I’ve become something of a fan of this writers poetry very recently, so I was somewhat disappointed that the compelling premise in the end seemed undermined by the delivery. There may be a connection between the two reactions since I often felt like I was reading a long, extremely and sometimes tediously long, prose poem that tried to carry off the lyric style of a shorter poem in the more discursive interweaving of narrative prose. There were probably 2 dozen great lyric poems in here somewhere but that didn’t add up to a narrative lyricism, or a very good story. It reminded me at times of something like Gertrude Stein, another writer I admire but who tries to make long and opaque lyric poems masquerade as narrative.
To some degree it seems to me that this book is not really about a kidnapping at all, though that is how it is advertised. It is really much more about the impossibility and uncertainty and yet necessity of memory, as well as the impossibility, uncertainty and yet necessity of articulating those memories, contradictions that the prose style mirrors. The dominant mode is the subjunctive, which could be fine but in the end, everything is possible, or in doubt, and nothing seems really secure. The poetics of uncertainty finally makes it impossible to care about the author as a character in his own narrative, or to really feel much of anything for his kidnappers. Indeed, so extensive is the sense of doubt and uncertainty about memory and even the capacity of language that I found myself speculating on whether he had really been kidnapped at all. Being precise about one’s own lack of certainty, about one’s own sense of how even to speak about oneself, in the end can carry the reader for a few pages or 20, but not for an entire book. It’s too bad, because McCrae as a poet seems like an imagination to contend with.
Peter Kerry Powers 