Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

by Danielle Dutton

Coffee House Press 2024

The English critic Cyril Connelly was a little cracked about lemurs. Jorge Luis Borges and William Blake shared an affinity for the tiger. Kafka memorably made an ape talk, a mouse sing. Julio Cortazar introduced generations of readers to that strange, smiling salamander, the axolotl. And in the creative world of surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, it was a hyena that kept showing up. Considering her otherworldly Self-Portrait, it isn’t the mirage of a rocking horse floating behind the sitter that commands your attention; it’s the striped and uddered hyena approaching her outstretched hand.

Carrington was a writer, too, and it’s fitting that the same painting—a crop of it, affording all of Carrington in her blue chair, but only one half of the hyena’s face—graces the cover of her Complete Stories. It’s an uneven collection, but readers still owe it to Danielle Dutton—co-founder of Dorothy, the small press who published that volume—for the fresh opportunity to appreciate such striking pieces as “The Debutante,” in which the young eponymous narrator convinces (yes) a hyena to don her dress and diamonds and take her place at her very own coming-out ball. It’s the kind of story that will remind you, in all its fabulistic simplicity, of the best of Aesop (deliciously smacking, too, of Tom Sawyer persuading Ben Rogers to whitewash the fence). But more than anything, right now the story is reminiscent of Dutton herself.

Not that Dutton is known for desperately shrinking from or violently shirking social expectation (Carrington’s debutante gives the maid up to that end; the hyena, who gobbles the poor girl, is careful to preserve the skin of her face to wear as a mask). No, Dutton the Private Person remains a mystery. But Dutton the Author, maskless hero of a lyrical avant-garde, has written a new book that is certain to challenge assumptions about contemporary American literature.

Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other—a quietly audacious array of stories, essays, and hybrid forms—kicks off with a big nod to the surrealists, whose project it has been Dutton’s lot to study and promote and now, in her own style, to extend. In “Prairie,” the first of the book’s four sections, Dutton wastes no time going for broke on the apparently absurd. “It’s the hottest week in the world,” she writes in a story titled “Nocturne”:

In Sweden a forest fire has crossed the Arctic Circle. In Oman the overnight low is 120 degrees. Near a small German town famous for its asparagus, long-deserted bombs are exploding beneath the trees. And just downstream in Czechia a hunger stone has emerged in the Elbe, the water having hit a record low. “If you see me, weep,” it reads, the words etched desperately four centuries before.

In the same story, a duck gets decapitated; its head falls off; then its feet run off. A mother sits behind the wheel of an automobile, her child in tow, “driving upside down on the bottom of the planet.” A topsy-turvy world, no doubt. Could it be closer to our own than we realize?

Everyone knows what prairies are. The typical mental image depicts lots of grass and lots of sky. What’s weird to find out—uncanny as any of Dutton’s stories—is that the majority of America’s prairie habitats vanished more than fifty years ago. Enormous agricultural developments, mostly, stand in their place. Yet floating somewhere in America’s collective unconscious is an undying vision of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Good art helps us understand the world, even when its picture departs from reality. Dutton’s horror-show truths resonate precisely because they confront some of our most persistent falsehoods.

The entirety of the book’s second section, “Dresses,” is given over to the sixteen-page “Sixty-Six Dresses I Have Read.” An experiment in associative collage, it is, at first glance, no more and no less than a constellation of quotations. But like an essay by Eliot Weinberger, a jazzy canvas by Stuart Davis, or one of Joseph Cornell’s crowded shadow boxes, such an orderly chaos must be evaluated on the strength of its selections and their arrangement. Ranging from the eighth volume of Samuel Pepys’ diary and Jean Toomer’s Cane to The Scarlet Letter and Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book, Dutton deploys a series of sixty-six passages on, about, or sometimes merely glancing at, dresses in literature. Some of these, such as “The morning road air was like a new dress,” are only a single sentence long. Others were lifted from poems: appropriately, the whole of the piece looks and sounds like a poem. Without skipping to the end (where a full works cited provides some grounding for an ensuing sense of dislocation), the succession of apparently untethered sentiments, observations, quips, and generally memorable lines makes for a strange, sometimes disarming reading experience, a silent fireworks in the form of fortuitous juxtaposition. Dutton is a daring writer with a careful eye who will make you wish another, similarly talented writer—Melville did this in his prologue to Moby-Dick—could get out there and furnish analogous pieces on sandwiches or shag carpets.

The book’s third section, “Art,” is an extended essay on ekphrasis, a typically scholarly kind of writing that takes a specific work of art as its subject matter. (Melville, who allowed Ishmael to pause thoughtfully in front of a vast mess of a canvas hanging on a wall inside the Spouter Inn, continues to be an instructive aid.) Titled “A Picture Held Us Captive,” Dutton’s essay, a survey of ekphrastic writings in her own work and that of others, ironically makes for the book’s least captivating reading. The problem, thankfully, isn’t that Dutton traffics in the mind-numbing jargon of Lit. Theory. It’s simply that the spirit of the piece is too expository, its tenor at odds with the book’s preceding sections. In the thrilling company of unadorned surrealism and synergetic modernism, “Art” introduces an unwelcome incongruence.

The fourth and final section, “Other,” offers its own highs and lows. A miscellany of slighter pieces, it’s a grab bag that stretches to encompass everything from a wonderful essay on Thomas de Quincey and a navel-gazing essay on writing (really, on “not writing”) to a hilarious little piece titled “Writing Advice” (which it assuredly is not) and a one-act play that will make you wish the book had ended twenty pages earlier.

Novelist David Mitchell once remarked that “a half-read book is a half-finished love affair.” Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is, like Carrington’s Complete Stories, an uneven collection. It should, still, be read all the way through. Its successes, not to be missed, are resounding successes, suggesting that even half of a book might be enough to fall in love with its author.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California