HEADLESS WORLD

The most recent novel collaboratively written by Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus under the name Ascher/Straus explores a world in which identity is not only mutable, but in constant flux.

The opening image of this surreal and often baffling novel is an idyllic scene of childhood. There is a lake, children, a grandmotherly figure, and a baby experimenting with the protolanguage of infancy while he bangs his sippy cup against his highchair. The narrative voice, unattached to any of these figures, functions in a kind of a documentary-style overlay that informs the reader of their position in relation to this scene: “Always from the outside, we feel life gather….The completeness of life, but only from the outside and from a distance.” This position is the one the reader will occupy for the rest of this iconoclastic project in which narrative structure, character development, even the flow of time take a back seat to the pyrotechnics of form. After the brief lakeside prologue, the novel restarts in a diner from which a boy named Junior with no memory or sense of himself is retrieved by a bumbling henchman-type figure named Waldo Bunny, who returns him to his mother, Penny. These figures—Junior, Waldo Bunny, Penny, and various fathers, among others—reoccur, occupying different relationships to each other and themselves as the book builds a gathering sense of the sinister, the occluded, or the forgotten rather than an accumulation of chronological scenes. The result is confusing. Characters blend into each other or perform seemingly significant actions and then abruptly disappear. There is a tendency for the narrative voice to branch off into extended similes that obscure the originating object rather than illuminate through comparison. For example, when one of Junior’s father figures is home alone, he feels his house is like “a capsule orbiting and isolated in space—and inside the isolated space capsule himself, small and shriveled as the last raisin stuck to the bottom of a little two ounce raisin box that’s just been emptied into the mouth of an ailing child standing on the sidewalk and waiting to be driven to a hospital where he’ll spend years isolated in a pod with food tray and television set.” The fact that this image later turns out to provide some situational context for one of the more developed plotlines does not excuse the lengths the reader is expected to go in order to participate in the scene. While there are some moments of real insight, the book as a whole reads like an experiment in process that does not fully congeal into a project—resulting in a frustrating experience for even the most patient and open-minded of readers.

This book perplexes without provoking more meaningful engagement.