Ascher/Straus, The Menaced Assassin,
McPherson; 2nd ed., 1989.
http://www.ascher-straus.com/the_menaced_assassin_38811.htm
The dazzling fusion of hard-boiled dialogue, psychological relativism and slapstick satire make The Menaced Assassin a postModern answer to Through the Looking Glass. Anti-heroine Celeste is an aspiring fashion designer, but first she must create an identity for herself, an identity she approaches through some "other zone" -- a mirror-world pieced together from old Hollywood movie plots, scenes out of sleazy crime novels and melodramas, ads in trashy magazines, fuzzy AM radio shows, and a stream of great overheard conversations.
"The novel's playful, nostalgic quality -- like remembering movie trivia, or guessing who gets the girl, who committed the murder -- keeps up its fast comic pace." -- Village Voice
Ascher/Straus, The Other Planet: A Novel of the
Future, McPherson, 2019. [1988.]
In this deliciously subversive novel the question is asked: Is it possible to live in the future?—andwhat would it mean to embrace the transformations created by every new thing, and at the same time to escape the depressing discrepancy between events that only happen and those which actually might?
For Valeria Florescu, the desirable pathway would lead through "a subtly coherent twining of adventures" in a personal quest for the "extraordinary." But when Valeria quits her job as research chemist at a large industrial laboratory, she discovers first that uncertainty is more than a law of particle physics. Almost immediately she encounters the contradictory allures of two attractive men: Liam Lenehan, whose mad passion for order takes the curious form of repairing obsolescence; and Humberto Vilanescu, alchemical entrepreneur and impresario of futurism. Against the claustrophobic inertia of well-meaning family members, Valeria is propelled by the magnetic promise of self-realization into adventures at supercharged Manhattan parties, orgies in postmodern condos, and tours through the decrepit wilderness of exurbia. And then, as the ruins of reality slip behind, she journeys toward the fulfillment of the ambitious yearnings of an electronic generation. . ..
“The Other Planet is one of the indispensable novels of the twentieth century, a complex and unsentimental examination of the tensions created by rapid social and technological change. Carefully constructed possibilities may be gleefully abandoned or lives that seem coherent in their design may be suddenly eclipsed by larger forces. Something sinister is still happening at the edges of perception, something both desirable and terrifying. In The Other Planet, the most common name given to that thing that inspires both longing and dread is ‘the future.’ . . . It is a journey through Ascher/Straus-world where film, TV, dreams, and brief conversations collide to create a hyperreal and moody landscape.” —from the foreword by Stephen Beachy
A growing sense of
unreality surrounds Valeria Florescu as a charismatic stranger
introduces her to the "real" world hidden behind the facade
of normal existence. Philosophical discourse and surrealistic
vignettes abound in this highly speculative novel. The writing team
of Ascher/Straus affect a style reminiscent of sf experimentalists
Stanislaw Lem and Samuel R. Delaney. This title is a marginal
purchase for large libraries. JC
"Ascher/Straus constantly force their readers to abandon expectations. In their later work, those expectations are foiled more subtly, and within structures that resemble more traditional plots, but whose ambiguities and multiple possibilities are all the more striking for that reason. In The Other Planet, Valeria is haunted by the sense that there's a completely different way to live, akin to living on another planet, a future that one can enter now, through sheer force of will. The Other Planet examines the ways the myth of the future creates a profound disillusionment and a yearning for the impossible. It critiques that myth while harboring no nostalgia for the forms that trap characters in the present, the habits of family and full-time employment. Valeria finds herself in a traditional romantic plot, receiving attentions from two radically different suitors. There's a nice, inarticulate working-class guy who's desperately in love with her versus a creepy evil genius-entrepreneur-rapist, Humberto Vilanescu, who offers her a part in the vague and improbable 'future' as an escape from the relentlessly barren present. 'We long for life to be like a waking dream, an adventure whose coherence, whose "plot" provides something akin to meaning,' Humberto tells her. It's exhausting, their need to resist a monotonous present rooted in an overly familiar past, and offering only the clichéd scripts of family, job, romance. "Mass agreement = History," Valeria's dying mother scrawls on a pad, unable to speak. 'It happens. Again and again. There's no resisting it, though it takes you by surprise every time. Now everyone is talking about marriage again....' Valeria's not having it either. The nice guy gets left behind without a trace of sentimentality for the contrived and narcissistic 'love' he offers as some emblem of what it is to be human. Human, as currently configured, is not OK. She journeys instead through Ascher/Straus-world, a world where film, TV, dreams, and brief conversations collide to create a hyperreal and moody landscape. ....Ascher/Straus have chosen their own canon and manifested that subjective history as a unique constellation. Ascher/Straus are a crossroads where Doctor X, Shadow of a Doubt, The Damned Don't Cry, and Lola Montes come together with the sort of 'European' fiction that involves an intellectual engagement with the world. Despite all the thinking that goes on in these books, they are never pretentious, boring, or incomprehensible and are consistently funny." --Stephen Beachy
McPherson & Company is an independent publisher that issues remarkable books of fiction at a snail's pace. In an unusual twist of the turtle and the hare fable, in which the snail stands for the turtle, McPherson novels connect with the future faster than novels not yet written. In 1988, McPherson released "The Other Planet," a novel by Ascher/Straus, written collaboratively by Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus, two dyed-in-the wool New Yorkers. The novel takes place in the idea-rich brain of a female protagonist with a Romanian last name. Her brain is so rich the ideas have to be divided between a number of characters, some of whom also have Romanian last names. These ideas ricochet all over the late 1950s, early 60s, between Long Island and Greenwich Village. The writing is deliberately color-field pointilist. For example: "As summer advanced to the point where a discerning eye could see a scorched orange in the green tunnels, Valeria went to more parties than there were days." One of the bearers of this bright prose is Humberto Villanescu, a mephistophelian character that might carry a plot if Ascher/Straus meant to have one. - Andrei Codrescu
https://www.codrescu.com/my-news/2018/8/11/rqroglk7ol4yzbdpdfd42xo0x82pp0
“Ascher/Straus
have translated a post-modern aesthetic into a pretty definitive
statement about the post-modern experience. [And] considering that a
whole generation of artists and intellectuals have been floundering
in it, trying to define it, describe it or run away from it, it’s
worth noting that Ascher/Straus pin it down as astutely as they do .
. . . ”
“. . . characters who can’t tell if their formless dread and existential ennui are inklings of impending apocalypse or the suppressed knowledge that civilization has already ended.
“[Valeria] is. . .
a post-modern Everywoman. All the other characters she meets. . .
habitually relate events in their own lives to scenes in their
favorite cult movies. I feel just like Marilyn Monroe in Niagara, a
woman will say, and then everyone debates the true meaning of the
film, until you notice that they never get back to what it all means
for the woman who said it.
“Even those who
don’t admit it recognize their dilemma. They sense that the arc of
the modern era has somehow fallen short of its goal, like work
stopping on a half-completed bridge, suspending them between the past
and the future. The future is out there, it’s potential, some of
them can feel the possibilities charging the torpid atmosphere of the
present, but they don’t know how to actualize it.
“In one scene, a
guy at a bar snorts, ‘Now I really have heard everything.’ The
bartender replies, ‘No you haven’t. There’s absolutely no limit
to the things you can hear. There’s absolutely no limit to things.
Things produce new things. Multiplication is the basic law of the
universe.’ (Remember, this is NYC.) The guy disagrees: ‘Stand in
one place long enough and everything that already exists will pass
you by. Sooner or later everything that already exists appears in the
mirror of waiting.’ But the bartender counters: ‘What we already
know exists may be infinite, but what about what we don’t know. . .
?’
“Valeria
experiences a moment that ‘was thick with nothing but itself: the
world a dark jam of impasses that added up to the here-and-now,
releasing the heady fragrance of the exact present, like the spice of
weeds in vacant lots or the cultivated wildness of basil and tomato
vines.’ She wonders ‘what it meant to say to become someone else.
But no one had ever done that. The self was a compact and porous mass
of habits and they never deserted anyone, completely or otherwise.
They simply ebbed and flowed over the years…(L)ife consisted of an
endless succession of deranged states, during each of which you were
convinced you’d awakened from something — till you felt yourself
waking up still one more time, looked back and realized you’d been
“deranged” again.’
“In this floating word, sex and romance are like the debris of a former reality to which the characters cling with a hopeless desperation.
“There is, in
fact, a surprising amount of sexual activity in this book, with a
strong undercurrent of kinky violence. . . .
“In The Other
Planet, the future is sparked by a mysterious stranger, Humberto
Vilanescu. Rich, foreign, partly messianic and partly
Mephistophelean, he’s a combination of the Aga Khan, Howard Hughes
and The Man Who Fell To Earth. He’s the distillation of money,
power, brains and high-tech futurism, which Ascher/Straus seem to be
offering as one Hobbesian way out of the post-modern doldrums. He
gathers about him a secretively corporatist hive of aimless
technicians like Valeria, and sets them to work constructing the
future.
“It’s an interesting and often challenging scenario. Not quite a futurist manifesto, but a suggestively equivocal counterbalance of dystopia and utopia.”--John Strausbaugh, New York Press
Ascher/Straus’s coauthored novel slips around its dreamily constructed narrative. The story nominally follows Valeria through her relationships with family, lovers, and acquaintances. But these are at times glancing and at other times porous. The lives of characters intersect with each other in indeterminate ways and movies broadcast on TV in the writerly equivalent of the Kuleshov Effect. But Ascher/Straus are aware of their structure providing the reader with the winking metacommentary: “Reality now had to compete with many realities.”
The ancillary stories – the recounting of midnight movies or of vague anecdotes – erupt into the primary narrative. Not explosively, but in a slow and steady channel of magma. The effect drives the narrative forward in a way reminiscent of J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. But Ascher/Straus present their narrative less jarringly, by letting episodic narratives subside and the main narrative return to prominence. The authors again provide metacommentary for their novel: “It was as if you were continually weaving a second life for yourself and this life was unavailable to you. Or as if, inside the first life, there were a pond, concealed by nothing more than forgetfulness, in which everything from the first life swam without its mask”
Valeria’s story traces the boundaries of human relationships in an age consumed by media. As Ascher/Straus imagine a future from the 1980s, they seem prescient. Even now the futurescape Valeria has helped create seems only a few years off with her prognostication that “WE DON’T WANT TO MEET CREATURES FROM ANOTHER PLANET. WE WANT TO BE CREATURES FROM ANOTHER PLANET!” - Nicholas Alexander Hayes
http://www.yourimpossiblevoice.com/review-the-other-planet-by-ascher-straus/
Ascher/Straus, Red Moon, Red Lake: Stories,
McPherson, 1988.
http://www.ascher-straus.com/red_moon_red_lake_38815.htm
These seven interlocking stories follow the lives of four friends into a locus of nightmare -- the elusive boundary that separates TV from the real world of shady streets, withering suburbs, anxious children, random murder and bizarre mutilation. It is a zone invaded by the private dialogue of impossibly cruel sitcoms, the zone known also as the American neighborhood. Here, in an unnamed coastal community, we meet the expatriated Californian, Pam; her strange brother, Rudi (dark genius, or patsy for a serial killer?); Pam's inertial husband, Ted; Pam's deranged and extended family; and Rudi's best friend, Donald Green, highway drifter and compulsive freeloader. It's a long summer of lost jobs, asinine anniversaries, strange encouters, and garrulous gossip. A summer etched by the lucid delirium wich marks the frustration of untempered striving. In short, it's another creation of tremendous sensual immediacy, exploded familiarity, and haunting perversity from the authors of The Other Planet and The Menaced Assassin.
Enter the laconic world of Ascher/Straus (the pseudonym for Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus, who wrote The Other Planet ) and everything comes into question. These seven interlocking stories evoke a hallucinatory world peopled by characters so alienated that their very identities are mysteries to each other. Is Pam's brother Rudi a serial killer? Is Rudi's best friend, Don, really his adversary? As their exurban neighborhood is menaced by a string of bizarre murders, these young adults become unmoored; they lose their jobs, their friends and lovers, they drift into states of lethargy. Style overshadows plotalthough the writing is uneven, it is invariably commanding. Vivid, imaginative, quirky images lend a precision to otherwise abstract themes: "His own theory is that maybe Rudi is just some sort of unhappy prehistoric throwback, if that's the right word. Maybe he was a kid who read a book about the Robber Barons and he got stuck on this idea of becoming one of those walruses with pinky rings who used to preside over board meetings like Roman emperors." Sophisticated readers will readily exchange the charted terrains of conventional fiction for the enigmatic adventures offered here. - Publishers Weekly
"Red Moon/Red Lake places the writing team of Ascher/Straus squarely in the forefront of post-modern literature. Cool and detached, the seven stories in this fascinating collection are deconstructions of reality, fragmented visions of life in a suburban hell.... Highly recommended." - Small Press Magazine
"The dreams and films reach their sinister and comic peak in Red Moon/Red Lake. This collection of stories follows a constellation of characters whose sense of coherence and plot is tied to monster movies, movies in which alien pods blow their seeds across suburban lawns, movies in which dark figures who hunger for living flesh haunt the dark spaces in between the shoddy houses of suburbs that seem to have been designed for nightmares to take place in. It's a feeling that pervades everyone and everything, so that in midsummer heat, under a blinding sun, Nora meets an old woman who speaks of how the cicadas are louder than ever before and the heat somehow darker, in a relentless monologue of horror. Nora thinks the old woman has lived too long: "Or had neither died nor survived the winter. A sort of corpse within which a tiny vocal kernel had sprouted, its roots on the other side." The old woman's daughter laughs and translates. 'What Ma means is that the air is dead and the trees are dead, and the sweat that pours off us gets filthier and fouler every year. Yet we stand out here and we keep talking and talking. We can't shut up....' Ascher/Straus-world is haunted by the belief that one's own story is composed of all the stories others tell us, even or especially those we'd rather avoid. As the most sinister possibilities eclipse the willful banality of these lives, Red Moon/Red Lake crests in the strange and complicated title story, as emotionally satisfying and dreadful as anything in contemporary fiction. ....Ascher/Straus have chosen their own canon and manifested that subjective history as a unique constellation. Ascher/Straus are a crossroads where Doctor X, Shadow of a Doubt, The Damned Don't Cry, and Lola Montes come together with the sort of 'European' fiction that involves an intellectual engagement with the world. Despite all the thinking that goes on in these books, they are never pretentious, boring, or incomprehensible and are consistently funny." --Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian
"To distinguish 'who wrote what' is to bow to someone else’s idea of authorship, no more acceptable than bowing to a narrow idea of what fiction can be. A long, invisible history of creating narrative outside traditional boundaries (of form, of publication, even of binding) is present in our four novels (Hank Forest's Party, ABC Street, The Menaced Assassin, The Other Planet) and the volume of related stories (Red Moon / Red Lake) that are traditionally published. In the late 70’s / early 80’s, largely in an art context, we created a series of novels we called SPACE NOVELS that used a variety of public spaces (from galleries to air fields) as bindings or structuring principles. Our idea was to create a new kind of un-bound novel, transparent and porous between writer and reader. Our early thinking about fiction, and art in general, particularly about its position between writer and reader and the ways in which the life of writer and reader (down to the ambient, intrusive event while reading or writing) can or cannot be included or suggested, has mutated over the years but never left us entirely. (ABC Street and Hank Forest's Party are its direct descendants.) That thinking and our love of the kind of philosophical narrative not thought to be 'American' has probably driven us out of the mainstream." - Ascher/Straus
Ascher/Straus, ABC Street, Green Integer, 2002.
http://www.ascher-straus.com/abc_street_38809.htm
Authors of The Menaced Assassin, The Other Planet and Red Moon/Red Lake, the noted collaborative team of Ascher/Straus contemplates the materials of the writer's life -- "what gets cannibalized into fiction but doesn't get treated as fiction itself" -- in this new work.
A novel that takes up the tasks of the journal, ABC Street can also be read as a journal that documents the materials in the novel, grounded in observations of daily life on a single street in Rockaway, New York, where Sheila and Dennis used to live.
...Ascher/Straus's oddly structured and quietly surreal novels have been interspersed with even more oddly structured and loudly experimental novels or novel-like things; it isn't surprising, therefore, the degree to which they remain unknown, despite the intelligence and vision that crackle from every page. they've resisted the primary mechanisms of corporate publishing, which are not so different form those of most indie publishing: the creation of a recognizable stylistic and marketing niche. Instead of capitulating to the cult of personality that drives literary production in America, they have obscured and undermined the idea of themselves. Their experimentalism has been playful and evolving, depending on the shifts in their own interests more than on the requirement to be consistently "experimental enough."...
Their most recent books are the two volumes of ABC Street (ABC Street and Hank Forest's Party), released by Green Integer and placing Ascher/Straus where they belong, alongside Stein, Wilde, Poe, Celine, and Michaux, in a line publishing "Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least." ABC Street combines the journal with the novel, a chronicle that isn't about the self that produces it but about the context that surrounds that self and about the act of chronicling itself. Its author, "Monica," is re-creating conversations that happen among constellations of characters who surround her, strictly realistic New Yorkers who seem only slightly less surreal than the characters of the previous books. Their dark sense of humor is familiar. Yvonne, herself the mother of a baby who's sucking up her life energy, confronts her destiny with words that say life stinks, a voice that says it doesn't matter: "Yvonne wants to know if Monica can figure Janey Hedges out. Janey's little one Joe Andy's not even a year old but she's got another one due in June! Janey's not stupid so why'd she need two nooses to kill herself?" Simultaneously, ABC Street sends out ripples that change our reading of the other Ascher/Straus books, blurring lines of memory and realism and imagination, while it forces us to confront the way writing itself, and the sorts of perception that drive writing, is a medium conducive only to very particular ways of understanding. Monica discovers that "what interest her as a chronicler has as little to do with what's ordinarily meant by realism as it does with what's called imagination." Chronicling is a form of editing, creating order and meaning out of disorderly experience. "But another path eludes both reader and editor, arriving in every text as if of its own free will." The chronicler's intentions go awry. Thinking and intending to write about one family, she ends up starting a book about people she hadn't thought about at all -- a collection of stories titled Red Moon/Red Lake. As much as the chronicles are about writing, however, they are even more about remembering, remembering through writing or at the edges of writing, and about the vast sea of unremembered, unchronicled, unknown events or non-events that surround the thin little stream of meaning we create with language. The two volumes of ABC Street explicitly raise questions about the function and intent of fiction and present themselves as models of something else: "a necessary aesthetic argument for a radically different basis for fiction, even more so than in the sense that every work of art is an argument for itself and against everything else."
Despite all the thinking that goes on in these books, they are never pretentious, boring, or incomprehensible, and are consistently funny. Ascher/Straus have chosen their own canon and manifested that subjective history as a unique constellation; they are a crossroads where Doctor X, Shadow of a Doubt, The Damned Don't Cry, and Lola Montes come together with the sort of "European" fiction that involves a devastating intellectual engagement with the world.... - Stephen Beachey
In April 1992 Sheila
Ascher and Dennis Straus wrote me to ask if I'd be willing to read a
manuscript of theirs, ABC Street. I suspect the manuscript arrived
soon thereafter, but in my files the next serious correspondence was
dated five years later, July 1997, at which time they sent me the
dedication to the book. Only this year (2001) did they send
photographs for the cover of the book now scheduled for 2002. My only
reaction is that Ascher/Straus must be the most patient couple in the
universe, having now waited nearly 10 years for their book to
appear—combined with the fact that another manuscript of theirs, to
have been issued as a early side-stapled book on the nascent Sun &
Moon Press in 1978, was never published!
These incidents are made even more ironic by the fact that, although Dennis and I have kept in fairly close touch by telephone over the years, I have never met Sheila or Dennis, but simply followed their migrations from Rockaway Park and Canaan, New York to Captiva Island, Florida through phone conversations and occasional correspondence.
Given their immense
patience, I thought it might be appropriate to at least indicate
through this short essay what I found so interesting about their
writing, particularly since a history has developed around this work
that makes it very appropriate to this year's thematic stitching of
My Year.
For despite the rather long relationship I have now had with Ascher/Straus, like the writing itself, it is a narrative without a coherent story. ABC Street is part of an ongoing project on which the two have been working since 1977, titled Monica's Chronicle, a day-by-day journal penned by the seemingly observant, but determinedly passive narrator, Monica. This chronicle alternates between intense depictions of the daily weather—evocative descriptions of the rain, snow, and sun Monica observes through her window and on her occasional walks—and the often gossipy comments of a large cast of characters Monica describes as "A Constellation," mostly lesbian women friends, and the various neighbors of what is obviously a location similar to Rockaway Park.
There are also
silences ("Days intervene, unwritten"), undated entries,
and sporadic ruminations on the nature of her writing activities.
There is a strong sense that in writing Monica is forgetting or, at
least, replacing the act of memory with the writing itself. If, as
Lyn Hejinian argued early in her career, "Writing Is an Aid to
Memory," in ABC Street "Writing isn't an aid to memory, but
a replacement for it." History, accordingly, is eaten up by the
narrator's acts, and as quickly becomes part of the ongoing snowfall
of words that pour from Monica's pen. Individuals and their
statements just as quickly are swallowed up into a kind of
nonjudgmental commentary.
Just as the
landscape Monica describes, the numerous human figures she portrays
often collide in the reader's mind as a jumble of abstract flesh.
Some families are so extended with sons and daughters, their best
friends, various lovers and boarders that, although on the "Monica's
Chronicle Website" created by the authors all characters are
listed, the reader loses sight of the individual, and ultimately can
hear only the chorus of communal voices, which is perhaps
appropriate, since all the choristers are themselves singing of one
another. Accordingly, although Monica can see Manhattan's Empire
State Tower from her window, ABC Street is a tale of small-town
living, a world in which everybody is somehow interrelated and
involved in each other's lives.
Yet unlike, say
Winesburg, Ohio or any of Sinclair Lewis's tales, ABC Street does not
comment on or evaluate—and only seldom satirizes— its characters.
Rather, they become somewhat flattened reporters of their own
destinies without an audience to coherently receive their messages.
As Monica describes her own conversation with one of the most
memorable figures of the book, Nancy St. Cloud:
It was windy and Nancy's navy blue wraparound skirt kept
blowing open in the middle of sentences. Every time she
reached down words got irretrievably whisked away across
the flat, dazzling surface littered all the way to the horizon
with sparkling bits of green, blue and amber bottle glass, so
Monica remembered the story as incoherent, though it may
not have been.
Unlike the utter
falsity of normalized fictions, accordingly, Ascher/Straus's
collaborative work is not just a collaboration between authors, but a
collaboration between characters and readers. As in our everyday
experiences, what we receive from one another is not always what has
been communicated—or even what each of us attempted to communicate.
People make their own conclusions and impact one another much as in
the old game of "Telephone," through incredibly garbled
readings of one another's lives by people they have never met.
Although the members
of the "constellation" have all had regular encounters with
Dr. DaVinci, a psychiatrist influenced by Wilhelm Reich, their
psychological interpretations of one another are most often mistaken
and motives are regularly confused or, as in Monica's encounter with
Nancy's handsome and charming husband, Andre, are represented in
multiple possibilities:
(1) Real, husbandly concern. (2) Enlisting the aid of a trust-
worthy friend who happens to be intruding in any case. (3)
Aligning himself with Monica's involuntary look of distress...
(4) Distancing himself (and not only in the eyes of others) from any
accusation of
complicity.
In short, in
Monica's chronicles of the world around her there are no answers and
relationships between people and events are at best tentative.
While normative
fiction carefully constructs a set of interrelated histories that
ultimately work together to present a vision of an individual or
community, Ascher/Straus' work, like the characters and events of
real life, keep their histories secret—even while attempting to
reveal them. Like the streets and lawns of this primarily wintertime
landscape, history is buried under an avalanche of information:
readings and misreadings, interpretations and interventions. As
Monica writes: "Our lost history is a daily panorama though not
necessarily a panorama of the everyday."
Despite the enormous joy of encountering this canvas of colorful characters, accordingly, the reader realizes that in Monica's chronicle there is no way to imaginatively reach out and touch these figures, nor any way to interweave their actions into a coherent or even consistent pattern. Writing is ink on paper, and any narrative, as much as it may seek mimesis, is as absolutely flat as unprimed canvas. At the end of Ascher/Straus's book, Monica closes her winter night's tale with the words:
February turns its sharp edge, black winter on the other side of
the page.
Not only is the tale
over, but the human beings it has mentioned have yet to appear, as
they stand in wait on the "other side of the page." -
Douglas Messerli
http://greeninteger.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-other-side-of-page-on-ascherstrauss.html
Ascher/Straus, Hank's Forest Party, Green
Integer, 2014.
http://www.ascher-straus.com/hank_forest_s_party_119739.htm
Hank Forest's Party continues to make ABC Street's tranquilly radical argument for the horizontal storytelling of life as it passes while asking itself fresh questions about time, memory and its own reasons for telling stories as it does. Unlike their previous Green Integer volume, ABC Street, the action of this fiction takes place entirely on ABC Street and the narrative circles the singular event of the title.
The two volumes of this outward-looking autobiography/novel/philosophical journal suggest a dedicated, life-long way of documenting life as fiction.
The authors have opened a channel into the background where the lives and places of the two ABC Street volumes are always forming and re-forming. The entire work, titled Monica's Chronicle, can be found at www.ascher-straus.com.
Hank Forest's Party is the latest volume of a collaborative project, part novel, part memoir, part philosophy, written by Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus and published under the name Ascher/Straus. The ongoing project Monica's Chronicle, begun in the 1970s, is a narrative of the process of narration. Narrator Monica records experiences of everyday life in a neighborhood in Rockaway Park, Queens, and weaves her notes through reflections and reinterpretations about the connections between experience, memory, and writing.
The framing event in Hank Forest's Party is the birthday of a little boy on Monica's block. The party overlaps with Monica's efforts to remember and write about it:
Monica enters Grete and Andy's new apartment, looks around memorizing. Carries this overly-fresh memory like a bright basin of water that's going to slosh and spill with every step. Keeps spilling throughout the day, till she gets home. Already in Grete and Andy's apartment she's wondering if there will be anything left to pour out at her desk, where writing replaces memory.
The question of how experiences become stories is a constant through line:
Thinking at the party (as if already not at the party) or at home later (as if still at the party) Monica wonders why one story chooses us and not another. Many-many-too-many stories are always buzzing about, but only one buzzes up and bites us.
The time and space of the story spill far beyond the party into the extended lives of the block's residents. Monica relays intimate back stories and day-to-day details that stack and overlap like the close-quartered living spaces of the block itself. She knows her neighbors' private hopes and disappointments, as if privy to their inner monologues:
Marriage to Andy Forest changed nothing. Very disappointing to Grete. Had assumed, without thinking much about it, that marriage to Andy Forest would change the balance of life in this house, but it didn't.
Other neighbors literally walk into Monica's narrative as she records the day's events from her front porch:
Pat Corcoran steps out of her front door through Monica's writing and says that Philip passed his exam and is already working: an apprentice splicer, on his way toward becoming a full-time splicer and hopefully even a master splicer like his father, John.
But that's not what she wants to talk about, she says. Something is bothering her and she has to talk about it.
Despite the story's inquisitive and intimate tone, we never learn much about Monica herself. She explores her ideas through the material of others' lives -- a filmmaker who never comes out from behind the camera. Some of the detachment comes through the accumulation of time -- Hank Forest's Party was written 25 years after the framing events. Periodically the story is preoccupied with what was left out or lost from the first notes:
Monica's notes say: "at her desk in the red room": but now, twenty-five years later, she doesn't remember (and doesn't see how there could have been space for) a desk in the red room.
Events circle back to Hank's party, even as years pass, couples split up or move away, and Hank himself is no longer a little boy. By the end, Monica seems no more certain about the nature of storytelling, though no less energized to keep interrogating it:
True or false: what's remembered is an impediment in the stream of what-doesn't-want-to-be-remembered. What-doesn't-want-to-be-remembered seeks forgetfulness by flowing as rapidly as it can around and through memory's rusting chassis where, twenty-plus years ago, it tore up railing and embankment and landed in the river just where it makes a beautiful bend out of town. - Mary Burger
Ascher/Straus, Letter to an Unknown Woman,
Mcpherson, 1979.
https://www.mcphersonco.com/uploads/1/1/7/4/117455904/fortnight_4r.pdf
Headless World (Excerpt from a Novel-in-Progress)
Since 1973 the award-winning fiction of Ascher/Straus has been appearing widely in magazines, including Chicago Review, The Paris Review, Chelsea, Sun and Moon, Epoch and Exile. Both Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus were born in New York City, studied at Columbia University, and live on a peninsula between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean
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