New York Times Review of Sam Savages new novel: It Will End with Us. it Will End With Us,’ by Sam Savage By JENNY HENDRIXJAN. 9, 2015 “I wasn’t going to begin again, having stopped, apparently, and started up again, foolishly, too many times already.” So protests Eve Taggart, the narrator of Sam Savage’s fifth novel, “It Will End With Us.” Like the first-person narrators of Savage’s earlier work, Eve begins with the intention, or at least the possibility, of ending in mind. This awareness that the narrative may be abandoned gives the book the feel of being cobweb-slight. It seems arbitrary, almost incidental; yet the text’s fragility reads as purity of a kind. Like all of Savage’s books — beginning with “Firmin” (2006), published when its author was 65 — this one takes the form of a monologue, if a self-consciously written one. It’s not a memoir, diary or letter, and seems driven less by the demands of art than by need. In this, too, Eve is of a piece with Savage’s previous narrators, all of them in the process of some form of disintegration, who cling to the written word as though it were the only thing keeping them afloat. Which, in some deep sense, it is: They write because they must, with no more (or less) a motive than that Beckettian shrug, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” A mere 151 pages, “It Will End With Us” is told in short, associative or anti-associative paragraphs, some a single sentence long. It’s perhaps best described as a somewhat loosely curated list of memories and facts, of things Eve knows, though often she knows not how she knows them, or if she really does. “I remember . . . ,” many paragraphs begin, hedging. Her subject is her childhood in a small town in South Carolina, where she lived in genteel poverty with her parents, brothers Edward and Thornton, and a heap of gun dogs in a house called Spring Hope — an ironic name, given the family’s apparent fate. From her account of the luminous cruelties of Southern life, there emerges the story of Eve’s mother, a woman driven mad by frustrated literary ambition, a beauty just out of reach. The mother’s story is closely aligned with Eve’s and may, in fact, be her own: Beautiful or cruel, memory has a richness that’s absent from Eve’s arid present, the details of which are vague. It’s possible she lives in a facility of some kind. She speaks of being ill prepared for life. And yet as Eve reaches for her memories, what appears is, more often than not, little more than image and phrase, figments that are “not information about anything except the furniture of my memory”: “I want to say that in this picture her mind is elsewhere and that she is smiling distantly”; “I remember ‘It’s cheaper to buy eggs.’ ” There is an echo, in this preoccupation with the world as essentially a place of language — as in the book’s form and tone — of David Markson’s 1988 novel “Wittgenstein’s Mistress.” Recall that book’s epigraph from Kierkegaard, for instance — “What an extraordinary change takes place . . . when . . . thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality” — and you have a fair description of Savage’s book. As Eve tries to pinpoint where words found their meaning, whence facts arose and what the original object of her thoughts might be, she just keeps running into more thought. Sometimes she’s left with only words themselves — words mentioned rather than used, as Wittgenstein would say. Memory becomes less a sign of something than an object itself, evoking Beckett again. Yet there’s a vividness to these false memories; even those scraps battered “beyond recognition” shine with a light of their own. In some ways it’s astonishing that “It Will End With Us” can support the weight of its ideas. Reading the novel can feel like admiring dewdrops on a spider’s web, each paragraph and sentence glittering exquisitely, strung together by nothing but the slim gray thread of Eve’s voice. But despite its entanglements in language, Savage’s is a book of the heart as much as the head. Which is itself an accomplishment of no small note: to recognize the arbitrary, degraded thing that is memory, and allow it its loveliness for all of that. IT WILL END WITH US By Sam Savage 151 pp. Coffee House Press. Paper, $12.95.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 02:08:09 +0000
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