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.