[Soft Skull; 2024]
Juliet Escoria’s newest short story collection, You Are the Snake, resists the notion that a stable self can be defined, or sharpened, through narrative. What we have is a life told to reflect reality as it happened, without the scaffolding of fiction’s usual tricks. While the narrator takes us from adolescence to adulthood in chronological fashion, she does not lean on plot to create the illusion of coherence. Meaning does not arise through the careful arrangement of elements that heighten drama so much as the sheer weight of life’s moment-to-moment accumulation. If the stories in this collection take on a shape, it is one brick laid atop another, the narrator soldiering on beneath the pressure of the pile. In this way, You Are the Snake reflects the anti-autobiography or experimental life writing traditions. While the collection is not structured around formal experimentation like other examples from that genre: Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait, Joe Brainard’s I Remember, or Maggie Nelson’s Bluets—Escoria still manages to undermine the instincts of a typical autobiography, memoir, or work of autofiction. Her narrator can’t, or won’t, wrest the nonsense of life into something cohesive or approaching the epiphanic. Readers are not lead down a paved path to pre-determined conclusions. The past is not mined for design and purpose. Escoria’s narrator won’t shape the self within the confines of story.
The tone of Escoria’s narrator, also named Juliet, remains consistently flat and disembodied—no variety of information is elevated over another. If this book were a horror film, there would be no ominous music in the background—terror would strike at random, without our being prepared. The stories in You Are the Snake do not follow traditional structural elements such as exposition, rising action, climax, denouement, and resolution. We do not follow a narrator who wants something, faces an obstacle to their desire, navigates around that obstacle, and then ties everything up with a neat resolution. If there are patterns to be found, they emerge through a constellation of coincidences left amorphous by Escoria, who will neither direct nor instruct the reader.
A few of the stories, and Escoria’s previous work, Juliet the Manic, suggest that we are occupying the subject position of a mentally ill narrator. Magical thinking, then, is apt, as is Escoria’s yielding—overinterpretation does not become a plot device, and rarely generates tension. It is, instead, a constitutive element of the narrator’s personality, one of the methods through which they try to make sense of the confusing and nonsensical events that comprise their daily life. In “Hazel: A Diptych,” the narrator attempts to achieve self-understanding by learning about her ancestor’s afflictions. This mission both fails and succeeds, as she comes to see Grandmother Hazel, “bipolar, undiagnosed, the genetic link to my own mental illness, the reason I am the way I am,” in herself while also failing “to understand the mysteries of her life.”
You Are the Snake could be said to demonstrate a more general failure to understand the mysteries of one’s life. The question is whether this brings us any closer to reality, or truth. Does Escoria rely on flatness, disembodiment, and coincidence to push against narrative or with the hope that shock will distract from the stories’ shapelessness? Do we want to be shocked by the details of the life that the author or narrator or character has lived? Or, would we prefer the author to manage, through craft, to surprise us—to show us something new, or reveal something we might already have known all the while? In a recent review of Blake Butler’s memoir Molly, Dwight Garner wrote that “People often mistake dark things for deep things.” You Are the Snake does give in to this belief, sometimes appearing as a list of tragedies told plainly, as if darkness, stacked high enough, will come to take on meaning.
Certainly, there is a darkness at the core of the narrator’s being. Her young life, like many addicts, alcoholics, and mentally ill of the world—even in the most charmed suburbs—is touched by terror. Her tales do have the capability to shock and are sometimes even more alarming on account of their matter-of-factness. In “Automotive Safety,” when a police officer pulls the narrator over and informs her that she’s driving on the wrong side of the road, she reflects, “That was why the light had looked so far away. I was a fucking moron.” The line between madness and sanity as well as inebriation and sobriety are easily blurred, in this case to comic effect. At the edges of humor is the clinical detachment of a survivor, someone who has seen some shit but isn’t sure how to integrate the horror, and whether it will ever mean something. While our narrator may present as if they’re accustomed to, or unaffected by, absurdity and tragedy, we learn the most about her when she actively represses, pushing pain from her mind through alcohol and drugs, or recoiling from public displays of emotion. In multiple stories, our narrator lashes out against those who express positive sentiments about the recently deceased. She is uninterested in the minds of others, alive or dead. There’s a certain myopia, the inability to imagine outside of, or beyond, her own perspective. The narrator assumes that everyone else’s minds operate like hers and are therefore unknowable. Escoria exhibits no desire to create a narrator who can be redeemed by the reader.
You Are the Snake thus captures certain truths about adolescence, particularly the way that singular actions or decisions provide the illusion of solidifying one’s personality. Teenagers try on different affects and see what fits. In “The Ryans,” while she and her friend exact revenge on a boy, the narrator reflects, “I was laughing. She was laughing. We were two maniacal bitches, and the Ryans would be sorry they fucked with us.” Soon after, she notes, “My heart beat fast in a way that wasn’t fear. It was the heartbeat of a maniacal bitch.” In this moment, a single action can shape the way the narrator understands herself. Young people want desperately to believe such swift personality changes are possible. In youth, the narrator yearns for some essence, or core, of her being to emerge instantaneously. As the stories progress, and the narrator ages, she finds that solidifying the self is neither quick nor simple and might even prove impossible.
“The Ryans,” is one of a few stories, like “Roadkill,” that portrays a group of girls reclaiming their agency from men. In the latter, the narrator and her friends create a game in which they try to force boys to show them their penises—this reversal, the girls demanding it rather than the boys forcing it, makes the boys uncomfortable, and grants the girls powers of humiliation. This, the narrator reminds us, “was the point.” Neither of these stories draw to a neat close. There is no denouement. Escoria is not concerned with looking back to the beginning and drawing meaning out of experience. She is no pedagogue and will not enforce life lessons. There is the sense that, as in life, one thing after another simply happens, and to interpret or narrativize even the most traumatic events would be dishonest. This is not to say that the author is incapable of writing an ending. In “Dust Particles,” Escoria deftly articulates, through metaphor, that there are things we never forget no matter how badly we want to, things that, particularly in childhood and adolescence, happen to us, are deposited in us, against which we are powerless.
You Are the Snake shows an alienated narrator learning to be in the world. A lot of time is spent in malls, parking lots, and empty spaces that were cleared for development that never arrived. We find “nice suburban teens” mixed up with random, strange, and dangerous people. Sometimes, these same suburban teens, propelled by alcohol and drugs, are the random, strange, and dangerous people—trying on different roles, identities, and personalities, seeing what excites, horrifies, and disgusts them. The collection ends with one of the more intriguing, and experimental, stories, “Is it Jackal or is it Dragon.” The flat, disembodied prose shines brightest here as the narrator asks if, with all these experiences and their many coincidences, life could have been otherwise. How much choice do we have in the matter? How much of our future is determined by fate? Escoria balances competing desires: to make sense of life while demonstrating the limits of, or refusing to engage in, narrativization. We receive little sense of a world supported by justice or karma. There is belief in coincidence, but very little interpretation of those coincidences. There is only action and reaction. In You Are the Snake, reflection rarely makes sense of either.
Patrick Duane lives in Richmond, Virginia.
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