from THE GIRL WITH BROWN FUR

The Water

If it were merely water and unimportant, but it is water, all-important, more brilliant than clean.

If water could rage back at us in a future of silver clashes. But water is merely itself; its body, its delirium of cohesion, its obeisance to gravity, its life as the house of fish—so water will never blame, only the people do that: for example, Gale, who lived in Tallahassee; he owned a rural house; he hated writing his thoughts. He liked tea at nighttime with the trees hanging near the fence, when there might be a mood in the air. And smoke (all through the waxy future, we will not lose such nights). He called his wife ‘Mother;’ he lived on a hill. Gale did not vote this time. He was not a bad man, not through all the bad years while Florida lost its lakes and he watched, while the lizards died papery in the grass. The lakes’ deaths were a shame, Gale said, resting in his chair, and Mother wrote a blaming letter to a magazine. Gale liked chicken. His children would soon retire. The water will be algae-oily and never consciously suffer.

We might reach an arm toward a dark surface someday, gasping alongside the boats and birds, alongside this incomprehension of water and the way those living at the top always rule. Gale knew it. Still and all, he was glad he lived. He said to Mother, Hi, Koo-Koo. Aren’t you glad you lived too?

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If she was not a child, then surely she was a type of girl. But she was not a girl, nor was she a married woman, by any means. She had no offspring, and often browsed through boating magazines; with her mouth and eye-wrinkles she seemed almost an older woman; but she was not. Her belly burned atavistically at times, and she could be aroused upon hearing anyone at all cough or speak her name. What was a girl? Frances never had quite considered herself a full woman; besides, older women were clearly prone to ugliness and illness. She was not that way—not yet. Was she unique?

She stepped toward Kenny, who held a broken cracker in one hand.

“Kenny, when I was four years old my mother told me, ‘You’re all alone in the world.’ And what do you know: that turned out to be true!”

He stared, then drank down a very small glass of water.

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from DRA—:

Winding softly down the stairwell, she glimpsed them a few floors below her, walking arm in arm. Perspiring, afraid to make herself known, Dra— trailed behind, taking care so they would not see her or hear her footfalls. Suddenly she had the distinct impression, as if from an objective, telegraphic source, that her future, though probably to include a good, dependable job, was certain to be brief and senseless.

Following Slim and Marla, she watched as they turned into a hallway then leaned toward one another in an ugly display of public affection. She raced ahead, hard prickles of anger on her scalp, not wanting to lose them, still hearing, almost in her bones, the vibrations of the indoor airplanes several floors above.

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from MY HORSE AND OTHER STORIES:

He was usually comfortable, and lived in this way, and had little disturbance in his life, and so, living as he did, as he had these forty years, it seemed necessary to have the molar removed, as it was dark, too dark, for a tooth, and thus suspect. It was a disturbing thing, he thought, but surely in, say, two weeks' time, the tooth would be taken care of and other thoughts would replace these thoughts of the tooth. The tooth had gone dark over a period of some time, and now he had finally shown it to his father, at which point all suspicions had been confirmed: the tooth needed to be either removed or treated immediately. He had waited six weeks to show the tooth to his father but on this night it became too much, too disturbing; the thought of this molar pounded his head with fear; he came out of his room and showed it, unable to keep it to himself any longer. The father, sitting in his chair, reddened instantly in a silent panic upon seeing the black tooth in the son?s open mouth and reached for the telephone receiver in order to call a specialist. Yet it was Friday evening, a difficult time to reach a doctor and the only reason in the first place that the father had been in his chair trying to relax instead of sitting in the locked utility room, attending to paperwork.

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San Francisco Bay Guardian September 29, 2005
Stacey Levine's new novel asks: Is it real, or is it America?
By Stephen Beachy
FRANCES JOHNSON, Stacey Levine’s latest novel, continues to map out the psychic territory of her first novel, Dra—, and her book of stories, My Horse and Other Stories. Levine’s work is, at least technically, ‘surreal,’ but like much of the best writing that maps the borders between dreams and conscious life, its subtle disjunctions create a zone that often feels more real than ‘reality’ itself. Although ages, species lines, and health are often slightly askew in Levine, these effects mimic the strange sensations of aging, being, more or less, human, and being ill in America in 2005.
http://www.sfbg.com/39/52/lit_munson.html

Time Out New York Issue 531, 12/1/05
By Caroline McCloskey
From the get-go, it's clear that something strange is afoot in Munson, the fictional Florida hamlet where Stacey Levine’s new novel, Frances Johnson, takes place. A volcano seethes on the outskirts of town, strange animals skitter in the shadows, and a dense brown fog has settled overhead. Pets and people vanish. Unfurling over a period of days leading up to the town's annual dance, the story follows 38-year-old Frances’ mounting restlessness, as she must decide whether to take control of her life or cede it to the murky future the community has designated for her. Though the novel hinges on a familiar plot point—will Frances remain in Munson, or escape to the world at large?—it’s the only trace of convention to be found in this hypnotic book, which transforms its setting into a tableau of exotic menace.
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/books/7695/dour-town

BelieverMag.com March 2006
In her introduction to the latest edition of the collected Jane Bowles, Joy Williams argues that reading Bowles taught her nothing about writing. With all due respect, I'm not sure that I agree with Williams, whose work I adore and which often bears the same reckless beauty and sentence-by-sentence surprise that I find in Bowles. In any case, someone who, it’s safe to say, learned plenty from Bowles is the Seattle-based author Stacey Levine. I’m not the first to suggest this; Levine’s current editor, novelist Matthew Stadler, astutely compared Levine to Bowles in a review of Levine’s first novel, Dra—.
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200603/?read=review_levine

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The Stranger
September 3, 1997
by Matthew Stadler
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Seattle Times December 21, 1997
By Judy Doenges
I finished Dra--, Seattle writer Stacey Levine's horrifying yet beautifully written first novel, feeling breathless and chilled to the bone. I also was filled with admiration for a writer whose flawless prose, subtle detail, and hints at further nightmares could take me to a world I so strongly resisted.

Levine's restrained depiction of the brutality of an imagined dystopia begins with her title character. Dra? (short for drab? draconian?) is a meek, paranoid woman in need of a job, though finding work in her world is an all-consuming and miserable task. While it's true that everyone around her is employed, all jobs are mechanistic, meaningless and literally malignant
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19971221&slug=2579225

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The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 3/22/94
by Angela Weaser
By way of its grotesquely surreal images and situations, Stacey Levine's first collection of short tales is an intriguing matter-of-fact study of the impossibility of ?real? perception, of a single objective way of viewing the world and the individual's relation to it. Levine?s self-critiquing narrators take for granted a world in which ?anything can happen??not the conventional ?anything? (i.e., winning the lottery, falling in love in a grocery store, being in the ?right place at the right time?) but the ?anything? of the Twilight Zone (without the voice-over narration). In ?The Twin,? a woman spends her days rolling over on her ever-so-small but annoying Siamese twin so that he might be buried in the sand; the forty-year-old man who still lives with his parents in ?The Son? is afraid to tell them of a blackening tooth for fear of being scolded and winds up at the doctor's feeling embarrassed for the trouble he?s caused everyone; the woman in ?Cakes? lines her rooms with shelves stacked with boxes of cakes that will, finally, make her full, but then can?t eat them because of the disturbance created by the strange, staring cat and dog that show up one day on the corner outside her window. Often startling the reader to attention, these bizarre vignettes end abruptly and leave the reader with a kind of ecstatic nothing.

Although they are not pieces of a broader "story," there are obvious thematic connections. Most prominent are the themes of power and control--specially the inevitable abuse of power over the weak exercised almost against the will of the protagonists. The reader becomes complicit in these abuses, ultimately sharing the self-righteousness of the protagonists; the horse named in the title must of course be punished for not speaking out (yes, the horse could speak if he chose) against his owner, for not denying his master's ?right? to control him. The horse is weak and the owner has no choice but to detest him; to punish him for his head-bowed-down loyalty. Related to this inevitable abuse of power, and perhaps the reason for it, are the feelings of helplessness and self-loathing felt even by those in power; after all, the master can?t empower the horse; she can?t make the horse deny her; she can?t, in effect, experience her own power. Levine?s prose is compelling and intriguing and risky. It gets beneath the skin and searches for vulnerable tissue; not a safe place to be, but certainly worth the danger.
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