The Complexities of Intimacy

by Mary Caponegro

"The music of Mary Caponegro's stories is to the mouth what wine is. Readers will find themselves lost among answers, intoxicated, knowing only that these are stories unlike any others before or since, which is, for this reader at least, a relief, a challenge, and a godsend."—William Gass A breathtaking stylist, Caponegro imbues her sardonic, surreal text with startling a sister with a secret tail, a brother who invents a hammock from a harp, and precocious children who choose their own parents. Buoyed by her arch, Jamesian prose and psychological tone, Caponegro's stories are as delicately intricate as the fragile and difficult familial relationships they describe. Mary Caponegro's short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions and Sulfur. Her previous short story collections include The Star Café and Five Doubts.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, American

233 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Mary 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.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

George Saunders gets blurb'd by Pynchon. But check out the blurb'ing Caponegro attracts ::

DFW says :: "The Complexities of Intimacy offers a topology of dreams, a world in which deformations and revelations are the same; and its stories are true in the exact same way dreams are true. Modifiers that fit this book include: baroque, eerie, elegant, funny, good, and thoroughly upsetting". [Don't be distracted by "dreams" ; the interesting word here is of course "topology". And that list? That's Caponegro's style DFW is aping. LovelyLovely lists in her prose.]


Gilbert Sorrentino got this to say :: "The signs and wonders of muted unhappiness, subtle cruelties, and obscure dementias, not to mention the absolutely fantastic, are herein revealed in a language that is curiously dispassionate and placed. This is an amazing book." [note that 'signs and wonders' is bible=speak for 'miracles'. And we forgive Gil his cliche 'amazing' ;; but stripped of its stylistic poverty, it says the right thing.]


Bradford Morrow [?] says :: "The Complexities of Intimacy richly confirms Mary Caponegro's reputation as one of our most perceptive explorers of the mysterious, often perilous universe of family. With language as intricate as the terrains of love and fear, desire and dread these connected stories evoke, Caponegro continues to reinvent the Gothic as a personal narrative of the fragility of being flesh and blood." [I like that 'fragility of being flesh and blood' which rings my ear with Nussbausm's [book:The Fragility of Goodness|18948578]. But anyways. In order to evaluate what this blurb is saying, we must know who/what Bradford Morrow is. And then you see the utter stupidity in these handwringings about 'taking an objective view of fiction.' No. Absolutely not. It is absolutely essential that in treating fiction (art) correctly appropriately respectfully we--as the very first step--take into account the subject that is speaking to it/of it. It matters if it's Gass saying the word about the work or Stephen King. So stop wringing your hands about having an oxymoronic 'objective opinion' and step into the real world where real people actually know something about things like art. These are The Wise Ones Aristotle talks about ; and the better you are at identifying The Wise Ones the more like them you become. (of course if you're happy in Philistia, that's fine with me ; be happy ;; I prefer knowing.) At anyrate, I learn that Bradford Morrow is founding editor at Conjunctions. --if you find Morrow blurbing in such illustrious company ; chances are his word is probably pretty good ;; even better is his word if you read this collection and find him pretty spot on. Habermas calls all of this process "communicative reason".]


George Saunders (he's famous now) says :: "Mary Caponegro is one of our great national literary treasures, a daring writer who reminds us in every line that the true business of fiction is intelligence and presence and compassion. This book is a delight, a challenge, and a celebration of the human mind and heart." [I like that phrase "one of our great national literary treasures" ; because I think each one of those words means a real thing -- 'great' is a real possibility ; 'national' is a rough and ready way to identify broad contours of the world of literature ; 'literary' is self=evident ; and 'treasure' is something I lay up for myself in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroy ;; nor thieves break in and steal.]


Riki Ducornet says ::
"If she were a metal, she would be quicksilver.
Her constellation: Berenice's Hair.
Were she a flower, she would be lethal;
A scholar? Cryptographer. And creature?
The serpent of the garden of Hesperides.
And if Mary Caponegro were a practice,
That practice would be alchemy."
[If you don't melt at the blurb'ing of Rikki, I don't think I want to know you ; you are probably an awful human being or an awful reader.]


At any rate--if you read anything generally in the 'experimental' camp and/or you read short fiction and/or you read largely for prose and/or if you adore the erudite and/or you support small presses (Coffee House here) pleaseplease do yourself the favor of finally reading Caponegro. She comes with the highest regard from the highest blurb=machines and you'll agree if you just tolle, lege.


Gass famously says :: "The music of Mary Caponegro's stories is to the mouth what wine is. Readers will find themselves lost among answers, intoxicated, knowing only that these are stories unlike any others before or since, which is, for this reader at least, a relief, a challenge, and a godsend." [And if you think Gass is gaseous or even make that pun ; I'm not interested really in what you've got to say.]


[read Caponegro]

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of short stories and a novella deconstructing the relationships of the family. The collection starts off on the weaker side and each story gets better as the collection goes on. The hundred or so page novella is almost painful to read in its discomfort, but amazing that the author could keep this kind of unease working for so long without losing my attention.

George Saunders and David Foster Wallace both blurbed this book, that's why I picked it up, and once again their approval on a book has not steered me wrong.

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Caponegro deserves credit for a lot of things, but pacing a collection isn't one of them. I was almost ready to set this aside with the first story, which is beautifully written, uses an interesting setting, and sets off the collection's anatomical theme BUT buries its main action in such an elaborate string of metaphors that I found myself wondering what the hell these sentences were trying to convey. This would've worked just fine as some mid-collection ambience (hey, Angela Carter got away with it), but I don't think putting it right at the start was her best call. Story number two is much better - here Caponegro introduces some of the humor that propels the last few pieces - but I still wasn't sold.

That didn't happen until I reached the novella at the center of this collection is an amazing family drama, blending grotesque characters, wry humor, lyrical prose and more facts about inventions and anatomy than I knew existed. Yet what's best about it is the creeping discomfort, which Caponegro never turns off but knows how to ramp up until it reaches a strange climax that at once deflates, redirects, edifies and muddles what came before it. It's a terrific piece of writing, as is the follow-on epilogue, wherein Caponegro succeeds in weaving a world and sprinkles some appreciated fairy-tale vibes on top of it. It's excellent stuff, and so is the creepy story about the priest that takes up the number three slot; it captures the gothic-horror vibe that story number one tried for and didn't quite get.

So if you're planning to read this - and you really should, it's a great book that got buried - here's what to expect. Through-the-roof erudition, although it feels a little stilted through those first two stories. A profound sense of unease only increased by her dark sense of humor. A sense that you are inhabiting the weirdo version of the real world. And, if you're up for it, some serious density. Give it a go, because "The Son's Burden" will take your head apart. Just don't be surprised if you find yourself itching to skip to the second or third story.

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read of a prose writer "X writes beautiful sentences," what the reviewer often seems to mean is that that writer has paid more than usual attention [for a prose writer] to meter and diction, without (writer or reviewer) taking the measure of the work those two tools are meant to perform, i.e., what is thereby said, the narrative thus produced.

Caponegro has certainly been accused of writing beautiful sentences, but cannot be accused of failing to take into account what those sentences produce in the mind of the reader. This is a book whose sentences seem designed to call into being narratives of their own, narratives superimposed on the larger narrative of the story, narratives of language, and usage.

If Pound and Fenollosa were wrong about Chinese characters and their readily apparent elemental meanings, the hope behind such a theory, that language might contain within itself its own seeds, is expressed and exemplified by Caponegro's precision of word choice. It is a precision that urges the reader to look beyond present context to earlier contexts, to spin rich associational webs around words, phrases and sentences, to make elemental what is merely verbal.

[j · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wrenching anxiety and neurosis in the novella-length centerpiece. And that particular piece displays Caponegro possessing a remarkable ability to capture the internal strife of a character, allowing their thoughts to unspool before us, while bit by bit contextualizing them -- unveiling the external reality while we are crucially locked in the distorted headspace. The abrupt and wicked ending is such a brilliant jolt -- into a harsh reality: that each of us have our own building blocks through which we narrativize the world around us. Crucially, that our protagonist has been absorbed by a specific set of concerns, while all the while the sister has been hyperfixated on a shocking sticking point -- something that most of the characters involved are wholly unaware of.

The discrepancy between perception and reality is one of the most nightmarish things I have encountered in my existence -- a familiar parasite that plays a leading part when it comes to my self-doubt and self-loathing and hypochondria and anxiety... I have come to understand this is an affliction not at all unique to me. There's a beautiful and effective testament to that here.

The only section I found myself unenthused by was the final. It is by far the most vague and poetic, but I couldn't gel with it, for whatever reason. I took a few pages to come to terms with Caponegro's prose while reading the first story. So, I think it smart that this opener is the least eventful of all the pieces. You become very attuned to the prose, and you either accept the florid and serpentine flow of it, or toss the book aside in frustration.

Most of this achieves that particular sort of excellence that is at once exciting and utterly alienating.

[jonah · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It is commonly known that those nearest to us, those of whom we have the most extensive, intimate knowledge, are often held at arm’s length in our minds. The saying rolls so easily off the tongue: ‘Familiarity breeds contempt,’ and the idiom ‘to take for granted’ is as familiar to us as those we do. An elaborate system inevitably—yet inadvertently—evolves whereby we offer such permissions to each other.”

“Oh that I could lie upon lamb, find shelter in fowl, shrouded under its winged roof, bathe my eyes in utter darkness, and pour silence into my ears; that I could stay the onward rush of mechanization with some custom-blended stupefacient, stimulated by neither thought nor problem-solving, rising to no challenge, fielding no questions, immune to sequence, innocent of alphabet—and take, in particular, the increments of melody and harmony, and loosen their hold, their relational tenacity—untorque the tension of every instrumental string, until all lies lax and flaccid, and I too lie, purged of information of any kind, devoid of goal or responsibility, lie in my simple human skin and breathe the dark.”

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

(7/10) An interesting collection of short stories framed around the concept of family, with each archetypal nuclear family member getting represented here. Caponegro's style is often ornate but always seems to fit her pompous, overeducated characters. The only dud in the collection is unfortunately the novella that makes up half the book's length, but has no more complexity than the shorter stories and eventually just grows irritating. Caponegro does manage to redeem herself by ending on my favourite of the stories, an alternate-world story where family relationships resemble the world of dating. Interesting stuff.

[Jasmine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Today is the day I give up on all of those books I don't actually have an intention of ever finishing. This book has been on my currently reading for probably like a year and I read one story and I hated it. Greg says it gets better, I don't think I care to find out.