To Nowhere

The Silk Road by Kathryn Davis.  Graywolf Press.  132 pp.  ****

I was thinking I would start this review with the sentence, “This is the strangest book I’ve ever read,” then thought, wait a minute.  Three Novels, by Samuel Beckett.  If the whole volume doesn’t qualify (and it does), The Unnameable alone would do the trick.  And then I thought, in a weird way, Kathryn Davis is a little like Samuel Beckett.

I don’t like reviews that compare authors, especially ones that say, This novel is like Samuel Beckett with a pinch of Pyncheon and a big dollop of Kurt Vonnegut, crap like that.  Authors aren’t fundamentally comparable.  But the thing that is similar between Kathryn Davis and Beckett is that the sentences themselves are lyrical, a joy to read, but the joining of them doesn’t make much sense, at least not to the discursive mind.  The meaning flows at a deeper, more emotional level, where you sense that you’re being nourished, but you’re not absolutely sure.

The first paragraph is a good example (almost any paragraph is a good example):

“We were in the labyrinth.  Afterward, no one could agree on the time.  Jee Moon was tucking someone’s right hand in under their blanket, having first tucked in the left.  She did this tenderly but firmly, as if to suggest we could be doing it for ourselves.  Next she took someone’s head and lifted it like it wasn’t part of a human body, a cabbage or a planet or the repository of all thought thoughts and evil, which, when you think about it, is exactly what a human head is.  Everyone could smell the gas the permafrost gave off as it melted; we could feel the labyrinth floor sinking under our mats.  Lower, lower, going down, deeper down than Paradise.  Department stores used to have elevators and the elevators had operators who told you what you were going to find when you stepped through the slowly opening door.  There would be a white torso without a head or arms; there would be people you knew you’d never meet again.”

We start off the paragraph in the labyrinth and end up in a department store (and I do indeed remember those elevators, and those floors with their various items), but actually, the chapter takes place in a yoga class, something I didn’t realize the first time through that paragraph, though you can see it if you read it again.  Jee Moon (the only person in this novel who actually has a name) is the teacher.  The class is in the final pose of the day, commonly known as shavasana, or corpse pose.  And the unique thing that happens (though I’m not sure of this, just as I’m not sure of anything else in this novel) is that, when the class ends, one of the people doesn’t get up.  This person was doing corpse pose and actually became a corpse.

Other characters in this novel are identified by their functions in life, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook.  The genders are mixed.  There is also a woman poet called P, and a moment when the Archivist is trying to get to a reading she is giving, though there’s a terrific rainstorm going on at the college where he works, and he’s having problems.  All of these people seem to know P, and have known her since she was a child.  The narrative also mentions a father and mother, and the Keeper seems to be basically a family’s nanny.  The narrative keeps making reference to earlier times, and to a place where a family lived.

I have of course read the jacket copy to this book, and a review[1] by the marvelous Laura Miller, in Slate (who calls Kathryn Davis “The most original novelist in America.  I read [The Silk Road] in a state I can only describe as baffled wonder”).  No one else has mentioned the conclusion I began to draw, but it was that all these people (identified by their functions) are members of the same family, that they all went to school together, all had the same mother, all knew P.  The one thing I can’t figure out is why they were all in the same yoga class, and this doesn’t seem to be the first time.  Jee Moon has been a factor in all of their lives.  It’s a family yoga class?

I actually thought when I read the first chapter that this was an extremely idiosyncratic mystery novel, that it would wander around in time and space but we would eventually discover how the corpse became a corpse, including the possibility that one of these people is a murderer.  As far as I can tell, that does not happen, unless I missed something, which I very well may have.  I actually felt that the book didn’t come to a conclusion.  It just ended.

I nevertheless had a marvelous time reading it, though it was like eating cuisine minceur; you finish the meal and say, wow, the tastes were marvelous, like nothing else I’ve ever had, but at the same time you’re thinking, did I just eat something?  I may want to read more by Kathryn Davis.  But right now I want a cheeseburger.

[1] For other baffled reviews, including several Did Not Finish, look here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40121981-the-silk-road?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=HLFpf2nCaQ&rank=1