Bird: A Novel

by Noy Holland

This is a novel about the persistence of longing in which the twin lives of the title character blur and overlap. Bird puts her child on the bus for school and passes the day with her baby. Interwoven into the passage of the day are phone calls from a promiscuous, unmarried friend, and Bird's recollection of the feral, reckless love she knew as a young woman. It's a day infused with fear and longing, an exploration of the ways the past shapes and dislodges the present.In the present moment, Bird dutifully cares for her husband, infant, older child. But at the same time Bird inhabits this rehabilitated domestic life, she re–lives an unshakeable Mickey, the lover she returns to with what feels like a migratory impulse, Mickey, whose movements and current lovers she still tracks. With Mickey, she slummed and wandered—part–time junkie, tourist of the low–life—a life of tantalizing peril. This can't last, Bird thought, and it was true.Noy Holland's writing is lyrical, fired by a heightened eroticism in which every sight and auditory sensation is charged with arousal. The writing in this book – Noy Holland's first novel –– is fearless in its depiction of sexual appetite and obsessive love. It sheds light on the terror of abandonment and the terrible knowledge that we are helpless to protect not only ourselves but the people we most love.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Adult Fiction, Contemporary

178 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 10, 2015

About the author

Noy Holland’s latest work is I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like: New and Selected Stories, out now from Counterpoint Press. Noy's debut novel, Bird, came out in 2015. Other collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First (FC2), What Begins with Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf). She has published work in The Kenyon Review, Antioch, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Western Humanities Review, The Believer, NOON, and New York Tyrant, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, as well as at Phillips Andover and the University of Florida. She serves on the board of directors at Fiction Collective Two.

Reviews

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Headstrong and heartsick; a nerve scraped raw on every page. This is the kind of brilliant work that can be devoured in a day but should be savored far longer.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and miraculous and incomplete, like an arrow that hangs in the sky without falling.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an ARC from Counterpoint Press through Edelweiss

This is a bizarre and surreal book that follows two different periods in the life of a woman named Bird. And actually Bird doesn’t even seem to be her real name, but a strange nickname given to her by a former boyfriend named Mickey. When the book opens, we are given a glimpse into a typical day in the life of Bird, a housewife and a mother of two young children. Her oldest child, although a little boy of an indeterminate age, is apparently old enough to go to school, is getting ready to catch the bus. Bird is trying to get her son ready for his day at school and make him breakfast while also dealing with the needs of her infant daughter. From all outward appearances, Bird seems to have a happy and content domestic life.

But in between her domestic tasks Bird keeps remembering the time she spent with her old boyfriend named Mickey. Bird met Mickey when she was very young and they lived on very little money in horrible, decrepit apartments. For quite some time, they carried on a vagabond existence fueled by drugs and sex. When Bird finds out that she is pregnant, she and Mickey could not be happier and they immediately name their unborn child Caroline. Even though they have little money and no jobs, they are happy and want to make a life together with their baby. But when Bird has an unexpected miscarriage, things begin to come apart in their relationship. Mickey starts wandering off for days at a time and his moods and behavior become unpredictable and erratic.

After the miscarriage, Bird and Mickey go on a road trip, traveling part of they way in his old car and eventually ending up on foot and hitchhiking. The parts that describe their journey are very strange and disjoined, especially when compared against the backdrop of Bird’s current, orderly life. At one point when Bird is home alone with her baby, she drinks rum and takes a hot bath with her baby. This episode of drinking during the day makes us wonder if there is some discontent in Bird’s life, or if she maybe at least has a longing for the chaos and freedom that she experienced with Mickey in her youth. Bird also revisits her past through conversations with her old friend Suzie with whom she speaks to a several points throughout her day. And Bird further recounts letters that she has written to her mother which express the extremes of happiness and sorrow that she experiences in her life with Mickey.

I also have to mentioned the language of the book which takes some getting used to. When I first started reading the story I almost gave up because I found the disjointed and choppy sentences very distracting from the story. Some paragraphs even go on for half a page with single words that serve as sentences. However, as I read the more cohesive parts of the story, I became very interested in Bird’s narrative. I also started to view the disjointed language as something very fitting for the turmoil that Bird feels in her mind. On the one had she loves her husband and children, but on the other hand she can’t help but feel pulled back by the memories of her past. I don’t think Bird would give up her family to find and be with Mickey again, but her time with him has left an indelible and ineradicable impression on her memory and on her soul.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intensely written book filled with memories, nostalgia, and dreams. The past concerns the narrator, Bird, almost more than the present. Further thoughts to come. For now, recommended to those who favour poetic prose and evocations of emotionally turbulent times.

Longer review here:

http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book...

[Andria Potter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't enjoy the writing style at all. DNF at 45%.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Because wasn’t surviving the worst part? The dreadful onset of the cure? There was nothing you couldn’t get over. You could sorrow all your life, but still you loved, you lived.”

Not since A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING has language on the page done more to move me, to blissfully disorient me, to send me careening into a life calibrated by longing. This is a magnificent book, with sentences that will leave you breathless and in envy. I already count this among my favorite novels, and it is as exciting and instructive as a book like Renata Adler's PITCH DARK when it comes to notions of what ought a novel do, what ought it look like. Lush and lyric and sexy and singing and sad, sad, sad.

[David Winters · Rating 4 out of 5]

My full review is here: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/12/b...

[duchessknot · Rating 5 out of 5]

actually amazing book. of course, my obligatory “i needed to get used to the writing style,” but once i did i finished it in two days.

frenzied, melodic, syrupy writing style that dips into present day, domestic bird and past, wild and vagabond bird. literally so good. felt like i was there with noy holland’s writing style! yum!

[Samuel Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

First posted at Perfidious Script

The average writer, even a great writer, tends to lose focus of other elements when they turn to the sentence. Plot can go right out the window. Character and feeling tend to take a back seat. And for those of us that love this sentence-forward work this is all the better, it allows the reader too to luxuriate in the sounds and unfolding without having to keep track of the broader picture.

Here, in 'Bird', Noy Holland has not only excelled on the sentence level, trotting out every trick in the book and inventing countless along the way, dancing across the page effortlessly so that the sounds and rhythm nearly fade into the background while being utterly upfront and dazzling, but also contracts a gut-wrenching portrait of a relationship at the edge of being and the life that is instilled with it, and torn apart by it.

"Mickey toppled his boots for Bird to stand on, on the clothes heaped at their feet. Now he was in her, disappearing, shade to shade, his cock like a bull's in the shadow they cast. Bird slickened with blood she was losing still; on her breasts, hieroglyphs of his hands. Mineral seep. Her feet were pewter; a beetle wandered in the swales of her tendons, daubing methodically at the spatter of her blood. A speckled wind, iridescent. Nothing more moved buck Mickey, Bird-a shadow fused, a Gorgon's head."

Much of the books rides this ledge between waking and dreaming, between the mundane and the mystical, these hints of memory and nostalgia and imagination seeping in, but the hard world always there, the hard pain and ecstasy of Bird's being wrought like cold wood on the page.

"Her jaw was swelling; it was yellowing and blue.
They made green together, yellow and blue. Blue and red made purple.
And what did yellow and Bird make?
And what did Mickey and Blue?
'And Mickey and Bird?' Mickey asked.
And Bird said, 'A bloody stew.'"

'Bird' has an unsentimental sentimentality, the love Bird feels for her son, for her baby, for Mickey so bone achingly deep, so strong it causes her to be drunk into sobriety, the clarity of the world turned up to the point of pain. Bird is neither victim nor perpetrator but raw vessel for the feeling of the world, a world so bright with pain and joy and love and loss that it warps the words within it, melts them together and causes them to kaleidoscope out, the only way it, and those within it, can be understood.

[Maria Gelsomini · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel took me a while to get into it, even though every time I picked it up I was impressed with and captivated by the authors sort of curt eloquence and prose. Parts of it are visceral and disturbing - it moved me and made me deeply uncomfortable. Bird, Mickey, and their relationship really repulsed me in many ways, but I think because i recognized parts of my self and my past and previous relationships in them. Even though I complained to my bf multiple times “I don’t think I like this book”, I am happy I pushed through my initial feelings of resistance lol. This probably sounds like a negative review but ended up really liking it !

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 wow thank you to the three people who have told me to read this

[David McMurray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Noy Holland’s first novel, Bird, follows the eponymous character through a labyrinth of haunted memories and conflicting desires as she navigates a single day in a now quasi-claustrophobic domesticity that revolves around a husband, a school-age boy, an infant daughter, and the family dog. Much of that day is spent—even as she multi-tasks—vacillating between thoughts of Mickey, a man she once loved (and can’t quite let go of, more than a decade after the fact), and the immediacy of the moment in all of its corporeal obtrusiveness (her restless boy—who pees in his sleep and needs to be fed and readied for school; her daughter, whose first tooth—newly arrived—digs into the woman’s nipple as the infant breastfeeds in a bloated diaper; Bird’s husband, who conveniently sleeps through the mess of her morning ritual until it’s time for his pre-work routine to take center stage; a long time friend—the embodiment of all that Bird once was and can no longer be, for better and worse, envied and pitied, both—who phones repeatedly).

The past and present mingle together like guests at a cocktail party as she moves seamlessly between the two, although on this particular day, her history with Mickey, recounted in fits and starts, is the more assertive presence. But it isn’t nostalgia as a refuge against the shell of what she imagined her life would be. It’s far more complicated than that, and the existential tension of this tangle of competing impulses is what drives the story.

There’s a real stream-of-consciousness feel to the narrative (sans the literary affectations of a historically circumscribed Stream of Consciousness style). It doesn’t follow a strictly linear path. Its trajectory is more akin to that of a spiral—around and about and back and forth; shirking a simple ‘here, then there.’ It reflects the way people think when they’re engaged with the world in a way that is more complex and demanding than, say, what one would experience while lying in bed, late at night, waiting to fall asleep. But Holland’s verisimilitude isn’t one of mimesis. It’s an exercise in evocation; slouching toward the felt-but-not-seen texture of thought—its scent, its temperature, its cacophony—without attempting a strictly literal rendering or slavishly adhering to the kind of linear contrivance (for the sake of narrative clarity) that most readers and writers are more comfortable with. Having said that, it’s not hard to follow.

Holland confines her ambition (considerable in scope) to an interior landscape, without the ubiquitous accoutrements of the extraordinary that serve as low-hanging fruit in the quest for the most facile kind of dramatic tension; no guns or assaults or wars; no pandemics or natural disasters or post-apocalyptic rubble, just a woman in her suburban home, (mostly) alone with her thoughts, over the course of an otherwise nondescript day. And she imbues it with drama, and the drama is real, and imminently recognizable. And haunting.

Her prose is exquisite (an understatement) and her 'voice' is truly distinctive. She has a poet’s sense of rhythm, and a poet’s eye for the hidden potency in the most pedestrian and obtuse of things. A book full of surprises, even at the granular level—the paragraph, the sentence, the phrase, the word—like a Russian nesting doll. I keep rereading it. It doesn’t get old.

And Kiki Smith on the cover to boot.

[Taryn Harbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard about this book from the "Writers on Writing" podcast. Noy Holland (author) read an excerpt and ordered the book immediately. Let's keep this simple.

Q: Is this book for everyone?
A: No. It's a very peculiar and unusual form of writing. As a writer, I loved it because I could appreciate it as an art. As a reader, it was challenging. I think there are books that either a) include a great story line with poor writing, b) include great writing but a not-so-great storyline, or c) both great writing and a great story. This book was a "B". Absolutely unforgettable writing, but the story line isn't riveting.

I'd recommend this book for writers, or perhaps poets, who are drawn to books for the writing rather than for the story. If you are a lover of mainstream fiction, this book will likely be a challenge to complete.

[Carol · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could not relate to the form of this book. Abandoned at a doorstep

[Alexa · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

CW: animal death, miscarriage

Oh, Bird. You were… 😧🥴😵‍💫🙃

Bird, living somewhere in New England with her husband and two young children, finds herself thinking of her toxic ex, Mickey, obsessively, as she considers where she is in space and time. Bird lusts after what once was and what might have been and longs for closure, which evades her. Mickey’s leaving, the death of her mother, the death of her unborn child… she cannot come to terms with them, so she exists in a kind of semi-suicidal state between the past and present.

This book had me lost in words; it’s not that it is challenging as much as it is confronting. Holland is testing the conventions of narrative with strange sentence constructions, frequent line breaks, and plentiful ambiguity. Sentences that follow one another sometimes do so for seemingly no reason. I accepted that I needed to let the words wash over me when I tired of stopping to ask myself what I’d just read. I’ve settled on describing this book as what it might look like if Jenny Offill’s writing— not just her protagonists— was unhinged. I will definitely be rereading this one day.

[katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so beautiful I feel sick!!!!!!


Some quotes:

"Bird carried a rock in her pocket to remember she meant to live: at least she meant to want to."

"Nothing lasting. A moment's impulse, three. / Still an impulse: wasn't it as good most days, any old day, as intention?"

"I can't see your face. I try to see your face and my face appears. / I can't help that. I can't see through."

[Charles Cohen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes in the excitement over playing with form, or arch writing or ideas, I forget that I also really need plot. There just wasn't enough here for me to love the book, even though it was beautifully written and the characters were icy sharp.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haunting.

[Gus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interestingly written

[Iz Ortiz]

I’m confused

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the writing - reminded me a little of Mary Gaitskill. Drifted a bit for me towards the end, but will definitely read more by the author and think that her short stories are gonna be great.

[KCantwell3 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not like this book. It was choppily written and hard to keep up with. Took me two weeks to read this.

[s]

Someone who I thought would be my professor wrote this

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Layering the timelines so that a single day at home mothering spans the entirety of an earlier love affair drives home the melancholic differences between the two phases of life. An aching, poignant little gem that probably would have annoyed me if it had been longer, but didn't try to be more than it was.

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/1359073...

Having held Noy Holland’s first book of short stories, The Spectacle of the Body, in the highest esteem I was excited to get my hands on her first foray into the novel genre. I did expect to be blown away again by her beautiful language. And I cared little about plot or whether or not I understood a single word of what she wrote. I was only present in my reading for the astounding force of language she might again bestow. Noy Holland had already proven to me in the past to be an extremely gifted wordsmith but I could not imagine how she could pull off a similar feat spanning the breadth of an entire novel. An entirely impossible endeavor for most of us, and perhaps especially difficult considering the writing of hers I was previously accustomed to. But what began, still, as a certain confidence in her achieving again my confirmation of excellence slowly began to drift as I neared the halfway mark. I began sensing a desperation of sorts, a forcing rather than force, and was not sure if I was bringing too much of myself onto her page or if the text itself was sounding too much coerced. But I stuck with my reading, fearing my boding negativity rising, but remaining hopeful I might finally expunge this discharge anyway and return exuberant in my praise. But sadly this was not to be.

Rather than be viewed as being hyper-critical of this work, and perhaps unfair compared to the glowing praise heaped by others, I simply will reiterate the words her editor Gordon Lish wrote on the front jacket flap introducing her first published collection The Spectacle of the Body. No one can possibly refute this Lish statement concerning, at the time, the most promising new writer in our midst. Sadly, for me, I am not sure what exactly happened with Bird except that perhaps the old Gordon Lish was missing. I think his words that follow artfully establish the only point I want to make as well-worth reading.

There was a time when the longest story in this book was known by the title of this book - for in a certain sense that story concerns the fabulous costume nature can construe from us when it has made up its mind to unravel us down to the last stitch of thread. But whenever Noy Holland went to read aloud from her work, there was an audience who heard her begin, "At night, we kept watch for turtles," and who, as if transfixed by an enchantress, would not leave their seats until - seventy-nine pages later! - they had heard Holland say, crooning in the manner of one who must give herself to song to keep herself from weeping, "We sat for the men with our hands in our laps with all that was ours in the parlor." To these ravished audiences, and to those to whom they hurried to send word of the amazement they had had the great good luck to be present for, it was "Orbit" - the name of one of the children whose mother's fantastic dying is central to the story's dreamy, rapturous motion - that came to identify for these persons an event unique, and inexpressibly strange, in their experience of literature. For literature, very literature, the heart's inmost speech in all its unexampled difference, is the thing this new young writer has been making, and, along with it, well before the publication of her first book, a name for herself as a force - indeed, as a divergence to be given every close notice. Nine adventures in the magic of narration, including the audience-retitled "Orbit," The Spectacle of the Body enacts a debut of the first importance and an invitation to feelings not felt in the absence of art.__Gordon Lish

[Jessie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm fascinated by books that happen in a day, that give a sense of the density of lived life, all the selves we are, within a few thick hours. Noy Holland does this in BIRD--it's a luminous book; I finished it for a second reading last evening and the petunias in the hanging basket on the porch had an extra glow--everything had an extra glow, and I was all ashes with Bird. I'm giving a lecture on layering time in narrative and am so happy I could study Holland's prose with this topic in mind.

How close she stays to the body with this main character who is a mother of 2 young kids and who is indulgent of erotic memories of a self-destructing relationship with Mickey -- the past is alive: "Bird sinks into it, a bloom of heat, so to feel it: the door swung to, the shrinking stars. A leaf falling. The way her mother spun her ruby on her finger, think of that. The way Mickey hooked his finger in her ear. Berries in the bathtub. Sweetened ferns. The sound of the chain on the asphalt road that the school bus drags behind it. Shall." (59)

"Bird misses everything at once. One thing makes her want all the others—lived or not, still she misses them. She misses lives she has never lived—days issued out of the future, hours that will never be.” (58)

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Count yourself lucky you survived him.
Or not. Because wasn't surviving the worst part? The dreadful onset of the cure? There was nothing you couldn't get over. You could sorrow all your life, but still you lived, you lived. You hoarded. You flew your mother on a string like a kite.
Or course it pulled. The kite was enormous. Her mother called down: it was lonely, dying alone.
But there was always more string to let out, Bird found, to keep from being lifted, to keep her mother lifting away. And Bird was heavy. She felt stuffed with sand when her mother died, the anchor and solace of grief. She couldn't; she couldn't want to . Should she moved, Bird moved against a current and the current wore her away. Even sleep wore her awe: the dream that her mother still lived. Bird would turn a corner and find her still dying in some darkened room…."

Bird, Noy Holland

[Cynthia Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read slowly because I read several books at once. Sometimes more than several. Which might or might not be healthy. But I think slow, occasional reading is probably not damaging to the reader's experience of this one because the book itself is so fragmented (a quality, not a defect). It is about the persistence of desire, past lives bleeding into present ones even as we live them. The sorrow that comes when desire dies. The writing is hard to describe and absolutely unique to Holland. Beautiful and terrifying. Lyric but definitely not saccharine. Jagged, sometimes brutal. On occasion exquisite. Very few occasions, and that is good, because a little exquisite goes a long way in my book. She has the mixology down. I'm kind of in awe of her as a writer. Maybe more than kind of.

[Jaclyn Day · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short book is an unexpected gut punch. I read it in the early morning hours: insomnia had taken over and the quiet darkness of the night combined with the semi-delirium of exhaustion lent it extra weight. I can’t begin to explain the writing: genius, heart-wrenching, every sentence a work of art. Bird, our protagonist, is a full-bodied character in the reader’s mind and soul within a matter of pages. The push and pull between Bird’s everyday and her imagination is so intense that it’s hard not to feel like you’re awake–but dreaming–while reading certain portions. This is as raw as reading gets.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crazy. Beautiful. Fuck up. This is written in a most unique manner...something that definitely takes getting used to. I think the writing style really fits the concepts, the message, and the main character, Bird, but it's still raw and a tough battle to get in to for that matter. It's relatable in some fashions, but it's tragically Birds story alone. I liked many sentences (if you can call them that) and yet was stunned by some lines so much that I had to read them aloud to others. I would likely not recommend this book as it takes a specific personal journey to find the beauty in this heartbreak reflection.