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A review by shimmer
Tongue Party by Sarah Rose Etter, Jess Larson
5.0
I recently had the pleasure and privilege of hearing Sarah Rose Etter read the title story from this collection, and now that I've read the book that story feels like the pivot point of the set. "Tongue Party" forces us, through an incredible turnabout midway through, to wonder about the implications of telling a story straight versus telling it through filters of metaphor and fantasy and suggestion, and to ask which story is "real." I don't want to spoil that powerful turn by explaining it here, but as perhaps the most literal, entirely realistic moment of the book it became a lens through which I read the rest, always aware both of the strange surface (eg, a father wearing a chicken mask to cover his grief, kidnapped dates locked in glass rooms, or a tide of washed up koalas) and of wondering what "real" experience such strangeness distorts or obscures. That made for exciting, provocative tensions between reader, writer, and text.
The strongest of these stories suggest a larger world their characters inhabit, rather than a discrete, contained storyworld. "Chicken Father," for one, complicates grief both within a family and socially at once, and "Husband Feeder" takes what in plain description might sound like too literal an image of consumption to take on the richness it eventually does through complications of gender, wealth, and culture. If anything, I would have liked to see that aspect of the collection pushed further, because a few moments felt like doors opened but not quite stepped through. Not because the stories lack anything as they are—far from it—but turning questions asked of the domestic onto other spheres, too, might have added another dimension.
"Koala Tide," for instance (and fair warning, bit of a spoiler), uses dead koalas washing ashore as the jarring, monkey's paw-esque fulfillment of childhood desires. It's a terrific story, building up then subverting readerly assumptions and expectations several times in its course. The koalas seem arbitrary as an animal, chosen perhaps for their cuteness or for the sound of their name, but koalas are also real, and endangered, and geographically specific, so a story about heaps of them dead on an ambiguous shoreline has implications beyond the aesthetic. Not that the story should be "about" endangered species or koala ecology or anything so didactic, but perhaps questions raised elsewhere in the collection about the realistic and the fantastic could have been engaged to ask not just how we use metaphor to make sense of experience but also where our particular metaphors come from and why our choice of them matters in a reader's world as much as a character's (particularly, perhaps, a reader who tends toward ecocritical reading and is a little obsessive about animals as metaphor. Ahem.)
The strongest of these stories suggest a larger world their characters inhabit, rather than a discrete, contained storyworld. "Chicken Father," for one, complicates grief both within a family and socially at once, and "Husband Feeder" takes what in plain description might sound like too literal an image of consumption to take on the richness it eventually does through complications of gender, wealth, and culture. If anything, I would have liked to see that aspect of the collection pushed further, because a few moments felt like doors opened but not quite stepped through. Not because the stories lack anything as they are—far from it—but turning questions asked of the domestic onto other spheres, too, might have added another dimension.
"Koala Tide," for instance (and fair warning, bit of a spoiler), uses dead koalas washing ashore as the jarring, monkey's paw-esque fulfillment of childhood desires. It's a terrific story, building up then subverting readerly assumptions and expectations several times in its course. The koalas seem arbitrary as an animal, chosen perhaps for their cuteness or for the sound of their name, but koalas are also real, and endangered, and geographically specific, so a story about heaps of them dead on an ambiguous shoreline has implications beyond the aesthetic. Not that the story should be "about" endangered species or koala ecology or anything so didactic, but perhaps questions raised elsewhere in the collection about the realistic and the fantastic could have been engaged to ask not just how we use metaphor to make sense of experience but also where our particular metaphors come from and why our choice of them matters in a reader's world as much as a character's (particularly, perhaps, a reader who tends toward ecocritical reading and is a little obsessive about animals as metaphor. Ahem.)