PRAIRIE, DRESSES, ART, OTHER by Danielle Dutton — reviewed by Thomas

He had always found the countryside horrible, but this, he now realised, was not due to anything inherent in the landscape, so to call it, but due to the rurality that has been imposed everywhere upon the landscape, a rurality fundamentally at odds with the landscape, smothering it, a rurality in some places intolerably dense and in other places miserably attenuated yet everywhere resulting in what he experienced, driving through it, as a terrible claustrophobia. The road, and how he clung to it, provided the only chance of escape from the rurality pressing down upon him, and yet it was the road that brought them, with every bend, deeper and deeper into the countryside. As he drove, he thought of the book that he was reading, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton, there on the back seat, just in case, though circumstances were unlikely to allow any reading on this journey, or at least he hoped not, certainly not when he was driving, although he had been known to read a book when riding a bicycle, foolishly, where was he, the book, and how the feeling of unease inherent in the stories in the ‘Prairie’ section, especially what he now remembered as the feeling of unease when the narrator is driving through the prairie, though what even is a prairie, he wondered, is any of the landscape we have been driving through today anything like a prairie, the feeling of unease perhaps arises from the unresolved transitional state that the narrator finds herself in, in the prairie or driving through the prairie, whatever that is, either by herself or with other people, members of her family perhaps, or other people, somehow sharing a small capsule of hyperawareness moving through an indeterminate and possibly oppressive landscape, just as in all car journeys and in all stories, borne on detail by detail through what otherwise could have been a long view, though a long view is nothing but impressionistic at best, not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with impressionistic. The road is what matters. In Dutton’s stories, he thought, all manner of often small but generally disquieting uncertainties and disruptions, if uncertainties and disruptions could be anything but disquieting, are introduced into the text or into the narrator’s mind, if there is any difference between the text and the narrator’s mind, and move their weight upon it in causing bends and dips that the narrator must steer herself around or through. In a classic story, as Chekhov iterated, any detail introduced must eventually be discharged, the gun seen early will be fired later, which, he thought, is fundamentally a lie, life is not like that really, and neither are Dutton’s stories. The firing of Chekhov’s gun, he thought, provides relief from the expectation that the gun will at some point be fired, literature is fundamentally reassuring in this way though it has no reason and no right to be. Is that why we read? He had wondered. Dutton’s stories have no such reassurances of shape and no catharses. Details bulge into hyperawareness and the narrator must intensify her awareness of them and steer her anxiety around them and between them, and the cumulation of undischarged and perhaps undischargeable details in the stories result in angst, just like in real life, or so he has found and in fact, if he admitted it to himself, has recently increasingly found, or so it seemed to him, grasping the steering wheel and turning it this way and that as he drove them through this increasingly intolerable rurality. He was now overaware of every turn of the steering wheel, of every acceleration and deceleration, of the way that every slight move he made of his body was translated into or was dictated by the movement of the vehicle upon the infinite turns and inclines of the road, each turn and incline composed as it was of an infinitude of subturns and subinclines, each of which required a subresponse from him as he drove upon them, each of which demanded of him that he not make even the slightest error in his driving. Whereas once he used to feel himself or managed to somehow make himself one with the machine, an extension of the vehicle, moving as one being over the terrain, he was now finding himself uncomfortably separate from the vehicle, acting upon it and responding to it consciously, to every minute variation of the terrain consciously, to every bend and every incline, hyperaware, as if he was writing an infinitely detailed story or a set of instructions for achieving an impossibly complex task, the task of guiding them safely through the rurality of this possibly prairie-like non-prairie landscape, keeping the car not only on the road but comfortably so, a task certainly impossible in its totality but, he hoped, perhaps just achievable as a string of details, a string of details for which the accumulating angst was certainly preferable to discharge. Is the vehicle responding differently, very slightly differently to the terrain, to the bends and inclines that comprise the road they are travelling upon, is there something in the steering, he wondered, or in the wheels, or in the response of the engine to the accelerator, he couldn’t isolate anything, everything seemed fine and the wheels had been recently aligned so it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the car, so perhaps the disconnect he was experiencing was between his awareness-and-intention and his body, perhaps he was becoming or even needed to become hyperaware of his own body, perhaps he was inducing in himself by merely thinking about it one of those degenerative conditions in which, before it is too far progressed, every movement necessarily becomes a set of conscious micro-instructions to the body, micro-instructions that make the movement at first possible but ultimately impossible. He had once written a very detailed description of a person walking up some stairs, he had broken down this action into the smallest possible micro-actions, and he himself had walked up some stairs and worked out how to describe these micro-actions in words and it had filled or wasted several pages, and after that he occasionally found himself repeating the exercise, and it had initially just been an exercise, involuntarily for other actions, which was at first intriguing but ultimately very unpleasant, even horrific, the mind is a fragile instrument to which everything becomes a threat. Everything. He drove on.