Book review: William VanDenBerg `Lake of Earth'
William VanDenBerg’s Lake of Earth contains an array of worlds within each of its seven pieces. The collection opens with `Treatment', a short piece which puts a multitude of questions to the reader with the opening “This isn’t working, he says. We doubt your commitment to the program”. Throughout the piece, we are narrated by an individual who has been instructed to “sit here and keep an eye on the bench outside”. They are kept in a room and the room is their world, a claustrophobic one evocative of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. The story is replete with enigma and the protagonists' focus is the mundane view of the street through the window. This normality is disrupted right near the finality: “The next day the people on the bench are erased by it”. All around the individual disappears and, enigmatically, the piece concludes with “something has changed”.
A couples' journey from city to city is the focus of `Five Cities’. The story is composite of five vignettes, which allows it to jump across time with ease and to dissect each experience of each city. Themes of adapting to domestic life prevail in segments such as “you sewed a shirt wrong—you sewed the sleeve shut” and “I exhibited my maturity by cleaning with bleach”. These moments are countered with bizarre and disturbing sections such as “I put your hair in my mouth as a sign of respect and we wore sandles all the time because that's the kind of town it was” and “You came home one day and wordlessly removed all your hair”. Beneath the story presides a desperation and there is a sense of the couples' desire to escape a city whenever it becomes familiar. This sense of the temporary commences in the first vignette “”We slept on the floor” to the closing line of the final vignette “We slept the last night in a locked, disgendered bathroom”.
`Wife of Elijah' deals with a husband and father who “sometimes viewed the wife as a curse” and regarded his children “ungainly”. Each paragraph represents a large passing of time, the children being at school in one paragraph and two later growing up and leaving home. In this instance this efficiency is at detriment to the story; more detail would have benefited the piece that the spare nature of the prose does not give. However, there are moments of this, such as “The younger girl regressed and had to be sent away. Her last act in the house involved a baking sheet and a pair of blackened hands”.
At around forty pages, title story `Lake of Earth' is the longest piece in the book. It is a magnificently expansive and dystopian piece, where citizens have names such as “A” and “S”. The reader is introduced to the protagonist immediately, who is cuffed to a boat which floats towards an unknown island. Finding a small civilisation in a large building nearby, they are thrown into a strange and feral world, one defined by a conflict between two characters called The Woman and A. The story is interrupted by mini stories rendered in italics, that could be taken for folk-tales. Throughout the language is beautiful and passes such as “A naked male body hangs unassisted in the air. Someone enters completely swaddled in baggy realms of cloth, pulls a scalpel from one of the folds, and begins to work” remain in the mind's eye long after reading.
`The Lake, The Other Lake, and All the Blood Gone Out of Him' reads as an evocative and richly textured prose poem, that recalls the precision and imagery of T E Hulme. It is photographic in its description, such as in the first line: “The water passes long and wide. I float and watch the pillars of earth that have risen from the lakebed”. This beginning deftly brings the reader to the focal point of the piece: the water. It is used as a device to take the reader around the scenery of the world within. It “drifts me to the steep banks” and takes the narrator to the water's end. The volta of the piece occurs when “The filthy children” who are implied to have followed the narrator are introduced to the story. The tension builds as they follow, crowd around the protagonist and push them to the shore. The ending is incredibly powerful “I scream and scream. I hear them roar until I am empty, under, and gone”.
As implied by the title, `Characteristics of Aberrational Cultic Movements' deals with religious themes. The narrator depicts a prophet, Martin, introducing his fellow citizens to “The Book of Light” a text that “Details the true nature of light – how it acts”. The citizens interest and fear of this news increases when Martin “explains how light will become deadly”. Scared, the citizens are left under the growing influence of Martin who has inexplicable power over them. They move to a building to shield themselves from the light. There is a harrowing scene when Martin asks for a volunteer to make a martyr of themselves and to walk into the light when it comes. Chillingly, the people in the house learn of the sacrifices' fate and hear their screams outside. The situation from here gets more desperate. Food runs out and they start to suspect Martin, who evades big questions asked of him such as about God; they start to long for the old world.
Wallace Stevens' `Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' is brought to mind in `This is How We Move through Homes' in the way it ruminates, in small sections of text, around one topic. The subject here are houses and their surroundings, beautifully depicted as “the common, puncturing memory of a gate: metal scraping on metal, the bottom right corner digging into dirt, a sharp real”.
Lake of Earth is an expansive, surprising collection of stories that, formally and otherwise, deals with extremities. A key strength of the book is VanDenBerg's prose style, which has a brevity that caries his stories efficiently and evocatively; also impressive is the manner in which the writer renders the fantastical the usual.
