[This review appears on Xantippe.]

Where cities built by magic
parted before us like mirages
mint captured our way
birds escorted us
and fish swam upstream
while the sky spread out before us
as Fate followed in our wake
like a madman brandishing a razor.
(From Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, The Mirror, written
by the filmmaker’s father, poet Arseny Tarkovsky)

Renee Gladman, in Newcomer Can’t Swim, gives us cities like these: at once hypnotic and treacherous, mapped and counter-mapped, landscape and dreamscape. Artifact and experience pull against each other and the reader, expertly guided, falls somewhere in between. Characters are brought forth, and then questioned; we can never really know them, because the narrator doesn’t fully know them. They wander through her lines, which read as a metaphor for streets in specific urban settings and for almost Anywhere, USA. The disorientation is what orients: welcome to this world. The known is in the not-knowing. How we organize or think about our multiple realities in 21st century urban North American society is at stake.

Gladman is best known for her books, Juice (2001) and The Activist (2003). Her work is most often referred to as “new prose” or “narrativity” along with poets and writers such as Gail Scott, Pamela Lu, Camille Roy, Mary Burger, and Robert Glück, among others. And for good reason–Gladman’s prose/poetry is not incantatory and neither is it reportage–it is a re-writing of genre and of the world. Boundary conditions, even of blended forms, are frangible and deliberately subverted. The narrative consciousness is polyphonic and discordant with unconventional transitions and sentence construction. Newcomer Can’t Swim does not offer a given signage. Though the reader can follow, the following leads everywhere and nowhere. Here everything is in progression: the story, and the form and by what language the totality of her experiment is named.

The book is divided into seven main sections. The first, “Untitled, Park in City,” begins, “Above the head, a mouth. . .” (1) and ends, “The eyelids shut” (2). It serves as an introduction to the body and to the body of the book. The reader is asked to externalize the instrument of language while also viewing it through a closed interiority. This sets up the twinning of subjectivity and narrativity throughout the book and the limitations of each. From the narrator: “. . . I have the map you drew in my back pocket,/but I want to get to you without using the map. . . .  I am not in the place where you live. I am on my way there. . . ” and “. . .What street/is on the corner of two other streets? What could you have/meant?” (5). Is the narrator lost? Or situated in the errant cartography of the designed city? Or suspended between the constructed binary of self and other? The tension between the intimacy of contact and the isolation of distance at once exalts and exhausts.

The shifting realities in Newcomer develop by accretion. Her sentences are conduits through the urban landscape and punctuation functions as a kind of traffic signal. Stop. Go. Yield. Turn. She modifies and directs the way the space of the page is experienced as a communicative device. Each paragraph is site-specific. Gladman sees them as “installations.” It is easy to see why. There is volition, a patterning modulation and a figurative repletion; they are both philosophic and cinematic. They motion to one another in scenes with long takes and jump-cuts.  She writes, “When the birds leap off the wall/and enter this world, no one/reacts. The museum simply/closes its doors; the artist leaves/the country. The birds fly above/us—all the inhabitants of the/zone—and in that way of birds, /form their own world” (101).

The geography of the external collides with the geography of the internal producing a democratized aesthetic of indeterminacy. Epistemological borders are permeable even as concrete and experiential differences abound. Throughout the book, but especially in the third section, “Untitled, Woman on Ground,” and the fourth section “Untitled, Colorado,” Gladman upends themes of race, gender, class, and sexual identity with genre-bending precision. The city and the word are a locus of power and devastation. Sentences break; people bleed. Constructions of self and other are contested. Multiple questions arise: What is the obligation between the polis and the private, the subject and the object, the language of autobiography and the language of autography?  The social production of identity and its manifestation in the every day is what her characters inhabit and question.

In “Untitled, Woman on Ground,” the danger of crossing the street becomes the racial politics of moving through communities (which becomes the danger of “being,” highlighting the inequity and peril of the world in which you do reside and the inaccessible world in which you do not and how your self-presentation and “being-ness” is perceived and mis/treated). The narrator describes a scene:

These are the externals: one, you will never make it home
in time; two, cars have bumpers but pedestrians do not
and this is not universally understood; three, you have been
plowed into by a car; and four, a crowd encircles you but it
is an inattentive crowd. ‘What are you doing,’ you gurgle
to a man near you. ‘Standing guard,’ he replies with his
chest puffed out. So, if they are proud, you are. . . ? (11)

The driver is a white male; the angry youth is black. (I did this
on purpose. Here are two reasons. First, as you’re lying
there, as this youth is very articulate, you can convalesce in
thinking he’s family: he represents you. Second, I wanted
to see if anything has changed now that blacks are the second
largest “minority” in this country instead of the first—
if that makes their voice more like an echo, if the anger of it
has receded.) (16)

The scene of an accident, its chaos, fear, anger, shock, dislocation, forced interaction and the quality and tenor of rescue, is beleaguered and uncompromising.  Gladman’s words circle and haunt, they expose and harbor, they confront and query—and they never underestimate the reader. She interrogates racism and the condition of African Americans in a contemporary urban locale.  It is a moving (as in motion, as in heartbreak) rendering of the brutal and delicate vicissitudes of connection and loss in a failing society.  “I want to tell you that this is a metaphor or a dream, as in/Kundera, but you are too fascinated with dying to hear me” (22).

In “Untitled, Colorado,” Gladman again underscores conflicted social biases and the disorientation of public space. The narrator “I” and the character “A.” are waiting to be seated in a restaurant. The waiting is delayed and fraught. It is unclear exactly why they are not being seated. Is it racism? Homophobia? Both? “‘Gladman party of two’. . . . But she [the hostess] doesn’t mean us. I can’t explain how I know. My name is Gladman and there are two of us. . .but that call, it’s for a different sort of folk” (25). The narrator “I” has the same last name as the author. Additionally, the mysterious party of “Gladman’s” that the hostess does call further complicates the layering of subject and object. Misrepresentation becomes representation in the text and the metatext.

The scene fluctuates between states of mind at turns anxious, angry, knowing, and detached. Visual and auditory stimuli crowd the experience and exacerbate the relegation of the characters as “other” and the cleft positioned between them and the rest of the world. That the first person narrator/character is listening to an audio book (from which phrases are taken and interspersed with the text and which is either a travel guide or an account of the disappearance of two women, or both), while this is taking place adds another stratum of displacement and involvement. When the two women finally make it inside the restaurant, they experience sanctuary only in the restroom. From the narrator: “The bathroom is unoccupied. Once inside, I pull her tank top over her head and seize her left nipple with my mouth. I have to stand on the toilet to do this. Well, I have to kneel on the toilet. I tug on the nipple, and wrap my arms around her waist. She does next what all day I’ve been hoping she would do, and afterwards screams, ‘Re…!’” (28).

Read the rest of this review at www.xantippemag.net/reviews_6.html