John the Posthumous
Language: English
Pages: 148
ISBN: 1939293219
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"After reading Jason Schwartz, it's difficult to talk about any other writer's originality or unique relation to the language. John the Posthumous is a work of astounding power and distinction, beautifully strange, masterful." -Sam Lipsyte "[Schwartz] is complete, as genius agonizingly is." -Gordon Lish "Haunting, original prose by a writer unlike any other on the planet. Jason Schwartz is a master." -Ben Marcus John the Posthumous exists in between fiction and poetry, elegy and history: a kind of novella in objects, it is an anatomy of marriage and adultery, an interlocking set of fictional histories, and the staccato telling of a murder, perhaps two murders. This is a literary album of a pre-Internet world, focused on physical elements - all of which are tools for either violence or sustenance. Knives, old iron gates, antique houses in flames; Biblical citations, blood and a history of the American bed: the unsettling, half-perceived images, and their precise but alien manipulation by a master of the language will stay with readers. Its themes are familiar - violence, betrayal, failure - its depiction of these utterly original and hauntingly beautiful.
named for a color—late in the afternoon, the light terrifically dim—it might conjure, finally, the form of your boyhood dog. Animals in the walls, child’s room, 1952: summer. The parakeets shriek for three days. Master bedroom, 1954: summer. The rats run from east to west, late at night, behind the headboard—walnut; a bend at the center; six feet across—and back again, from west to east, returning to the attic early in the morning. New Street, 1858. Daniel Anderson: merchant (suit of clothes,
calamities, 1863: spring and summer. An attic collapses under cannon fire. Lightning destroys a porch awning, a Dutch door, a wedding trellis. A cyclone destroys eight chimneys and a balcony. (Mr. Porter, the lodger, removes to the cellar with a fowling piece, a flannel hat, a crate of dirt, and a pasteboard face.) How to survive a household fire, 1905: crawl to the door. Or remain in place. Or hang a white bedsheet from the window—and cry out your wife’s name. Family disaster plan, 1926: three
assume, outside other houses. I cannot abide a column overgrown with vines. On the east side: the garden wall is five feet high, brick in a standard configuration, flush cut. The child found mice there from time to time. The bats prefer the latticework, the balcony, the gutters. The border plants burn or freeze, as the case may be. I am displeased by the pine trees, by their location and arrangement, and by the manner of the shadows thrown across the lawn. A section of the path is hidden
confide, is always lonely, a fact that returns us to the terms of the town—but I ought not speak so often of grief. Manners for mourners differed somewhat in the country, where a dinner-setting might include, to the left of the strop, a jar of hearts. A child’s knives should sit crosswise. A white plate should conceal a dark card. Have they measured as yet the length of the carcass? Grouse, in bruises, to use the local phrase, was acceptable on these occasions. Pox hen, gutted and trussed—or
effigy, was the custom in a number of towns. Older practices required ash. The skinner marked the carcass. Slaughter boys, so-called, crossed the boards and burned the offal. The family tore the cord. The marriage bed, in this brown house, was a prettier affair—the latch adorned with short spikes, on the husband’s side, and short hooks, on the wife’s. The hinge was neither gold nor silver, alas. Whereas the pock—this was copper. Sometimes the posts and slats were mistaken for bones. As distinct