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23.9.23
So Beautiful and Elastic by Gary J. Shipley
So Beautiful and Elastic by Gary J. Shipley
available from Apocalypse Party
Gary J. Shipley’s latest offering, So Beautiful and
Elastic (Apocalypse Party, 2023), is a challenging
book and not for the faint of heart, but those who
commit to it will be pleased to have done so.
On the most superficial level the plot concerns our
narrator, Ann, leaving London and returning to the
unnamed seaside town from which she escaped as a
teenager, in order to bear witness to the death of her
father. The journey is twofold and fraught. Ann is full of contempt for her
father, her dead mother, her past, life in general, and herself. The reckoning
the reader suspects Ann will have with her father will also necessarily be
one she has with herself and whatever secrets her past contains and that she
may or may not be keeping from herself.
There’s plenty to chew on there, to be sure, and the book’s brief chapters
skip through time, giving us a kaleidoscopic view of a turbulent life, though
Ann gives equal weight to the life of the mind by offering ekphrastic
disquisitions on the visual arts, those being her chief obsession in life and
the primary way in which she constructs her identity. In the place of what
we might call “normal” human relationships, Ann has her intellectual
relationships to philosophy and art; Magritte, Cioran, Schneider, Lynch, et
al., provide the scaffolding which allows Ann to continue her own
insubstantial existence.
For all the disorienting weight of the subject matter, So Beautiful and Elastic
reads quickly and in an engaging manner due to Shipley’s fine prose. Here is
Ann, early in the book, offering comment on one of the ways in which she
created herself: “I suppose I’d made a point of not sounding like my parents.
Not that their bare-bones syntax, stunted diction and coy expungement of
expletives was the worst of it, and not that there weren’t cringier examples –
those parents of friends, for instance, who’d made a point of not sounding
like themselves, but whose impoverished disguises only ever managed to
emphasize the lowliness they were attempting to conceal – but because the
sound of them carried with it everything they were, the tawdriness of their
thinking, the repulsive biological link that in the end no amount of articulacy
could undo.”
What’s noteworthy here, besides the elegant sentence construction and
rather pointed observation, is the way in which Ann perceives language as a
means to imprison, dissemble, and also construct. The book is obsessed with
this kind of thing, how tenuous and flimsy the self is and how the essential
“lowliness” of the human condition might be mitigated (whether Ann cops
to that desire or not) through engagement with intellectual and creative
endeavors. About midway through the book, Ann quotes Magritte as having
said that “what is important is that in a hundred years’ time, someone finds
what I found, but in a different way”, to which she adds, “I too have found
what he found. I found it altered and perverse, lucid in its mystery from
every available angle, and maybe awake to it, refusing to look away or
squint or think it into something else.”
So Beautiful and Elastic does not squint or look away. It is full bore in its
ugliness but never gratuitous, and in doing so it invites the reader to think
about what makes a life, what exactly they love and why. What’s more
rewarding than that?
So Beautiful and Elastic is available from Apocalypse Party.
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