Five Doubts

by Mary Caponegro

Mary Caponegro's latest exploration of narrative possibilities takes as a point of departure five arresting images from Italian art and a Verrocchio painting, an Etruscan tomb, a Roman mosaic, a Renaissance manuscript and a Tombola board - five images that give rise to voices haunted by desire, doubt and death.
Within these fictional meditations on Antiquity, the Renaissance, and contemporary life, she creates a tension between spirituality and materiality, between nature and culture, leveling artifice to blood and bone, as the first stage of a complex metamorphosis.

Genres: Literature, Short Stories, Fiction, Art, Womens

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

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]

Nate D's Like brought this one back for me. Do yourself a favor ; read Caponegro.

FLOAT!!


__________

Mary Caponegro’s short fiction is lyrical, comic, above all, erotic. From the purely feminine Chinese tales to the transformational vision of the title story to the final brilliance of the novella ‘Sebastian,’ this rare first collection rings all possible changes on gender as illusive power. To read this book is to succumb to it--with the greatest pleasure. --John Hawkes (re:The Star Cafe*)

In the landscape of American fiction, The Star Cafe is now on the map, a stop that cannot be missed. If you are feeling lost in the forest, go there, it’s the real thing, a subtle, elegant book, marking the emergence of a gifted and powerful young writer. --Robert Coover (re:The Star Cafe)

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 H. Gass (re:Five Doubts)

I believe that’s a rather rare triangulation. And I don’t hesitate to drop names because those names are magic words and it was names=dropped that led me to Caponegro’s magic. She is a confirmed member of this school [you’ll see that membership is proven by objection to being counted a member of.....]; having been a student of both Hawkes and Gaddis, even teaching in Gaddis’s seat at Bard.

Here’s the setting that set it into motion (finally! srsly, should’ve been here done this muchmuch sooner) ; the words which I now suspect are those of Bursey, not Tabbi (notice the brackets serving to indicate an insertion within the quotation) :: “What Gaddis’s early work gave to his and subsequent generations [e.g., David Markson and, later, Mary Caponegro and David Foster Wallace], which they would not yet have found in universities or in bookstores....” And I’m tempted to say that that famous issue of RCF should’ve had Caponegro joining WTV & DFW rather than Susan Daitch ; imho.
[the Bursey quote :: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2015/10... ]

But what struck me as I read these two collections back=to=back in reverse chronological order was the contrast between them. Yes, The Star Cafe is her first and it is not exactly a set of conventional short stories, yes they are perhaps more ‘short prose’ or ‘short fictions’, yet reading them on the heels of Five Doubts they felt, yes, rather conventional. Five Doubts had the stuff, the stuff to do more than simply make you sit up and pay attention. Read these two together (and we assume her other two collections also) for a quick glimpse into those two sets of dueling fictionings ; from within a single side of those dueling partners, as it were ; because again, The Star Cafe is not exactly ‘normal’. Here’s some contrast ::

The Star Cafe
pub’d by Charles Scribner’s Sons (1990)
I paid US$5.95 at The Village Bookshop
It sat on those shelves at The Village Bookshop for less than a week’s time.
Reads (to me! to me!) like conventional fiction.

Five Doubts
pub’d by Marsilio [huh?] (1998)
I paid US$1.00 at The Village Bookshop
Sat in the warehouse at The Village Bookshop since January 27 2012 ; remaindered ;; and then when it couldn’t/wouldn’t sell as a remainder, it was Mark’dDown to the Dollar Bin.
Reads (to me! to me!) like what I think of as (successful!) ‘experimental’ fiction.

Whilst the former is twice as popular on gr as the second, neither is worth mentioning as anyhow over=rated. She has two more collections, The Complexities of Intimacy and All Fall Down ; both of which, well... sometimes Completioinizationalism is faaar too easy. I’d really love a big fat brick of a novel from Caponegro some day**.

Unnecessary, but two comments in a gender direction. 1) Some say that the term ‘genius’ is gendered ; may well be. I don’t use it here (despite my Delight! in Five Doubts because a) short fiction is not my strong suit and b) Caponegro’s simply not written enough for me to arrive at such a judgement. 2) This school of fiction (‘experimental’, ‘Hawkes’, etc) is dominated by male writers, true. But readers of Maso and readers of Ducornet will recognize something familiar in Caponegro. Were you to look at the numbers, I think you’d have to concede that these writers go unread at least as much because they write an experimental fiction as because they are female -- Hawkes’ biggest number is 624 ratings ;; not exactly a blockbuster [Gass’s is 1238 and Coover’s 1314 ;; you can do the other numbers].

eta :: quoted from the interview which is following and there found link’d :: “I believe I mentioned during the ‘Imagination Alive Imagine’ Paris Conference my wish to ‘feminize’ the legacy of my mentors. Despite a great resistance to such terms and gendered categories in general when interpreting literature, I was certainly aware of having mostly male predecessors in the domain of American metafiction, with Angela Carter as an obvious exception.”


Interview (2002)
An Interview of Mary Caponegro in Six Questions by Françoise Palleau-Papin
https://www.cairn.info/revue-francais...
“Here is my response to John Hawkes’ infamous assumption that ‘the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme.’ I see myself as very much a member of this renegade school, writing against the grain of the mimetic mainstream. I consider myself an avant-gardist, an experimentalist, (and admittedly in this case, a sentimentalist)—as these words are those of my mentor, John Hawkes, who gave me tremendous encouragement and urged me to follow my own idiosyncratic path in fiction.”

Here’s Mr Moore with Ms Caponegro ::


And his review of The Star Cafe ::
http://www.washingtonpost.com/archive...
“Short ‘fiction’ is more apt than short ‘stories’ because Caponegro avoids the well-trod path of the well-made story for the yellow-brick road of Borgesian ficciones.”
“Faced with a ‘back in ten’ sign at a gas station”--that’s a big factual SIC! Mr Moore!!! [it’s a ‘back in fiftene’ [sic!] sign at a dry=cleaners]

Moore also reviewed Five Doubts in the American Book Review, July=Aug 1999. [nolink]




*I really should write ‘Café’ but it’s just too tedious to do so today.

***from that interview (again) :: “But I can’t imagine ever being a 600 or 800-page person. I am (and suspect my reader is) exhausted by 8 pages of my stuff!—into which I try to cram what might be the equivalent of the material of a whole novel.”

This Review is duplicated in that of the other discussed collection. Also.

[may · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well worth the read, especially for Il Libro dell'Arte (my favourite of the pieces -Tombola & An Etruscan Catechism following in close proximity-).
Fragmented, reflective, collective. Take whatever you will from those words because I imagine everyone's mileage and interpretation will vary.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

obscure, opaque and sometimes inventive but cold writing and narration.

[Halley Sutton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sure there's value to this experimentalism but no thank you, not for me.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

More a series of fictional meditations rather than short stories, Five Doubts mines art, history and human nature in experimental forms. While the texts are thought-provoking, sometimes even profound, Mary Caponegro's detailed imagery can be haunting, such as the rolling ostrich head cut off by an emperor before a crowd. This book is not for everyone but, for those who seek out words and literary structure as artforms, it must be added to their list.

[Will]

Suggested by George Saunders (Harper's Bazaar Interview with George Saunders, June 2001).