I’m just putting in the last edits on the new novel, Delible (uh, again), which I’ve been working on forever, or so it seems (of course, abandoning a few 200 page drafts and beginning from scratch is an integral part of the process, which is why it takes me so long). The thinking began in April of 1999, when I was handed a missing poster. Throwing it out wasn’t an option, because the girl hadn’t been found. Putting it away amounted to throwing it out. So, I ended up putting up the poster over my desk, and when I moved to Vancouver, the poster moved with me. Every day, I sat down to write, and it was below the poster, seeing the girl’s unknowing smile. That picture haunted the edges of my thinking. It shaped the direction my writing took.

In my second novel, Hush, there’s this abject character, Loralie, and her experiences are pretty awful, there’s a lot of violence. In an “open text,” like Hush, there’s a lot of work done on the reader’s end. That openness, coupled with the nature of Loralie’s experience of the world, added up to Loralie being read in ways I hadn’t anticipated. A normalization or naturalization of Loralie’s experiences of violence occurred: In other words, the character’s situation was open to being viewed as an natural effect of her ‘being.’

So, with the new, I again wanted to work with a character who was not an “ideal victim,” and did a lot of thinking about how to do it this time around. One of the artists I looked to was Doris Salcedo. In Unland: the Orphan’s Tunic, the very suture Salcedo uses to hold the piece together also acts to create tension between the viewer and the viewed, the artwork implicates you when you draw close.

In the detail below, it’s possible to see how Salcedo has sutured the broken halves of two tables together with human hair. But it isn’t until you are close, dangerously close, as Mieke Bal points out, that you can see the terrible details. And when you are close enough to see, your very proximity is a threat to the integrity of the piece.

It occurred to me that sisters, in this new novel, could act similarly, there could exist a kind of suture between the two. So, the new is primarily told from the perspective of a 15-year-old girl, Melora Sprague, whose sister has gone missing. The two are very close in age, but the narrator lags a little behind the older sister, the missing girl, in both age and experience, though their trajectories are close. As the story progresses, the two move along their twinned trajectories; in part, it’s a strategy that relies on the western tradition of identification with the narrator. Anyway, I hope this structure will frustrate the urge to understand violent loss as somehow traceable back through its expression to the victim; that that urge will be waylaid by the reader’s sympathy with Melora, and complicated by Melora’s lagging identification with her sister. In so many accounts of violence, violence is understood as a flaw that is inherent in the victim, a flaw that has merely, and in exaggerated form, been reflected back at the victim by the world. (I see this kind of ’sympathetic magic’ around newspaper accounts of murders all the time. Perhaps a paratactical approach, a series of small, simple descriptive passages (comme Robbe-Grillet?), could avoid the failures of a syntactical approach, which demands the projection of complex relations. But I digress.)