On a different timeline, Stephanie and Alan are seeing each other, although Alan's married, so the relationship is complicated. Once, Janet and Cindy were seeing each other; they even lived together, but things didn't work out. Moving through the dating permutations, Cindy comments that people tend to consume others simply for the sake of the experience.
The poles are set, then, between complete alienation and consumption. On the side of alienation are ineluctable events from the local (a train crash, the World Trade Center) to the national (the re-election of George W. Bush, the ensuing presidency) to the international (the fighting in Fallujah, the Iraq War in general). The reader learns these events are on-going from short lists of headlines spotted on the subway or in passing, by brief broadcasts which are quickly switched off. It's as if the reader, too, by focusing on You Are Here, is ignoring the universe's puissant You Don't Matter forever repeated by the news.
Breckenridge's characters make themselves matter by substituting the personal for the geopolitical, by retreating into unhealthy or at least ill-advised relationships, by playing the old meta-narrative game: the May-December romance, the cheater and his mistress, the consumer and the consumed.
But these small attempts at organizing the universe are failures. Rendered in a beautifully fragmented combination of dialogue and description, the characters, in trying to play their selected roles, aren't able to focus on the lines, either because of a continued inner-pain, outright egocentrism, or a seeming attention deficit, as if what's being said couldn't possibly be worthwhile; the lines are mumbled by melancholic actors to ennui-riddled co-actors searching for something to organize or lend meaning to their lives. Furthermore, Breckenridge skillfully splices scenes together, combining present-time conversations and actions with sometimes painful, sometimes banal memories that serve to slightly unmoor the reader, but which also show how plotless the characters' lives are. Any attempt to combat alienation only leads to alienation.
Desperate for organization and meaning, three of the characters try to control their lives by writing semi-autobiographical works, which Breckenridge, ever the splicer, seamlessly includes in You Are Here. There is a short story, a play, an idea for a novel, a novel-in-progress, a guide on writing fiction, all opening onto the metafictional hall of mirrors (there is even a character named Donald), leaving the readers to wonder how to solve the puzzle.
One of the many joys in this novel is wondering if one of the characters wrote any given section. After trying to put the puzzle together for the first half of the book (who's dating who and when, who's writing what and why, who are the real people of the You Are Here universe and who are the characters from the semi-autobiographical works), the reader will realize that the point isn't to assemble the jigsaw (though there is a good deal of fun in that), but to understand that any final assemblage is subjective, that the pieces could go together many different ways.
April 10, 2022
"What followed was a carefully prepared and well-rehearsed twenty-minute monologue that began with a detailed description of his unhappy childhood and concluded with his proposal concerning romantic love."
June 21, 2024
engage w/ here https://5cense.com/24/1156.htm
July 31, 2010
Headlights crossing ceilings
Metrocards at the subway
Purses hanging on the back of chairs
You Are Here is a novel that mixes up the entire concept of a story. Breckenridge takes apart a group of people and finds the tiniest of connections between their varying lives in the years proceeding 9/11. All are unique but some constants remain: the same newspaper headline being read by different people in different locations, or the same restaurant where they eat, even the same brand of wine. On the perimeter of the story is a stage play that alternates as part of the story and the story itself (it's complicated!). At one point, in discussing whether to attend the play, two characters discuss the style, with one suggesting it may be experimental. The other laughingly translates this to mean it may be pretentious. I think this is a direct question to the reader from the author: is this novel simply experimental or is he being pretentious?
I think the experimentation is refreshing, so much so that different passages floored me in surprise (as when, mid-book, he outlines the key diagram to a successful novel, all the way to denouement, in a textbook style). The characters are not traditional, and as they go about their lives, some of them repeat the conversations of others. Shoes are a popular subject, as in the dismissal of one man: "And for him, she is nothing more than a new pair of shoes..." Some characters find themselves in the same window, watching their reflection, on different days. In fact, entire phrases and setting are reused with different individuals living in the space. The references to reflections, which are frequent and usually involve mirrors or windows, are a nod to both the characters lack of reflection in their life as well as the way their lives reflect each other in this fictional style.
While I think Breckenridge is avoiding traditional style motifs, there seemed to be an underlying theme of underlying things: subways, feet, sidewalks. There is a sense of motion and transportation as most of the events take place in the midst of transportation, or shortly before or after. A frequent reference to the Metrocard and the subway show us that their world is in motion, which refers us to the events that follow. Strangely enough, lipstick and bar glasses (usually empty) were another motif, and I couldn't help but think that this is a nod to these individuals trying to make a mark, to leave something of themselves, as evidence of their existence in the first place.
The style is different, and at times I was desperately wishing for a paragraph break to help pace the story, as well as dialogue tags so I could more readily identify who was saying what. I think that's part of what the author intended, though, to keep the reader from settling into a predictable rhythm and missing the switchbacks. I appreciated that in the midst of his stylistic experimentation, he never gets cutesy or, as the character suggested, pretentious.
Metrocards at the subway
Purses hanging on the back of chairs
You Are Here is a novel that mixes up the entire concept of a story. Breckenridge takes apart a group of people and finds the tiniest of connections between their varying lives in the years proceeding 9/11. All are unique but some constants remain: the same newspaper headline being read by different people in different locations, or the same restaurant where they eat, even the same brand of wine. On the perimeter of the story is a stage play that alternates as part of the story and the story itself (it's complicated!). At one point, in discussing whether to attend the play, two characters discuss the style, with one suggesting it may be experimental. The other laughingly translates this to mean it may be pretentious. I think this is a direct question to the reader from the author: is this novel simply experimental or is he being pretentious?
I think the experimentation is refreshing, so much so that different passages floored me in surprise (as when, mid-book, he outlines the key diagram to a successful novel, all the way to denouement, in a textbook style). The characters are not traditional, and as they go about their lives, some of them repeat the conversations of others. Shoes are a popular subject, as in the dismissal of one man: "And for him, she is nothing more than a new pair of shoes..." Some characters find themselves in the same window, watching their reflection, on different days. In fact, entire phrases and setting are reused with different individuals living in the space. The references to reflections, which are frequent and usually involve mirrors or windows, are a nod to both the characters lack of reflection in their life as well as the way their lives reflect each other in this fictional style.
While I think Breckenridge is avoiding traditional style motifs, there seemed to be an underlying theme of underlying things: subways, feet, sidewalks. There is a sense of motion and transportation as most of the events take place in the midst of transportation, or shortly before or after. A frequent reference to the Metrocard and the subway show us that their world is in motion, which refers us to the events that follow. Strangely enough, lipstick and bar glasses (usually empty) were another motif, and I couldn't help but think that this is a nod to these individuals trying to make a mark, to leave something of themselves, as evidence of their existence in the first place.
The style is different, and at times I was desperately wishing for a paragraph break to help pace the story, as well as dialogue tags so I could more readily identify who was saying what. I think that's part of what the author intended, though, to keep the reader from settling into a predictable rhythm and missing the switchbacks. I appreciated that in the midst of his stylistic experimentation, he never gets cutesy or, as the character suggested, pretentious.
January 3, 2015
A very good, slightly overlooked novel about Manhattan in the 1990s (and the long shadow of 9-11). Here's my review, reprinted from Open Letters Monthly:
The thing about Donald Breckenridge’s slim, arrestingly good (and idiotically titled) novel You Are Here that everyone who reads it will notice first is the protracted stylistic gamble he attempts in the way he depicts conversations, so it’s probably best to deal with that gamble right away by answering the most important question: it mostly works.
The book is the unfolding story of Alan and Stephanie and James and Janet, four young people (and all their various friends, enemies, acquaintances, and co-workers) in 1990s New York, and what Breckenridge does throughout is to take the normal interplay in conversational scenes – the serve-and-volley between words and little actions – and completely free it from its theatrical origins, moving it in one bold stroke into the realm of felt, real-world experience. The typical “he said, he thought, he did, she said, she thought, she did” choreography of such moments becomes at once a surreal jumble that feels both stranger and more lifelike:
“It’s been such a gloomy week,” Janet had her hair and nails done the day before, “It’s like the entire city is in mourning again,” when the maid came to clean the apartment, “not that I blame them one bit … I was so depressed on Wednesday as well.” James couldn’t find anywhere to put his hands, “this week has been like one long hangover,” was at a loss for the right words, “before the next nightmare begins,” and was annoyed that all of the things he had prepared to say evaporated just as she buzzed him into her building and he began climbing the carpeted stairs with the bouquet in his right hand, “You know what I mean?”
But as fascinating as this gamble is, it itself is mostly stagecraft, often upstaging the genuine artistry of Breckenridge’s prose and the gentle, assured insight he brings to bear on all his characters. This is the second time I’ve been thoroughly impressed by the sheer literary quality of a novel put out by Starcherone Books (the first was Zachary Mason’s Lost Books of the Odyssey), and I’m starting to think this may not be a simple coincidence. You Are Here is the kind of slim, sporadically-distributed novel many readers will be tempted to skip in favor of more accessible (in all meanings) fare – I urge such readers to find this book and devote a long afternoon to it. Time well spent.
The thing about Donald Breckenridge’s slim, arrestingly good (and idiotically titled) novel You Are Here that everyone who reads it will notice first is the protracted stylistic gamble he attempts in the way he depicts conversations, so it’s probably best to deal with that gamble right away by answering the most important question: it mostly works.
The book is the unfolding story of Alan and Stephanie and James and Janet, four young people (and all their various friends, enemies, acquaintances, and co-workers) in 1990s New York, and what Breckenridge does throughout is to take the normal interplay in conversational scenes – the serve-and-volley between words and little actions – and completely free it from its theatrical origins, moving it in one bold stroke into the realm of felt, real-world experience. The typical “he said, he thought, he did, she said, she thought, she did” choreography of such moments becomes at once a surreal jumble that feels both stranger and more lifelike:
“It’s been such a gloomy week,” Janet had her hair and nails done the day before, “It’s like the entire city is in mourning again,” when the maid came to clean the apartment, “not that I blame them one bit … I was so depressed on Wednesday as well.” James couldn’t find anywhere to put his hands, “this week has been like one long hangover,” was at a loss for the right words, “before the next nightmare begins,” and was annoyed that all of the things he had prepared to say evaporated just as she buzzed him into her building and he began climbing the carpeted stairs with the bouquet in his right hand, “You know what I mean?”
But as fascinating as this gamble is, it itself is mostly stagecraft, often upstaging the genuine artistry of Breckenridge’s prose and the gentle, assured insight he brings to bear on all his characters. This is the second time I’ve been thoroughly impressed by the sheer literary quality of a novel put out by Starcherone Books (the first was Zachary Mason’s Lost Books of the Odyssey), and I’m starting to think this may not be a simple coincidence. You Are Here is the kind of slim, sporadically-distributed novel many readers will be tempted to skip in favor of more accessible (in all meanings) fare – I urge such readers to find this book and devote a long afternoon to it. Time well spent.
December 10, 2009
In regards to this book I told the friend who had recommended it to me, "I love this book because I have no idea what's happening." She responded, "I know exactly what you mean." One of the most innovative and creative books I've ever read. The story is written as if you are watching a movie so that, even mid dialogue, when the camera shifts or a character moves, the narrator describes what is happening, being said, or being thought at the same time. There's also such interesting things happening with lighting and the stage that it would take a lifetime for me to unpack all of the smart details. This book is playful, but to enjoy you must only read and not think and then re-read while thinking. It's worth the effort.
January 5, 2011
Very impressive, although it left me a bit cold (perhaps this is what is meant by "part Fassbinder anti-theater"?).
Want to Read
February 10, 2009Very much looking forward to this novel by the great Donald Breckenridge...
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