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Strawberry Fields
Fence Modern Prize in Prose
Much of what is read as news is fake; still the real news is, at its very best, partial. At the heart of Strawberry Fields is the storied figure of the journalist, who despairs of accountability yet must accept its disorienting weight. This is a global fiction; these shapeshifting journalists together demonstrate the ethics of reading and writing “news from elsewhere.” An antidote to the normalization wielded upon us by narrative, Hilary Plum crafts with dizzying invention a recursive disorientation of stories starting over and over again, without conclusion. The fragmentation of these harrowing truths, ripped from the headlines, is a reprieve; at least it’s not really “happening,” like normal fictions do, simulacra at the speed of life, not really “happening,” at least not at the rate of narrativity. Oh, but it is. This fiction jumps through genres, destabilizing players and circumstances: revolutionary Ireland, Iraq in the midst of US invasion, and Pakistan during years of drone warfare, an eating disorder clinic, a farming community in the midst of pesticide poisoning, the plight of a journalist imprisoned in Mexico. Our throughline is the recurring story of a reporter, Alice, and a detective, Modigliani: together they failed to solve a crime that occurred years ago amid the chaos of a hurricane, and we find them now piecing together the stories of five murdered veterans of the war in Iraq. Making up nothing, or everything, all around the globe these horrors go on daily.
Much of what is read as news is fake; still the real news is, at its very best, partial. At the heart of Strawberry Fields is the storied figure of the journalist, who despairs of accountability yet must accept its disorienting weight. This is a global fiction; these shapeshifting journalists together demonstrate the ethics of reading and writing “news from elsewhere.” An antidote to the normalization wielded upon us by narrative, Hilary Plum crafts with dizzying invention a recursive disorientation of stories starting over and over again, without conclusion. The fragmentation of these harrowing truths, ripped from the headlines, is a reprieve; at least it’s not really “happening,” like normal fictions do, simulacra at the speed of life, not really “happening,” at least not at the rate of narrativity. Oh, but it is. This fiction jumps through genres, destabilizing players and circumstances: revolutionary Ireland, Iraq in the midst of US invasion, and Pakistan during years of drone warfare, an eating disorder clinic, a farming community in the midst of pesticide poisoning, the plight of a journalist imprisoned in Mexico. Our throughline is the recurring story of a reporter, Alice, and a detective, Modigliani: together they failed to solve a crime that occurred years ago amid the chaos of a hurricane, and we find them now piecing together the stories of five murdered veterans of the war in Iraq. Making up nothing, or everything, all around the globe these horrors go on daily.
- GenresFiction
224 pages, Paperback
First published April 3, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
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June 17, 2018Political themes resist being represented in novels. I know this gross (if weasley-ly worded) generalization can be easily falsified with any number of examples. But somehow in novels revolutionary passion can only appear as youthful folly or dangerous fanaticism. (Or both: The Good Terrorist.) --Or none of that is the problem, but one's heart sinks as earnest novels become, under the weight of their political themes, "topical trash encased in blocks of plaster," as Nabokov wrote (with such disdain).
Plum has found an elegant way around these difficulties in Strawberry Fields. Her world-building proceeds by erasure, and yet there is no global or international catastrophe too big or too ugly to be included. We don't know what year it is in Strawberry Fields, but we recognize as our own the sense of urgency and the dread waiting, as well as the events: people of color murdered during a hurricane; dissidents tortured in prisons; war zones, toxin zones, displacement zones.
But. The tendency toward erasure hobbles the plot. It would be one thing to never learn who committed the murders in the hurricane's aftermath. (And we don't learn that.) But nothing like a "case" even emerges. Just the shifting frieze of relentlessly topical, oddly place-less vignettes.
Plum has found an elegant way around these difficulties in Strawberry Fields. Her world-building proceeds by erasure, and yet there is no global or international catastrophe too big or too ugly to be included. We don't know what year it is in Strawberry Fields, but we recognize as our own the sense of urgency and the dread waiting, as well as the events: people of color murdered during a hurricane; dissidents tortured in prisons; war zones, toxin zones, displacement zones.
But. The tendency toward erasure hobbles the plot. It would be one thing to never learn who committed the murders in the hurricane's aftermath. (And we don't learn that.) But nothing like a "case" even emerges. Just the shifting frieze of relentlessly topical, oddly place-less vignettes.
July 11, 2023
I was really confused for most of this book and it felt like it was making points I didn’t get but by the 3/4 part of it I was lowk into it and the end was super powerful. Would’ve been 3 but the ending bumped it up!
June 2, 2019
Disclaimer: I am the mother of the author.
Yet I think I would have given this novel 5 stars even reading it as a non-relative — especially having re-read portions of this novel within a week or two of reading Tommy Orange's There, There. Both are novels that use multiple narrators working through the seemingly inevitable violence of our lives in the 21st century — where the seeds of the destruction that happens now have been planted so long ago. And few people pay any attention to the price that history exacts on the everyday. By comparison to Orange's novel, Plum's — in which I guess I will say "the center does not hold"— seems to me the more painfully exact replication of what our lives are like now. To steady myself, I had to hang onto Patricia in an early chapter and the zookeeper later in the book (although that is a very painful chapter).
I re-read the novel in preparation for hearing the author speak about it. I wasn't going to put a review on my Goodreads feed until I read There, There and wanted to make the comparison.
Yet I think I would have given this novel 5 stars even reading it as a non-relative — especially having re-read portions of this novel within a week or two of reading Tommy Orange's There, There. Both are novels that use multiple narrators working through the seemingly inevitable violence of our lives in the 21st century — where the seeds of the destruction that happens now have been planted so long ago. And few people pay any attention to the price that history exacts on the everyday. By comparison to Orange's novel, Plum's — in which I guess I will say "the center does not hold"— seems to me the more painfully exact replication of what our lives are like now. To steady myself, I had to hang onto Patricia in an early chapter and the zookeeper later in the book (although that is a very painful chapter).
I re-read the novel in preparation for hearing the author speak about it. I wasn't going to put a review on my Goodreads feed until I read There, There and wanted to make the comparison.
July 24, 2018
Please do not underestimate this novel. Hilary Plum explores heady themes like politics, media, truth, and morality and how all those can be complicated by disasters both man made and otherwise.
The characters are fully realized yet time is still made for the heavier themes involving our current state of media, all in short, digestible vignettes.
The characters are fully realized yet time is still made for the heavier themes involving our current state of media, all in short, digestible vignettes.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews