Unfinished: stories finished by
ART: Original art finished by Anne Austin Pearce. Also includes unfinished art by Pearce that readers are urged to finish.
"Lily Hoang is a daring writer because she attempts to make something new with each piece that she writes. She plays with form and sometimes applies compositional constraints. And she does amazing things with narrative voice." – William Walsh
"Hoang invited over twenty adventurous writers to submit unfinished stories that she then completed. Story fragments ranged from a few sentences to a few pages, and manifested in wildly different styles. "The breadth of range is impressive," wrote book critic Paul Constant, "some entries are science fiction, some are field guides for fictional birds, some are descriptions of fantastic, otherworldly museums." Authors of unfinished writing are Kate Bernheimer, Blake Butler, Beth Couture, Debra Di Blasi, Justin Dobbs, Trevor Dodge, Zach Dodson, Brian Evenson, Scott Garson, Carol Guess, Elizabeth Hildreth, John Madera, Ryan Manning, Michael Martone, Kelcey Parker, Ted Pelton, Kathleen Rooney, Davis Schneiderman, Michael Stewart, J.A. Tyler. "
Here’s the deal: we know from the publisher’s description of Unfinished, from interviews with Lily Hoang and the initial call for submissions on her blog, how this book came about. She asked writers to send her their “abandoned” stories. She would finish them. The authors of the abandoned and Hoang would edit them together or not. Then the collection would be published.
But before we talk about what became of these finished pieces, we have to address Unfinished’s paratexts: Gérard Genette’s concept that every text that surrounds the main-text of a book creates a frame for understanding it.
Within the framework of paratexts, there’s the peritext: information in and on the book (text on the cover, the spine, the title page) and the epitext: the text that orbits the book, outside of it (interviews, reviews, etc.)
In the forward (a peritext) to Unfinished, Hoang writes of the stories, “I have co-opted and taken [them] as my own.” That kind of ownership isn’t necessarily suggested on the cover (another peritext), which reads “stories finished by Lily Hoang.” And the epitexts that surround Unfinished create what will become a useful confusion about ownership and division: Hoang is listed as the sole author of the book in its bibliographic reference online at the Library of Congress, and she said in an interview about the book at the Kenyon Review blog, “They’re now my stories”. But some writers of the abandoned drafts refer differently to the stories published in the book: John Madera calls his “The Museum of Oddities and Eccentricities” a “collaborative story” on his blog and Kate Bernheimer wrote of her draft that became “Kitty’s Mystical Circus,”: “I felt Lily was giving something to me, not that I was giving something up.” To complicate matters further, a story from Unfinished, “So Cold & Far Away,” was included in William Walsh’s Re-Telling, where both Hoang and Rooney are listed as writers of the story—though Hoang’s name comes first.
But back to the peritext. Hoang’s name is printed at the top left-hand side of each page of the book in bold multi-colored text that matches the font of the story titles. This placement is just where readers expect the author’s name to be. The names of the authors who provided the abandoneds are listed underneath the titles of the stories, in parentheses and italicized in plain black text. Their names are preceded by the word “from.” So we have “An Expansion of Land” and underneath “(from Ryan Manning).” But the “from” means many things here, and seems a very deliberately used open word. “From” as starting point? Clearly. But what about the definition of “from” as removal or separation? The stories were “given” to Hoang, the words taken from the original authors and re-claimed by her, but as she says in the same Kenyon Review interview where she claimed ownership of the stories, “the abandoned story starts are still on the original writers’ hard drive somewhere, still unfinished.” Or maybe “from” is meant as distance between things: the distance between unfinished and finished, the distance between one writer’s voice and another’s. Or maybe, more importantly, it’s the distance that disappears once we begin reading, when we, the readers as collaborators with the finished text, quit obsessing about the goddamn paratexts and start thinking about the stories.
Yet introducing these stories is difficult. Do I write, Unfinished begins with “Your Ballad of Milt and Stanley”; or do I write Unfinished begins with Evenson and Hoang’s “Your Ballad of Milt and Stanley” (as was done in Hobart 12); or do I write Unfinished begins with Hoang and Evenson’s “Your Ballad of Milt and Stanley”; or do I write Unfinished begins with “’Your Ballad of Milt and Stanley’ from Brian Evenson” like the table of contents suggests? Does it matter?
Regardless, the choice to begin with something “from” Brian Evenson is important. Because there’s a particular sound, an unfolding, in all of Evenson’s works that seems recognizable, particular to him. Are we meant to look for the seams, to see what doesn’t sound Evenson-like right away? Is this a challenge?)
If it is, it’s perfect. Because the story is told in the second-person. The “you” is an active participant from the second line of story, “What made you think, even for an instant, that Stanley had a chance with the cool kids?” We, the readers, are accomplices to something terrible that will happen. To participate fully, we who become the “you” have to let go of trying to separate Evenson’s words from Hoang’s, because we have to play the role the story demands of us. As we proceed, our “you” morphs into a double of ourselves: a character reading the story written by the narrator: “For Christ sake. Haven’t you ever read a fucking short story before?” Then the “you” becomes another double of the character “Milt,” with the same failed career in the electronics department at Wal-Mart, and is admonished by the narrator, “Because rather than reading the story like a normal human being, you start seeing yourself in every character.” Soon after, our “you” wears the same clothes as Stanley, changes his/her electronics department nametag to “Stanley,” until finally we arrive where we began the story: we, the reader, have provided the impetus for some classroom violence against Stanley so affecting it can’t be described and the story ends. The identity of the reader, the “you”, quickly emerges and disappears, is buried and begotten beneath layers, like the very palimpsest of authorship that the paratexts of Unfinished create.
I think it’s only natural to talk about the seamlessness of these stories—how the reader can’t “feel” the textures of Hoang’s words separate from the authors of the abandoneds. But I think there are exposed seams and they are vital to the success of the book: the seam between reader and text that can only occur because we are at times fused: reader and character.
In almost every story, we, the readers, are asked to become characters; the narrators often speak to us. The narrator of “Birthday Cake”, who watches Samson, a man who has baked a cake and left it for someone to find while he hides, waiting to witness the intended recipient’s reaction, knows his thoughts. This narrator makes a remark to the reader in parentheses. And even though it’s a fairly mundane comment about the numbers of windows needed in a room “(preferably two, but one will do),” and arises out of Samson’s surveillance of his hiding place, this aside is still an important moment. The narrator knows we are watching the narrator watch Samson.
In the exquisite “So Cold & Far Away,” a kind of “translation” of the “Book of Ruth,” there’s a similar moment: “He is a quick one, this Boaz,” says the narrator, stepping outside of the narrative, clearly making a comment to the reader about Ruth’s husband, who realizes something’s wrong with Ruth, who has been hiding in a closet.
The narrator in “The Man and His Treasure” has the same moment of contact with the reader: “Remember: the treasure is tucked in the man’s corduroy jacket” we are reminded, about a never-explained treasure the man takes great pains to conceal.
When we, the readers, become characters, when we fuse this division of outside and inside, we create the story, just as the original writer of the abandoned drafts did, just as Lily Hoang did when she finished them.
But many of these stories are also about the failure to divide, the failure to blend. In “Whore’s Machine,” there’s a physical line that cannot be seen that separates two worlds, there’s a failed attempt of language, to separate the all-powerful force of an “it” into its disparate, there’s the world that “migrates towards the interior,” but is in constant, uncomfortable contact with the “she who does not belong.” In this story, what’s separate is what’s dangerous.
In “The Story of Two Sisters,” the removal of difference creates a despair. The physical and magical differences between two sisters, “Ana” and “May,” disappear at the end of the story. The girls “make a little slit on their forefingers and rub their blood together,” and in that decision to blend is the danger; it’s the moment when they abandon what separates them from everyone else in the world that they lose their individual power, even their names: they become “AnaMay.”
But there were moments when I stepped completely outside the stories. While reading “A Birder’s Guide to the Wibble-Wibble,” I couldn’t help but think about how wonderful it must’ve been to get this draft from Michael Stewart, to get to play with it. But even while I thought this, I never lost my connection to the kind of tension between counterparts that permeates the book (finished / unfinished; separate / fused). In the “Guide,” we learn that “Once you are quite certain you have sighted a Wibble-Wibble, you should approach while banging a pot with a wooden spoon in a variantly syncopated pattern. The Wibble-Wibble will dance, allowing you to venture closer.” Yet we are warned in the parenthetical editor’s note that follows that: “The Splotched Ruth may also dance like the Wibble-Wibble when approached this way, but if you come within a thirty-food diameter of it, it will attack. This is when the method is particularly important. There are no known survivors of a Splotched Ruth wound.”
And there’s more still; certain stories seem to comment on the process of making the book. In “Eight Ball,” three co-workers at a department store make a film; one of the actors, Kyle, says after seeing the finished product, “It’s totally perfect.” But Zane, who directed the film, says, “It was my vision, not yours… It’s shit. You made it shit.” Then there’s the mission of the Museum of Oddities and Eccentricities, in the story of the same name, which states, among other things, that it exists to “encourage and develop the study of dead starts and false ends.” If we aren’t supposed to see these two statements as meta-remarks, the first as a self-conscious comment on Hoang’s process, the latter as a kind of declarative goal of the project, well then I’ll eat my suncovers.
After twenty-one stories, Unfinished ends with an image of a puzzle piece and the words “finished,” just as the cover of the book shows the negative image of a similar puzzle piece, and the words, “unfinished.” The visual metaphor of the process that created the book is represented beautifully by Anne Austin Pearce’s collaborations with artists (some professional, one 9 years old). Many of the thirty artworks show their finishing boldly: the layers of authorship we can’t see in the stories are made manifest in the art." - Jess Stoner
"Lily Hoang is daring writer. I initially wrote “young and daring” but realized that Lily Hoang’s daring on the page is not a quality related to her (relative) youth. Lily Hoang is a daring writer because she attempts to make something new with each piece that she writes. She plays with form and sometimes applies compositional constraints. And she does amazing things with narrative voice.
Lily’s latest project is a large-scale collaboration with multiple writers. In May 2009 she issued a call for unfinished manuscripts, contacting more than twenty writers and asking them to send along their abandoned story ideas. She proposed to complete their story remnants: “I basically told them, ‘Send me your trash.’”
The resulting collaborations with Brian Evenson, Michael Martone, Kathleen Rooney, Zach Dodson, Kate Bernheimer, Ted Pelton, Debra Di Blasi, and others will be collected as Unfinished, forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press. I saw Lily read the Evenson-started story (“Your Ballad of Milt & Stanley”) at the &Now Conference last fall in Buffalo and was blown away but its structure and humor, and I just read the equally impressive collaborations with Dodson and Rooney (which is featured in the new issue of Make).
Here’s a Q&A with Lily Hoang about this unique collaborative writing project.
You approached a number of writers who are known to be prolific. I would see those writers as finishers and imagine that any unfinished manuscripts in their files would be absolutely unfinishable. Was that part of the challenge for you?
- Yes and no. I’ll start with the no part first: I have dozens of stories and novels on my hard drive and my notebooks that I simply abandoned, not because they weren’t good, per se, but because I couldn’t find my entry into the narrative. I imagined all these other writers–because they are prolific–were probably in the same position. In many ways, I asked other people for their “trash,” thinking it would motivate me to finish my own abandoned stories.
But yes, of course, I wanted the challenge of finishing what other writers didn’t or couldn’t, but I didn’t see it as a conquest. More than anything, I wanted to play. I didn’t think of the story starts I got as “unfinishable.” They were all finishable. They were all great story starts, but they were things their original authors had abandoned for any number of reasons. It was more like I was taking on stray pets than anything else.
Why did you want to begin collaborating on stories in progress–especially stories that had been all but abandoned by their initial authors?
- I used to teach at a college, and when I taught, I couldn’t write. I used summers as writing time. When last summer (09) rolled around, I didn’t have any project I was keen to start. A month or two earlier, I’d joked about swapping unfinished novels with a friend and we’d finish them for each other. Whereas I was joking when I suggested it, the idea of finishing someone else’s work became appealing.
So I started to send some emails to see if anyone would even respond, and people did! Writers I love and respect generously gave me their unfinished stories, many of which I considered better than anything I could have written on my own.
Without naming names, were there any writers who declined your request to collaborate? Or can you describe any negative or qualified responses to your query?
- There were many writers who declined my request, though they declined by not responding. I did notice, however, that I had a disproportionate number of men offer me their story starts. I had to make a concerted effort to contact women to make the collection even somewhat balanced. I don’t want to make any kind of hypothesis about this gender divide and writing, but there is something to be said here.
Did you find that some of these stories were unfinished because of specific flaws? What kind of prescriptive work did you do to finish these stories? Was the revisions process entirely addition or was there some subtraction involved?
- No, none of these stories were unfinished because they were flawed. They were all promising story starts. I abandon plenty of promising story (and novel) starts, and not necessarily because they’re flawed. Writers abandon stories for a range of reasons. I don’t want to speak for the writers in this collection, but I can say that most of the story/novel starts I “throw out” are trashed because either I can’t the right voice and/or form or I don’t think the voice and/or form I’ve chosen can be sustained. I don’t think of these as flaws though. I’d prefer to think that the decision to stop a project shows insight, that the writer is patient enough to not push, etc.
Most of the story starts I received were really short, some just a sentence or a phrase, some a paragraph or two. Only in a couple instances did I receive more than a finished page, and these were the most challenging stories to finish. These stories had established both voice and form but no plot. I didn’t do “prescriptive” work on them though. I just picked up where the original author left off. I literally finished what they started.
But it was a long process going from their story starts to a finished story. There was a lot of addition, obviously, but also substantial subtraction. My goal was to keep the original author’s voice, style, and narrative as best I could. Nonetheless, these story starts were given to me with the freedom to modify, and so I did. I did a lot of renovations: removing extraneous words, adding more words, changing the narrative voice, changing the narrative as a whole, etc. On the whole though, almost all of the authors were happy with the end product.
What were the biggest surprises in the process?
- How easy and fun it was to finish other people’s stories! I conceived of this project as an extended writing exercise. I wanted the constraint of another writer’s voice, style, story, etc. I expected it to be difficult, but I found that because I was familiar with almost all of these writers, the process was fun. If anything, I did a lot more playing than working!
You play with form and often use compositional constraints in your storytelling. How did you apply this approach to these unfinished manuscripts?
- All of my books have some kind of constraint to them, and with this book, the constraint was to maintain authenticity to the original authors’ voice, style, and substance. This is a fairly common writing exercise. I’ve given it to my fiction students: take a story (usually a canonical story) and add something–a few paragraphs or change the ending–to it while maintaining the author’s voice and style. I’ve done the same thing, only with living writers and unfinished stories. The concept is the same though.
Can you talk about the title of the collection, Unfinished? Do you see the completed stories as still, somehow, unfinished? (As if these orphaned texts will always be unfinished.)
- I called the collection Unfinished because the abandoned story starts are still on the original writers’ hard drive somewhere, still unfinished. I’ve finished their stories, but they’re now my stories. Even though I tried to maintain the original author’s integrity, in the end, these stories are mine. I hope the reader can’t tell where one author ends and I start, but I can tell and so can the other writers. So I’ve offered these stories one possible ending, one possible finishing, but they will all remain ultimately unfinished, until the original author finishes them.
Do you feel the project changed you as a writer? If so, in what way(s)?
- Whereas I don’t necessarily feel changed, the project did challenge me as a writer. For instance, most of my other writing is overtly fabulist. I have some grounding in realism, but the ties are loose at best. With these unfinished stories, however, I had to work with what the original authors gave me. So if a story was fabulist and/or conceptual, I was comfortable, even though I still had to negotiate plot, character, etc. If a story was realist and/or traditional, however, I had to work within those specific constraints. The challenge was part of the fun.
Did you have similar feeling(s) in completing this manuscript as you did with your previous books?
- That’s a really great question, especially considering the title is Unfinished. I always have a rough outline before I begin writing. I write towards a goal, whether it’s a certain development in narrative or a decided number of chapters. This book was no different. I knew I wanted 21 stories. My first book had 21 chapters, so I’ve come to have a sentimental attachment to the number.
When I finished this book, it felt more decisive than when I finished my first book, which felt like groping through darkness. Finishing Unfinished felt like finishing something unfinishable." - Interview by William Walsh
Lily Hoang, Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008)
"Besides being a powerful novella with an emotional heft that weighs you down with sadness, with the burden of a woman’s history, a woman calling herself “little girl,” Lily Hoang’s Changing is also a puzzle, a game, a manual, and, through some kind of magic, an oracle. Actually, that last part isn’t true because the fluff of hocus pocus is not the stuff of great fiction. In fact, Changing doesn’t provide definitive answers so much as it asks more questions, creates doubts and uncertainty; it provokes, prods, and befuddles the reader. As the narrator explains in “Viewing,” she’s sick of giving “answers so easy & I / want you to look at this I mean / really look at this & from these / stories find your own future.”Reading Changing you might consider starting at the end, with the novella’s appendices, where you’ll find a “Letter of Introduction & Instruction” and “Handouts.” Or you could, like me, begin at the beginning and try to figure out for yourself exactly what is going on. If you see yourself opting for the latter, you might wish to stop reading this review and immediately pick up a copy of the book from Fairy Tale Review Press.
The novella uses the form of the I Ching’s hexagrams as a structural device. Divided into the 64 hexagrams, the text itself mimics the symbol’s form, as it’s broken up into “Yang” sections that run margin to margin and “Yin” sections that are divided in half. This experimental structuring, however, is not simply a fancy frame, but an energetic way of allowing the text to virtually continually change. Borrowing an idea developed by Alice Fulton in her essay “Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions,” Changing is “fractal.” Here every section is as complex as the larger piece from which it’s derived, is full of infinite nesting patterns where digression, disruption, and disintegration counteract conventional notions of continuity.
The I Ching translates as the “Book of Changes” and Hoang’s use of the active verb derivation of change for her title suggests in an even stronger way movement, and lack of fixity, lack of permanence. Like fractal forms, her prose fragments exist in a paradoxical space of movement and stasis. Another interesting device (one that I usually find annoyingly self-conscious and twee) in Changing is the universal use of ampersands. Here its curvilinear aspect acts as a kind of connective tissue to the text fragment’s angularity. Very smart that.
Without giving too much away (one of the pleasures of reading this book is piecing together its threads), Changing is a meditation on what gets lost in translation. Throughout the refractive narrative, the “storyteller” points to the inadequacies of various translators’ translations, mistranslations really, and their concomitant interpretations of the hexagrams. She writes of the “[t]ranslator translating & I not / liking it,” and in the hexagram “Innocence,” she shares the burden of her responsibility:
Translators translating for this one telling me how the innocent often befall misfortune & even though I don’t understand I don’t get it I try to translate au- thenticaly [sic] to authenticate texts of straight & broken lines to give fate.Hoang’s novella is a collection of tiny time capsules. At times it reads as a kind of textual family photo album, each fragment a snapshot from the narrator’s life. Most of the memories are anguished, but some are joyous, even whimsical. Here is one of my favorite passages from the book:
Memory of bathtub filled & me pretending I’m a mermaid & me pretending to sing the Siren’s song even though I’m only four & I don’t really know what the song is I make it up & me pretending I’m the little mermaid only with out such red hair & me splashing up side of tub as if it’s a rock & me seeing water rise higher & higher & me not wanting to make a mess in the bath but still wanting to be a mermaid until a chin cracking open on porcelain & water being ruby redPassages like this (and there are many others like it in Changing) beautifully navigate through childhood fantasy while allowing submerged pain to unexpectedly rise to the surface. In Changing, we find reflections on how one is shaped by circumstances, by memories. Here images collapse together, are obscured by contradictory feelings. Here time moves “differently than / straight & so leader leading to- / day will be gone & even perse- / verance can’t change it & even / being great won’t change it…”There’s so much that my review hasn’t even touched on: the novella’s wonderful repetitions, the bouncing back and forth between “flatland” and the “city of heat,” its numerous interpolations of the Jack and Jill tale, its passages that tumble breathtakingly along. This is a book meant to be reread until the various fragmented memories and stories in Changing finally intertwine, then mesh, then cohere into a captivating story of love, illness, regret, sadness, betrayal, yearning, doubt, and fear. That said, it’s also a book meant (after picking a number out of a cup) to be read at random with each individual story offering direction, illumination for the reader’s—the seeker’s—path. Read this book. It will stretch you." - John Madera"Admittedly, I occasionally look to the back cover of a publication to give me pointers on how others might have read the book that I am reading. This often happens when I am not completely sure about how I “should” be reading. Take for instance, Lily Hoang’s experimental “fairy tale,” Changing, which is described in this way: “At once a fairy tale, a fortune, and a translation told through the I Ching, Vietnamese-American author Lily Hoang’s CHANGING is a ghostly and miniature novel. Both mysterious and lucid at once, the book follows Little Girl down a century-old path into her family’s story. Changing is Little Girl’s fate, and in CHANGING she finds an unsettling, beautiful home. Like a topsy-turvy horoscope writer, Hoang weaves a modern novella into the classical form of the I Ching. In glassine sentences, fragmented and new, Jack and Jill fall down the hill over and over again in intricate and ancient patterns. Here is a wonder story for 21st century America. Here is a calligraphic patchwork of sadness.” While the description seems clear enough, one knows that there will be a challenge levied upon the reader when the phrase “mysterious and lucid” is used to describe the text. Indeed, the “fairytale” does not operate in a realist fashion, proceeding along a relatively linear trajectory. Instead, the text jumps from one narrative configuration to the next, but there still seems to be a rough geometry, as each page possesses textual blocks. Having read Lily Hoang’s Parabola prior to this point, I was well aware of the mathematical way in which her work tends to be structured. In Parabola, the title already clues the reader into the way that the novel will appear as a kind of boomerang. With Changing, Hoang structures it in relation to the I Ching, which employed 64 hexagrams in its arrangement. As such, the updated “fairy tale” does possess 64 sections that each seem to mimic the ideographic nature of the I Ching. It is difficult to describe exactly what this looks like, but suffice it to say that on some pages there are six separately blocked sections in two columns with three “text boxes” each, where it is confusing to think about whether to read “downward” or “across.” Because each “text box” is already so fragmented, it almost doesn’t matter what direction you read. Not all pages have six different text boxes, some have three, others have five, but all are in blocked form and each seems to exist independently of the others. When taken together though, strands do begin to emerge.
While one of the immediate impulses is also to re-envision the “fairy tale,” Hoang seems content with the metaphorical nature of what the fairy tale provides. While the description at the back does make mention of Hoang’s Vietnamese heritage, there is very little reference to that except in the form of indirect and oblique references. For instance, “Mother & father coming here from the country of heat from the country that was their home coming here to a land without their language a cold land & Mother & Father bowing heads complicity dreaming”. “The country of heat” might refer to Vietnam given its tropical climate. Their migration to “a cold land” already suggests the challenges they might face. Another block explains, “That my mother & father don’t speak the language fluently that they take insults from strangers with regularity like pills like medicine swallowing without water like humility like theirs doesn’t need lubricant”. The updated fairy tale is very invested though in the question of translation and if we are to take the possibility that the “narrator” of Changing is indeed someone facing the challenges of assimilation, the fairy tale structure serves as an entire metaphor for such acculturative obstacles, that language is itself a process of Othering and we see this element all throughout the fragmented narrative: “Translator translating this Prevading & me with my humility & embarrassment not knowing what this word Prevading could mean & me searching dictionaries & maybe it’s misspelled or simply the wrong word”. If we understand the “narrator’s” parents as suffering due to their lack of English fluency it would seem vital for the “narrator” to establish a link with English that would allow to use it in such a way as to overcome its power to Other not only her, but her parents as well. Family is a larger motivation as it recurs over and over again; brothers and sister appear repeatedly throughout, and the mother “character” seems to endure a cancer illness that leaves the “narrator” struggling to find her bearings. Other portions of the text seem to invoke a more experimental aesthetic; one block reads: “Return: point a to point a to point a…” and another reads “When I grow up, I want to be a _______ or a _______ or a _______ or a _______ or a ______ but never in my life had I wanted to be a ________ or a ________ & yet that is what I am”. Fred Wah and Myung Mi Kim has used similar techniques in their poetry to leave the reader to “fill in the blacks” themselves. The other major “fairy tale element” is the repetitive motif of “Jack and Jill” which become a riffing device for Hoang; one characteristic riff is this one: “Jill holding the pail & water sloshing & Jill asking Jack to help & Jack saying I thought you’re Ms Independent & Jill saying Of course I am Jack but this is really heavy & I think I might & Jack stepping in front of Jill & Jill falling down & the pail no longer containing & Jill with her head hit & Jack running off & Jill dreaming dreams of seven men no taller than her knees & Jill dreaming dreams of a man with hair yellow & fine & dreaming dreams of a life without Jack”. What is of course interesting here is that the Jack & Jill fable is retold from the perspective of a ruptured relationship and placed in a feminist context. It also has a somewhat serious undertone in that it disrupts the playfulness of the rhyme for a scene of domestic violence in some sense.
The I Ching was supposedly an oracular text, a way to find order out of seemingly random events, and one wonders what sort of predictions that Changing provides the reader. Hoang does not make it clear for us and that I believe is part of the fun. Towards the conclusion of the novella, Hoang intrudes in the form of the translator, “If you are still confused, dear readers, here are more guidelines, but they are unimportant. This can be read any way you want, but I dream of you friend standing & thinking your questions needing resolve & I dream of you extending your arm into the cup & removing a sheath of paper & this is what you read & this is all you read until your next question”. Clearly, Hoang understands the importance of the reader in making meaning out of text, but those meanings can be derived independently of writerly intent. To a certain extent, this makes Changing an absolutely interactive and liberating text. I think taking a very flexible mindset when reading this novella is the only way to make “sense of it” as the translator doesn’t ask us to read it in any one way. There is no handholding, no specific signposts. If I were to invoke my own fairy tale in this review it is to liken this text to a positivistic reading of Hansel and Gretel, where there is no need to follow the bread crumbs, because you can make the bread crumbs out of the hexagrams that appear in the novella. You will find your own way out of the forest, eventually that is. In this respect, I agree with the blurb on the back cover (to be circular if only momentarily), that the text is both mysterious and lucid. I especially appreciate the use of the word “glassine” to describe, as glassine is a type of translucent paper that can be made opaque in the presence of dyes, both transparent then and possibly not. On this seemingly paradoxical terrain, Changing is its own chameleonic force." - Stephen Hong Sohn
"I love this novel. Yes, I like this book and I am impressed by it, but more importantly, I love it.
Let me explain: this book is unique, touching, intimate. It almost feels autobiographical, but it is not. On page after page Hoang's riffs on Jack and Jill and other nursery rhymes, on romantic relationships, on cruelty and tenderness, on family, feel so intimate that to not love them would seem inhumane.
Changing, a 2009 Pen America Award Winner, is based on the ancient Chinese uber-text I-Ching or Book of Changes. The book is composed of 64 hexagrams, each one with six stacked horizontal lines. Some lines are composed of just one dash (—) and some are two (--). The unbroken lines are associated with yang, the creative principle, and the broken with yin, the receptive principle.
For our purposes, it is enough to know that these 64 hexagrams refer to combinations of concrete natural phenomena; namely earth, mountain, water, wind, thunder, fire, swamp, and heaven. For each hexagram, the first three lines refer to one of these phenomena and the second three refer to another. (This is how we get the number 64; there are 64 such possible combinations.) Water, as an example, is composed of a broken line followed by a solid line and another broken line, respectively.
To use the I-Ching for divination, you ask a question then randomly pick a number. Studying that hexagram should help you understand your question better. In an appendix at the end of the book, Lily says that she wants the book to be read that way. For all practical purposes, we can assume that the book need not be read sequentially.
Hoang's book is a new translation of the I-Ching. And it works by, for each hexagram, riffing off of its implications for two pages. (i.e. Each chapter is two pages.) A chapter is divided into six blocks of text, three on one page and three on the other. Some of these blocks are broken into two columns and others are completely solid. They correspond to the broken or solid lines in the hexagrams.
To see what Lily does with three hexagrams, go here. Note that there are six text blocks under each hexagram, and that in the book a page break takes place between the third and the fourth ones. Since it is easilly accessible on the net, I will use this excerpt as an example of what happens throughout the book. I will concentrate on the first one, "Obstruction."
The most direct discussion of the hexagram itself is in the text block that begins "This hexagram is not..." Since heaven is the ultimate creative force (with its three solid lines) and earth the ultimate receptive one (with its three broken lines), it would seem that this hexagram would be water. But it is not: it is obstruction or barricade. Hoang imagines the Princess Jill living in a castle behind a moat. Where did this come from? Throughout the book, in every discussion of a hexagram, Lily goes into Jack and Jill at one point. What's more, other nursery rhymes and fairy tales are quoted. So here, Jill is a princess, evoking all sorts of other tales. This quoting while riffing is very similar to what many jazz artists do, who, while soloing, "quote" the melodies of other songs as a playful and generative act.
This riffing and quoting occurs throughout this excerpt and throughout the book. Each chapter is composed of more than six riffs on the title coming from different imagist, allegorical, and conceptual frameworks. For an example of an allegory, look at the text block beginning "That us lovers..." The whole piece is about the narrator's inability to play chess well and, by implication, the lover's "clean" ability. This is an allegory about the narrator's difficulty with bringing intense emotional scenes (what else could the chess game suggest other than arguments, stressful decisions, an inability to be decisive?) to a conclusion. Perhaps they tend to fester.
Other text blocks under this hexagram are equally interesting. If we remember that with the bottom three lines we are dealing with ultimate receptivity, the block beginning "Impossible for the great..." becomes fascinating. It is a paean to the Taoist idea that the insignificant and nonfunctional (the traditional example is of a severely bent tree) will not be hurt. Here we see how crafty and impossible to catch are the small ones. The very nature of ultimate receptivity implies a strength, an ability to take powerful pressure and yet still remain. The total obstruction of the receptive is impossible (and this is also in keeping with the Yin Yang philosophy) no matter how hard anyone tries.
In the long text block beginning "Memory of the city..." Lily works the notion of water and rain as obstruction once again. Using conjunctions, repetition, and agrammatical structures she causes us to plunge down the text block like heavy rainwater. And it ends with the rye comment "before we're real stuck." The playfulness in this section is quite typical. There is a bouyancy to this novel in spite of its many tragic elements: cancer, growing old, homophobia, racism, breaking from family, and so on.
The playfulness, perhaps, comes from the the conception or intuition that animates the novel, the use of the I-Ching— coupled with the wildly free, agrammatical style. What's more, the play seems inexhaustible. Each chapter could be discussed for hours in terms of how Lily is riffing off of the hexagram. In the sections of the hexagram "Obstruction," she deals with memory, fear, sadness, definitions, Heaven, Earth, small vs. great, family, translating, allegory, and housing. All in two pages!
What's more, this intricately textured novel is not dense. There is so much room to breathe, so much tenderness — the mother lying next to a sick little girl and asking her to give the illness to the mother, and the little girl not wanting to get her mother sick; lovers hearing "how sounds move in groups to our ears"; & Jill walking "into a forest & there she sang with rabbits & birds & a very charming prince overheard melody. And there is tremendous pain — cancer and chemotherapy, racist comments aimed at the little girl and her parents, love affairs breaking apart, a young man almost completely rejected by his family because of being a homosexual. Each of these, returned to again and again under different hexagrams, causes us to read each text block in at least two ways: one in relation to the hexagram it is under, and the other to the other text blocks under different hexagrams that deal with the same issue.
I love this novel because of its tenderness, its playfulness, its ability to look at some of the most horrible aspects of experience yet not despair. To read this novel and inhabit its world is to feel that almost anything can happen, and it might be horrible. It also might be beautiful. But in that very randomness is the possibility for a a spaciousness and openness that is the source of endurance, perseverance, play, and good fortune." - Jefferson Hansen
"Lily Hoang has created something truly unique and altogether fantastic (in nearly every sense of the word) with this book.
I find this a hard book to really talk about. It’s perhaps best described as a book of oscillations, in craft and syntax as well as meaning and direction. It’s a book that circles in on itself as well as outward, swelling upward like an explosion while sinking into the depths like a whirlpool. Deafening in its unsuspecting force, but also at times in its silence.
This is a book that raises big questions (Are we to believe in fate? If so how seriously do we (should we) take it?)) while keeping itself grounded with an authentic, enjoyable poignancy and honesty that is generated in part from autobiographical themes that seem to course through a lot of Lily’s work. It’s an experiemental endeavor while at the same time struggling with its roots as a retelling of ancient fortunes.
Most importantly, it’s a delicate yet strong book; beautiful and ugly but always enjoyable." - R. Sanford
Lily Hoang, Parabola (Chiasmus Press, 2008)"The simple act of a butterfly flapping its wings, and our journey begins. A tracing of modern day mythologies, Parabola weaves through genres, mathematical formulas, and photographs, all while following the curve of a parabola, stopping at various points to pick up strands of intersections or stories. Lily Hoang's debut novel offers readers tender snapshots of an Asian American girl coming-of-age juxtaposed with the Pythagorean belief in numerology placed right beside a physical manifestation of dark matter contrasted with interactive IQ, personality, and psychological tests. Smart, challenging, sad, and kind, by the end of Parabola, you will have moved through every emotion, and you will end right where you began, with that simple act of a butterfly flapping its wings."
"A work of proportion, grace, tenderness, ferocity. The easy intelligence and genuine audacity of Lily Hoang’s Parabola makes it a wonderful and disarming reading experience." — Carole Maso
"Lily Hoang’s Parabola deploys a calculus of composition that always already approaches the absolute of… Or I was going to say something like that, but this book exhausts the conceits of mathematics, physics, heavenly bodies, and the human heart. The story problems have all been proven; the figures figured. Parabola is a tour de form with force multiplied further. Elegant vision is the constant and ever-changing. And imaginary numbers are the least part of the imagination evident here, and everywhere, in this sublimely sublime book." — Michael Martone
"Lily Hoang's Parabola is the kind of text that solicits a rereading, but you aren't dutifully bound to return to its beginning. Instead, you can rewind to the middle and branch out both forward and backward, deciphering chapters that match up along the Y-axis of the titular structure.
This novel — or un-novel, since it's the winner of Chiasmus Press' Un-Doing the Novel Contest — stops at disparate intersections to tell its stories. Hoang has created an experimental work that communicates with the reader through fragmentary exchange. Whereas some postmodern narratives feel stale due to their headiness, Parabola manages to include heart and humor within an innovative, interactive storytelling style. It chronicles the inner life of a first-generation American daughter of Vietnamese immigrants. The resulting so-called coming-of-age story explores the gap between expectations vs. reality, incorporating numerology, myth, astronomy, and other mystical wonders in the process.
Reminiscent of Nabokov's Pale Fire, Parabola features similarly beautiful and elaborate word games, such as an entire paragraph alliterated with the letter B that corresponds to quadratic form. Hoang's novel has a similarly dizzying effect, frequently compelling you to flip from one chapter to a parallel one 100 pages prior. But it stands alone, challenging categorization by presenting holes filled with words (surrounded by black matter) and playful collaborative components like personality tests and even a Word Find." - Michelle Broder Van Dyke
While reading the book [Parabola] I was fascinated by the juxtapositions between histories of astronomy, first person narratives, and seemingly private voices that we may find in a journal (among others). Am I correct in observing that you are playing with the similarities and differences between the close and the distant?- Yes and no. I don't necessarily see a difference between the two. I consciously chose the subject for each chapter more as things I considered to be mythologies than questions of distance and closeness.
Many of my favorite authors use geometric shapes as the basis for plots. The Brazilian Osman Lins, for instance, works with a spiral in his novel AVALOVARA. What interests you in the geometric shape of parabolas? Is this related to your interest in various 'scientific' tests that purport to measure intelligence, personality, and so on?
I first conceived of this novel as one that would explore the occult & religion as mythologies, but as I started researching, I found a lot about numerology and mathematics. Since I was little, I wanted to be a scientist or a mathematician (I'm not quite sure why I'm not, to be completely honest!) so I decided to use the superficial constraint of the form of a parabola to shape this text. Again, while researching, I came to understand that there were so many more mythologies out there than just the occult & religion. As such, I expanded the scope of my novel. I wanted to create a work that dialogued within itself. As for the shape of the text, I wanted to mimic the traditional triangular structure of a novel, but I wanted to invert it. A parabola was a perfect fit! I love interactive novels. I think the various tests that appear throughout the text add a new level of interactivity. Ideally, readers would actually take some of the tests. Additionally, I know many people (myself included) who put a great deal of weight on personality tests, IQ, and psychology. I see these as modern-day myths, a new form of "religion" and a method of categorization. To me, IQ seems to be especially troubling, particularly because of the mass sterilization in the early to mid 20th century based on the Army Beta IQ test. I based some of the questions on my test on that original test.
At each point of the 'X' axis, there are two different stories, one as we come down the left side of the parabola and one when we go up the right. Many of the two points are in direct dialogue, most particularly number 5, which is a continuation of the same story. Sometimes, however, there does not seem to be as much dialogue. For instance 9 juxtaposes a history of astronomy with what appears to be an actual intelligence test. How do you see the interaction of the 'X' and 'Y'?
As for Chapter 9, personal equation is one of those really fantastic scientific truths that has a whole mythology to it. First off, I should explain what it is for your readers who haven't read my book. Personal equation essentially says that everyone sees things slightly differently because of our reaction time to light. The whole myth or story to it is that an Astronomer Royal fired one of his assistants because his data was incorrect. Quite a while later, it was discovered that the assistant's data was, in fact, correct. The slight aberration in numbers came only because he had a different reaction time to light. Then, as I was researching personal equation, I found a great scientific article that tied reaction time to a person's IQ. I came up with the thesis that IQ then has something to do with reaction time, which is almost arbitrary, if that makes any sense. So both chapter 9's are in fact related. I actually thought that the chapter 9's had more of a correlation than some of the others. I did my best to have each chapter reflect its opposite chapter. Some of the reflections are harder to see than others, which I can readily admit is my fault.
I was charmed by the many places where you worked stories into stories, almost like the wooden Russian dolls. I am thinking most specifically of the second Chapter 3. Is this related in any way to your interest in layering text (scene here to the right)?- I'm not quite sure I understand about stories within stories. I can say, though, that I work best with little pieces. Especially now, I feel like I have a hard time writing anything more than 500 words long. But when writing Parabola, I was working on my MFA, and it was expected that you would produce "short stories," as one would traditionally think of short stories. Most of the chapters in here are my attempt to "cheat" the system by putting little pieces next to each other & seeing what that juxtaposition does. As for the layering of the text, I used it twice, well, three times technically. The first two instances, with short shorts inside geometric shapes, were my attempt to show how easily truths are covered & to mirror the jumbled nature of this world. It's hard to distinguish what is what. I simply wanted to reflect that feeling of almost helplessness. The third instance - the dark matter story - should be fairly obvious. I tried to have as much fun as possible with this chapter, once I came up with the basic conceit. I have to give all the credit to Tom Philips's A Humument though. It was his idea to create a new text by highlighting an original text. What I found, however, was that by covering 95% of my original Chapter 6 did create an entirely new text. Again though, I was just having some fun!
This is the big question, but your book I think demands it: Some will probably claim that your book does not cohere. How would you answer such a criticism?- I could go into all the small way this novel coheres (please do keep in mind that this book won the Chiasmus Press Un-Doing the Novel Contest), but I'm not sure it's really necessary. There are themes that tie this together, and the mathematical structure of it makes coherence a lot easier to achieve. I think the more interesting question would be why it's a novel & why I've chosen to call it a novel. & I suppose I'll turn it back over to you now, readers. Do you think it's a novel? Does it cohere? Should it cohere? & finally, what exactly is coherence & should that be a function of a novel?" - Interview with Jefferson Hansen
Lily Hoang, The Evolutionary Revolution, Les Figues Press, 2010."What if evolution was decided by committee and revolution by mere chance? What if man was a subspecies? What if man, as a subspecies, was woman, with tiny red wings on her thighs and pasted shut eyes? What if she flew in the sky or slept on the moon, and what if the earth was a saltless water world filled with forgetful, vengeful two-headed mermen? Welcome to The Evolutionary Revolution, a fabulist story of sense-making for the 21st century. In this twinning tale of freak shows and prophets, tract homes and impending doom, award-winning author Lily Hoang collapses time and narrative into a brilliant novel of beginnings and ends, where sentences undo each other and opposites don’t cancel each other out. As Anna Joy Springer notes in the book’s introduction, “In literature, as sometimes in life, it’s a scary kind of fun to be manipulated by a pretty girl, who changes the game on a whim.”
"This is a book about evolution, about a failed evolutionary revolution, and in a layering deftly handled by one of the new queens of fairy tale play, the text itself also evolves and the language is used for revolt: "A long time ago, long before man walked upright, the earth was filled with water. It was a sphere of pure ocean. During this era, man flew in the atmosphere with tiny wings attached to her thighs. Back then, man as a sub-species was kind." There are plenty of books that sturdily house a story within a story within a story but Lily Hoang has taken it upon herself to evolve this conceptual foundation, making her stories in The Evolutionary Revolution the stories of the stories inside the stories told by the stories to break the stories and build new stories. This is, to put it mildly, a book that is doing something masterful and glorious: "She was gentle, never provoking arguments, never killing other beings for sustenance, or even pleasure. It’s said that man’s language didn’t account for cruelty. Acts of aggression were nameless and silent, as if they never existed. During the day, man flew over the ocean, playfully chattering about this or that, and at night, she slept on the moon."When The Evolutionary Revolution opens it proposes to be about several stories all tied together in tandem, and it doesn't take Hoang very long to get us mixed into and caring about all of these narratives that are, in reality, mere threads into a new beginning – a beginning that we must surpass in order to realize that Hoang is telling the same story and all different stories and no story at all. This book evolves and blooms as we turn its pages, and the flower that opens is a magnificent beast: "The Evolution Council was unhappy when man started using her eyes again. They had done a great deal for man when she decided to seal her eyes so long ago. They had, in fact, convened a special meeting just to help man cope with the loss of one of her most valuable sense."There is obvious depth and complexity in Hoang’s book, the narrative divides and multiplies, turns away and turns back on itself; however, it is in the simplicity of her language that Hoang achieves so much: "Back before the daughter was born, the father waited until his wife was asleep, and when he saw her breath move in the calm of silence, he bent his mouth close to the fetus. His hand cradled her body and whispered a story into her unformed ears." There are moments when the arc of The Evolutionary Revolution teeters on the edge of philosophical cliffs or environmental diatribes but Hoang steers her ship artfully and carefully way from those falls by basic language and gentle moves, just at you worry the journey is lost: "He told her that two decades later, they would meet again, and he would forgive her for killing him, that she should be unafraid. He told her she needed to maintain strength, to build her focus to help her brothers, that not all revolutions end with death. He told her this as a preface to the story, a private conversation between father and daughter."In this moment of literary time, when the broken narrative and fragmented through-line are so often being employed by writers and, seemingly, against readers, Lily Hoang’s The Evolutionary Revolution is breaking and un-breaking language alongside her readers. Hoang is carrying us within her earthquake, within her tumbled rearrangement of the world and her unrelenting manipulations of these fairy tale elements that we have always held and cradled, until we realize just what terrors and haunts Hoang has us holding so dearly to our chests." - J.A. Tyler
"Before starting this book I thought, "No, Lily could not possibly do it again." She has written two terrific books in the last couple years, Parabola (Chiasmus) and Changing (Fairy Tale Press). Finally, Les Figues has just come out with The Evolutionary Revolution, a wild fabulist book where a number of remarkable things happen, among them females living in the sky and eating on the fertile moon at night. So far in my reading, it would seem she did it again.
Since I am not finished with the book, I would just like to share some of Lily's fine prose at this point. She writes in very short, half-page to two-page chapters that are often discontinuous. In one, entitled "Merman's Dream," these sentences appear:
"Emily is caught in a merman's dream... Once, she tried to sing, to comfort herself, but her voice came out as soft cashmere... Then, out of nowhere, she hears him singing. His dream is a muted song and Emily uses her fingers to draw out the lyrics, which she must translate into Man, and when she has, she will be able to talk to the merman... Emily doesn't know about the merman's vengeful nature. She doesn't know that the merman isn't dreaming at all, that he's letting her think he's dreaming so she can waste the little breath she has left in interpretation. He has no problem killing little angels... He laughs broadly. Emily hears this. She thinks it's another clue to help in her escape."This parable about interpretation, which I take to suggest that interpretation often has absolute limits beyond which is profound misunderstanding, is part of a larger narrative in the book about mermen and women with wings on their thighs and wax on the eyes. It's a remarkably inventive book, sentence after sentence right on. I am looking forward to the rest." - Jefferson Hansen
"Micro-chapters that can stand alone or be read in a linear fashion, Lily Hoang's The Evolutionary Revolution is a book of sly stepping stones, stepping away from the world as it is now. The world as it is now is assumed by many to be out of our hands, something unstable, something that both affects us yet is not within our reach to fix or improve. Hoang's chapters have grandiose names such as “The Imperial Council,” “Man Emerging” and “How the Sea Became Salty,” for the times beg for at least grounded, surefooted beginnings -- even if many find themselves wading in obscurity after a story unfolds. Hoang creates lush yet monstrous, hybridized versions of humanity disguised as imaginative fables, somewhere between the familiar and unrecognizable. They are lovely, weirdly knowledgeable in their goal to un-educate (i.e. perhaps, one needs to un-teach the self before the self is capable of learning) the reader regarding treatment for any sanctioned story's future.
There are so many possibilities in The Evolutionary Revolution - choices that provide the reader with adventurous scenarios, concocting piece by piece a sense of renewal and strength upon finishing the text. Hoang brands complex, coiled fable into memory with ease:
'Of course, back then, man lived underwater with all the other species of human, and because water was translucent and the sun's brightness never waned, every dream was a daydream, bright with anticipation and hope. It must have been the sunlight that tainted their dreams, giving their tree, their meeting place, a golden hue, and it must have been all that vivid light that made these men at this very first meeting decide that man should no longer live with other humans, that man should take to the atmosphere, and at night, to hide from the luminous brilliance of the sun, man should harvest a home on the moon.'
One can see how addictive these scenes can become. With each chapter, it becomes easier to locate at least one line that is like nectar to an anxious hummingbird, instructive and wise (“There is no hero, no savior”). Phrases like “Back then” and investigations into what “man” used to be and no longer is prevail. This subject matter never ceases to be of interest to those searching for what they truly are made of - especially in times when despite being flooded with catchy technological trends, remnants of pseudo-knowledge and emerging Wikipedias galore, there are still so many heavy questions left unanswered regarding human nature and the origin of the species.
Hoang's text refers to a timeless epoch that is both ours and not ours simultaneously -- one where many are more obviously influenced by moral storytelling, twisted fable, myth handed down generation to generation. Hoang hypnotizes, deliberately repeating introductory phrases, such as “A long time ago...” or “It is said...” or “At the end of this winding road...” or “The truth is...” or “Back before...” or “One of those early days...” or “At this point in time...” or “There was a time...”. It is difficult to avoid feeling that a poignant conclusion should be reached at the end of each chapter, yet oftentimes, Hoang ends chapters magically, abruptly - as if fairy dust was an intrinsic part of this readerly equation.
This ineffable energy that Hoang illuminates can also be found in current film and music, as well as in other more classic samples of literature and art. For instance, consider accessible works such as Pablo Picasso's La joie de vivre (1946) or Marc Chagall's Der Spaziergang (1917). Humanity has an ongoing rapport with bliss, illusion and auspicious escapism. A more modern version of this fixation is present in Jay-Z's hit “Young Forever”:
So we livin' life like a video /
Where the sun is always out and you never get old /
And the champagne is always cold /
And the music is always good /
And the pretty girls just happen to stop by in the hoodJay-Z and Hoang both have a talent for fabricating thriving metaphors for this life force. Both share hopes of basking in an eternal sun, yet these euphorias are most rooted in the examined life. Perhaps, only the examined life has the capacity to be recognized as phenomenal or “bright with anticipation and hope.” The world's foundation is made of daydreams, and what a shame it would be to deny the art and literature of today the right to feel uplifted. Hoang explains:
'Unlike storytellers, who had a utilitarian function, poets weren't very useful. It was the poets' duty, their task and purpose, to retain the stories of the past in the various cavities of their bodies. Poets were created with many empty sacs. Rather than real livers or lungs, they survived on the memory of these organs. Their bodies were essentially empty pockets, a hollow skeleton holding up skin.'
It can be argued that it is the poet's role and inclination to preserve and protect stories such as those produced in The Evolutionary Revolution. The poet is most equipped to build a palace from nothing but memory alone." - Jacquelyn Davis
"As an admitted follower of Lily Hoang’s already admirable body of work, young as it is but growing at an almost obscenely prolific pace, the expectations I approach each new work with have yet to be disappointed.
One of the most intriguing aspects of her work is the way in which her authorial tone from book to book manages to evolve and shift as one might hope it would while retaining similarities in confidence, intelligence and whimsy that never let the reader forget Hoang’s presence behind the scenes. There’s an ever-present slyness and impression of trickery, the execution of which is brilliant in that Hoang manages to walk the line between solely emphasizing the performance itself or that behind-the-scenes finesse; both are important, and the sense of play always gives way to a cohesive focus and momentum that leaves no doubt as to how seriously one should take the themes of the book. The word ‘whimsy’ seems to be one I always cling to when pondering Hoang’s works, but it does feel a bit imprecise as I don’t feel it communicates the proper weight of this book, as well as her others. While Hoang indeed seems to have mastered this kind of playfulness reminiscent of the classic fairy tales, I don’t feel I can emphasize enough how well she pushes this playfulness toward something larger and arguably more lasting; let there be no mistake when questioning how much intellectual stunt work is going on in this novel.
To me, the most enjoyable element in ‘The Evolutionary Revolution’ is the constant, open-ended criticisms of memory and nostalgia, the way we (as a person, as a society, as a culture, as a nation, etc.) look backward and interpret not only the past as it stands objectively, but how we even deal with the act of remembering itself, how we question or do not question ‘facts’ and other types of cultural givens that affect how we interact and behave. There’s quite a bit going on here that makes one think about ‘where we’ve come from’ on so many levels and in so many voices that the reader will no doubt find herself trying to answer them long after the book ends. This doesn’t even scratch the very large surface of Hoang’s delving into the nature of stories and fairly tales in particular–where the monsters come from, who has to fight them and how, and why? What makes a hero, if a ‘hero’ can really exist at all? The power of all of this is the questioning; Hoang seems to stop short of pushing forth too many answers, which to this me allows her to take a place comfortably alongside the reader rather than some place above, a trait I admire quite a bit.
My only qualm with the book is in not feeling certain how to feel about the rather overt, ‘preachy’ messages regarding issues such as global warming. If these are indeed as ‘preachy’ as they seem at times, I think this is a bit disappointing and something I think the book could have / should have been better than putting forth. If they were intended to be more self-conscious, I probably would have liked them to be more clearly so, and to play with that in a larger and more complex way. Overall there were small places I felt the book could have been slimmed a bit, a few sections that wandered perhaps a bit too far into an awkwardness that seemed slightly too aimless, but these were few and far between. The quirks here nearly always create the appropriate space for themselves and never use up any credit they haven’t earned.
This book, like the rest of Hoang’s books is certainly worth your pennies, and more importantly your time." - White Walls / Black Ink
"The latest release from Lily Hoang, The Evolutionary Revolution is a history unto itself. Both a fable and a myth (“Myth is about the past, fable is about the future.”), this title revolves around stories of an ancient, watery Earth populated by “subspecies,” one of which is man, although she does not physically resemble modern homo sapiens. (I know I’ve used “man” and “she” together. It’s an oft-employed technique from the book, one of many contradictions of language that whirl about and simply shrug off their own existences, adding to the intricate mystery and progression of Hoang’s work.)
This old Earth shares a deep bond with contemporary society in the form of a mysterious and power-endowed family, the Sylphs, including a two-headed boy, Eliot and Sylvester, a thigh-winged girl, Chloe, and other curious beings. This is one of The Evolutionary Revolution’s greatest strengths: the rich yet subtle characterizations and interactions twist in ways exotic and unexpected. I simply could not put the book down, beginning to form a very strong bond with these characters and the fate of their world(s).
It’s difficult to explain too much about the Sylphs, the Imperial Council, mermen, or the beast with three thousand sets of eyes without spoiling some of Hoang’s experimental techniques. Here we can see a short example of her myth-unfolding style, the casual yet profound tone she gives to this history:
'Just one day of physical separation, and the Sylph boys are losing their collective memory. Their singular memories – that’s fine – but anything they experienced together is beginning to erase. Their earliest memory is the day they chose to be conjoined. Their father, a man they barely remembered even when they were double boys, appeared in their small, unformed ideas and persuaded them to hold each other tight. They were, at this point, not even fetuses. They had no body, and even as ideas, they were scattered, barely coherent, but they remember their father’s words and when they were given bodies, they held each other with such force, with such passion, that their bodies melted together.'There’s an uncanny depth to Hoang’s style, choppy and full like salty ocean waves (an image of relevance to the novel). At times, Hoang’s individual sentences seem daringly simple, but this effect only furthers her fable/myth motifs. The wider tapestry is voluptuous and exquisite, each small chapter ending on a note of poetic toast. The novel can feel more like a series of prose poems tied by a number of recurring narratives (which is appropriate, given Hoang’s status as a recipient of Chiasmus Press’s Un-Doing the Novel Contest). But like any good work of multiple narratives, the intermingled plotlines take a turn towards each other and the namesake event, a collision of ancient past, tumultuous present, and predestined future. The Evolutionary Revolution is a thoughtful and endearing work that will leave you dreaming in Hoang’s imaginative past for days." - Caleb Tankersley
"Is Lily Hoang's The Evolutionary Revolution" a "feminine feral" book, as a Naropa graduate student, Janna Plant, wrote to me today, towards: genre, an independent study... I've been reading it on a dark, spring-time, rainy afternoon, with the off-dazzle that comes from having said the word "mermen" aloud earlier in the day, and, in another context, "mermaid," then reading this, from a chapter called "The Extinction of Poets and Philosophers:"
"There was a time when all men lived in water. Back then, there were more than ten species of humans, some of whom have survived, such as men, mermen, and arguably, poets and storytellers. Many others have gone extinct."Poets can't handle the gravity, apparently. Or their gills rupture.
I've been mapping out the Summer Writing Program sentence/species class, and this feels useful. Also, Erin Morrill in her knickers and bra, in Oakland most recently, photographed in a gorgeous, startling and ruined landscape, in a bear/wolf/tiger wrestling mask.
How can I merge the studio practice of the body with a paragraph, in which the sentences lie down next to each other, exchanging their blood non-violently, all night*, but in a way that's guaranteed to kill them off by dawn? A sentence is an addict. You just have to open a novel written in the late nineteenth century, or anything written by Michael Ondaatje since 2001, to see it: the sentence, lying down forever, right there, on the ground, on the forest floor, on the carpet, barely breaking eye-contact with the one lying next to it, when you open the book to read." - Bhanu Kapil
"Struggling to review Lily Hoang’s The Evolutionary Revolution, I recently witnessed a confounding concert by Rufus Wainwright. How Wainwright’s enigmatic music connects with Hoang’s peculiar novel will grow more obvious. Trust me.
Rufus Wainwright is the child of two famous musicians: his mother was Kate McGarrigle (recently deceased and the mother of another popular musician, Rufus’s sister Martha Wainwright). His father is Loudon Wainwright III, folk singer who has fathered other musicians with other women (at least one I know of: with the Roches’ Suzzy Roche, the singer Lucy Wainwright Roche).
Over his career, and even within albums, Rufus’s music swerves theatrically from pop to ballad, from Baroque-flavored pop-opera to funky progressive. I’ve seen Rufus Wainwright perform many times, but this show presented a puzzler like I’ve never before paid $50 to witness.
We the audience were instructed not to respond (not to applaud, Rufus hoped—not to feel, I supposed) when Rufus entered, performed, and exited the first set. And so the lights dimmed and out funeral-marched Rufus, wearing a cape that married Count Chocula’s work outfit (for Gothic darkness) with the Duchess of York’s wedding dress (for length of train).
Performing solo, Rufus accompanied his singing with melodramatic piano. Although the music took a sophisticated poperatic stance on his mother’s death—and I’ve never buried a parent—it wasn’t the music that flummoxed me. Far from it. Much like reading Hoang: the writing itself is some of the clearest, plainly-structured prose I’ve ever encountered in a novel. In fact, having recently tossed aside Jose Saramago’s Blindness because the dialogue refuses quotation marks or paragraph breaks—and all prose contains innumerable comma splices and run-on sentences—processing Hoang’s language reminded the reading part of my brain of life’s simpler pleasures.
What perplexed me about Rufus’s performance was the eyes.
Looming behind Rufus and his grand piano was a screen showing sometimes one, sometimes two or three or more eyes…eyes looking vaguely human but strangely animalistic… almost like dangling tarantulas, lower lashes drooping more lushly than the top… eyes glistening with moisture… leaving me to wonder: is the moisture tears or some other indication of human emotion? ...or is moisture simply how any animal’s eyes work?... whose eyes are these; why even ask these questions; I just want to enjoy this work of art—why should I even care?!
When you read Hoang’s The Evolutionary Revolution, similarly prepare for a flummoxing. Darken the stage on which Hoang’s supposed drama will play. In fact, forget a simple dark stage with spare spotlight. Imagine a grey surreal landscape, drips and drabs of brilliant color smudged with black. Think painter Yves Tanguy’s 1942 “Indefinite Divisibility”—a suitable backdrop for the Earth in The Evolutionary Revolution, when our planet was no more than water and sky and the first few species populated it simply.
Back to those eyes, those inscrutable reptilian eyes, striking chords of human familiarity but insisting on bestiality. The Evolutionary Revolution melds mythology and fables with science fiction and fantasy. It requires readers to imagine a time when human-like creatures could fly—some modern-day human characters awake to find atavistic wings appended to their legs like little Mercurial propellers—and their extremities bore talons. Their eyes were cemented shut by mucus and hair-tangles… and, instead of sight, these proto-human creatures relied on senses such as (interpersonal) memory and (the crudest, most fairy-tale beginnings of) kindness. If painter analogies work well, try Hieronymous Bosch (1450–1516), whose technicolor Renaissance take on mythology and religiosity imbued human epiphany and torment with eerily contemporary skill.
As when I sat stone still at the concert, haunted by those eyes, you will feel the creatures of The Evolutionary Revolution haunting you. Hoang thrusts you into a world where pre-humans are more like creatures, gender warped or erased from your perspective. Before humans, “man” was identified by “she” or “her,” and instead of “mermaids” there were sexless “mermen” who, instead of charming and soothing, seduced with song and imprisoned and then tortured, killed, and/or ate the “men” they captured.
And like the concert of a skilled musician—confusing, unsettling, throwing you off with switches of genre, time signatures, mosaics of themes and images—this book will never let you settle into comfortable understanding… of its story, characters, even language itself. Overlapping genres constantly, Hoang wittily glides from fable to myth, from novel to intermittent stabs at something like personal essays (each chapter bears a title to headline the action or propose an abstraction to ponder). If prose writing had time signatures—describing not rhythm or pace but grounding you in verb tense or setting—then Hoang seems hell-bent on disorienting. The narrative bolts between present (with satiric nods to contemporary technology) and various stages of the past, when our civilization was still forming and our ruling forces perseverated over what to do with us. Here time elides, warps, blurs, and bedevils.
The mosaic of themes and images animates a cast of characters you might loosely call a family…one even more outrageous and far-flung to map out than a literal band of Wainwrights. Hoang’s tale begins with the conjoined twin boys Eliot and Sylvester Sylph, the sons of Mama Betty Sylph and Ralph Sylph. Here’s where reality flings far: Eliot and Sylvester Sylph have a sister named Sylvia, more prophet than human actually. Sylvia also has a twin sister, in another family, Chloe Henklemeyer…whose adopted mother is Susan Henklemeyer (also a prophet) and whose father/brother is one Stanley Henklemeyer, who was born…yes…Stanley Sylph. Bend your mind around the modern-day Sylph/Henklemeyer clan(s), where daughter Sylvia kills father Stanley before she was even born, when he commits suicide; where Stanley’s sister/other wife Susan brings him back to life, allowing him to save his conjoined sons (now separated, at least in their dream lives) from beyond the grave.
If you’re sensing Oedipal and Electra myths strewn together in a sloppy yet tightly-controlled stew, you know you’re struggling to swallow The Evolutionary Revolution. Just like I did.
How did I make sense of it all? I thought of it as one woman’s take on the modern-day tussle between evolution and literal Christianity, between science and religion, between rational thought and faith. It’s an emotionless, deliberate yoking together of binaries: using evolution to explain our shifting understanding of our bodies and souls and our place in the universe. Or, if you prefer: using mythical and fabulist writing to illustrate how man, long before our current scientific knowledge, first pondered concepts like evolution.
The concept now seems as elemental to me as… well… mourning one’s mother and playing out the love, angst, incestual drives, and anxiety associated with death. With poperatic piano articulating the language of loss. And a giant hovering eye to blink out the tears and highlight an artistic vision." - Matthew Katz
Excerpt:
A Caveat
We cannot be held responsible if some of these events are not quite in order, if some of the facts are slightly out of place. We did not live through this, and what few facts we do have are difficult to verify.
We have tried our best to make this clear and simple. We have tried very hard to reconstruct this history as it happened, but it’s impossible to do so without some errors so we apologize in advance, before it becomes too murky. We have tried, and while we hope that is enough, we’re afraid it isn’t, that the inevitability of the future is already set, that maybe the prophet wasn’t talking about the Evolutionary Revolution, that maybe the prophet was talking about something we can stop, if only we can get things right. We are trying. We’re trying very hard, but we can’t do it all on our own, if only we could have help, if only we could get you involved. We’re weak and few in number, but that does not mean that we do not try, lord only knows, it does not mean we do not continue trying.
A New Baby Boy
Stanley was born a single boy, but when he was in his Mama Sylph’s belly, he had a twin sister. The doctors didn’t know about them being attached, but his mama did. Mama Sylph picked out the name Sylvia for her. She loved the idea of twin babies, attached by a small piece of skin, little wrinkled blobs of baby attached like friends. It was her idea, them being attached like that, but Stanley didn’t like the idea of a sister so he made her disappear.
Sometime along the twenty-ninth week, fetus Sylvia disappeared from his mama’s belly. Mama Sylph was at the doctor’s office getting a sonogram. Both babies were there. They were holding their small hands. Mama Sylph swore she saw Stanley gentle rubbing Sylvia’s hand, soothing her, and then, just like that, Sylvia disappeared. No heart beat, no remains, nothing.
It wasn’t uncommon for fetuses to be miscarried, especially with a tentative pregnancy like Mrs. Sylph’s, fragile twins and all, but the doctor had never seen anything like this. There had to be remnants somewhere, bits of baby floating in Mrs. Sylph’s body somewhere, but there was nothing. There was nothing anywhere, almost as if Sylvia had never existed at all, almost as if someone had gone in and erased her from the manuscript, only it was more than just erasure. You can see the imprint of remains after erasure. No, it was more like someone had just hit the delete key while typing and had deleted all of Sylvia.
The doctor didn’t tell Mrs. Sylph about this sudden change in her body. He thought maybe it was in his own head, but later that night, he went over her file, and in all the other sonograms, there’s another small, distinct body. Up until she gave birth, Mrs. Sylph expected to have conjoined twins, and when just one small wrinkled glob of baby came out instead of two, and after it smashed its eyes and cried, suddenly, no one remembered he should have had a sister. Even the pictures forgot.
A Rumor Dispelled
The sea has not become any more or less salty since that one decisive moment. We would like to think differently, that eventually, we can actually correct the mistakes someone else made at some other point in time, but we can’t. This is the state of things. We must accept it. The sea is full of salt, and it will remain so until we can invent a mechanism to remove it, and even then, the mermen will make sure the memory of salt remains, if only as an afterthought, if only as a final act of revenge.
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