EverBy Blake Butler |
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Reviewed by Angela Stubbs
Blake Butler’s debut work, EVER, is a puzzling and inexplicable journey into the hallucinatory world of the mind, where we get to explore what happens to us when we shrink to fit into the rooms and spaces we occupy as well as what happens in those spaces where time ebbs and flows while the mind remains in flux.
Butler’s prose keeps the reader trapped in rooms “wide as nighttime… [that] could hold a house within a house already “ and also rooms “flush in fat… [c]hunks I’d known once” or else “[flooded] with fungus,” while the text itself takes on a life of its own, isolating itself from one sentence to the next, enlisting brackets to separate word from sentence and sentence from paragraph, pulling the reader into the page and keeping them there while also never letting them be quite sure where they’re at. Paragraphs of text are interspersed with sketches and pictures that often mesh together or intrude upon one another, almost as if Dubuffet had written over some of his own abstract paintings and inserted them here. Bodies and structures are related in images or descriptions too rich to eat whole, so Butler breaks them down: Phrase first, bracket next, period last, all so the reader will be able to process the complexities of this work.
Throughout EVER, Derek White’s obscure illustrations become edible only when coupled with the rich and grotesquely poetic prose that litters the pages we read, pages where words fail to form a cohesive plot but nevertheless keep us on a rollercoaster of varied tones and monotonous rhythms. The off-kilter writing religiously parallels the voice of the piece, both of which leave you questioning the reality of what you’re reading, the reliability of voice. In one instance Butler describes room after room of structures where colors, images and sounds are seen and heard. The most interesting sections of text are where Butler’s narrator gains and simultaneously loses the use of certain senses and ability to decipher present from the past:
[In the room then I could not see the sentence. I felt a presence in me worming, making meat. There was a sense I could not scratch, no matter which way or how about it. I heard my body near me turning, turned. I was old as I could be. [Old as anybody ever.] [The room began to gleam.]
Because Butler keeps us antsy and focused on his changing prose and its counterparts, we hardly notice what envelops the narrator and reader alike. EVER distorts the reality we call our own, pushing us both deeper and further into ourselves, falling back into the recesses of our minds and hearts and homes. Here we are to take a closer look at our crooked realities while attempting to walk a straight line on the cement landscapes that resemble our own boundaries. Butler’s greatest gift to readers is his innate ability to make you second guess yourself. This novella is groundbreaking in its style and voice throughout. A less ambitious writer might have opted to leave out the obscure and grotesque in a story as brief as this, but Butler reminds us that he’s the ringleader of this circus called EVER and we readers are just along for the ride.