Micheline Marcom Reads @ Elliott Bay Books Tonight

Micheline Aharonian Marcom reads from her new novel tonight at Elliott Bay Books at 7:30 pm, at 101 South Main Street.

When we first wandered over to the Seattlest Arts Desk to pick up our review copy of Draining the Sea, we'd never heard of Micheline Aharonian Marcom. Turns out this Saudi-born, LA-raised child of an American and a Lebanese-Armenian is the author of two critically acclaimed earlier novels: Three Apples Fell From Heaven and The Daydreaming Boy. Who knew? Back in 2001, reviewing Three Apples in the New York Times, Margot Livesey wrote that, "The fierce beauty of her prose both confronts readers with many breathtaking cruelties and carries us past them." Such a description recalls the Cormac McCarthy of Blood Meridian, in which endless passages describe the breathtaking natural beauty of the Southwest with such vivid intensity that the reader is easily dragged into the booby-trap of McCarthy's brutally twisted violence (baby tree, anyone?). Unfortunately, to judge Marcom by Draining the Sea, it would seem that Livesey's observation is as much a prescription for long slog of a read as for a literary masterpiece.

One need only crack a copy of Draining the Sea to discover that Marcom's style is dense and darkly lyrical. The narrator inhabits a phantasmagorical Los Angeles, where he spends his days collecting the carcasses of dead dogs off the roads and grappling with his memories of the Guatemalan civil war and Marta, a woman he both loved and likely killed, as well as his family's experience of the Armenian genocide (this is Marcom's central theme through all her books, apparently). Written in a hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness, Marcom's prose twists and turns poetically. Take, for instance, this single sentence:

This is my inquiry, an inquisition of the air: you say that you cannot be undone, and you say (with your looking) that I am a beast of clean proportions; you say nothing with your words, in fact you have no words in my language (and I none in yours) and you insist in your dark cold chambers, in the capital of darkness, you bring me there, into the pit with you, with the other handless corpses, the half-deads, the unclosed eyes of the dying: you, the rats and diptera girls, and faceless cockless boys, and black bowed beetles, and intrepid moths on your skin eyelids—that I stay with you in that place, that I take up your hands (beautiful veins of indifference) and bundle that unringed, unpainted fingers fingernails to your mother in the Highlands: to your dead mother, the dead brothers and father, the crucified brother, who beat each other in the winters and for whom hunger is like an iron fist: send them these artifacts of the body, you say; rescue me from this hole, this hollow they've made for the half-deads, and I am crying uncontrollably now at the side of the freeway, and I can't see you amidst the piles and it is you and then it is my mother giving me her five phrases about the Armenian grandmother when I am a boy, and the long distances between home and here, and then it is me, alone in my car, driving along the 405.

On the one hand, this is an act of literary bravura, a sentence constructed with a poet's sense of flow and a technician's precision, that unfolds and blossoms like a flower bud, as layer upon layer of language opens up. There's three parenthetical phrases, three colons, and two semi-colons in one sentence. An impressive feat all around. On the other hand, it's nearly meaningless. What are "beautiful veins of indifference" or "skin eyelids" besides pretty phrases? And perhaps most problematically for a first-person narrative, who on earth would talk like that, let alone think like that?