Review: Charles D'Ambrosio's Orphans

You know D'Ambrosio as the author of extraordinary stories in The Dead Fish Museum and The Point and Other Stories. This collection of his essays--a delightfully solid and lovely volume, the size of my palm, from Clear Cut Press--isn't as ubiquitous. But it deserves to be.

The eleven essays are haunting, hallucinatory, and so sharp-eyed that it rattles the bones. D'Ambrosio moves among landscapes like a watchful ghost--from oddball modular homes in Washington state, to the infamous Hell House, from Seattle in 1974 to a Russian orphanage, from a tent on a cold ocean beach to a utopian experiment in small town Texas to a courthouse multiplex where a teacher's on trial for becoming pregnant by her 13-year-old student.

Sound strange? D'Ambrosio thinks so too ... or rather, he's rapt at the spaces of ambivalence, of fakery and rhetoric, the blurring of what we mean and the meaning we make.

Perhaps the rarest quality in Orphans is D'Ambrosio's fearlessness in taking a stance. These aren't essays of endearing observation. They stand for something.

Consider, from, 'Mary Kay Letourneau,'

"In the case of King Lear, the language that let's us see his magnificent ruin has outlasted Newtonian optics. Science deals with things, not human beings, and is speechless."

And, from 'Whaling,'

"Nowadays, it's just as likely the surface of life is what puzzles Pip and finally sends him around the bend, and today's cabin boy must go alone into the quiet depths to escape and find peace and recover for himself a measure of sanity. It's civilization that's raw and wild and full of scary monsters and grotesques and deformities crowding every bus and park bench and court of law, whereas we now believe our wilderness exhibits the high sweet harmony we hope for from life as well as offering the refuge and sanative balm we desire when our energies flag and the botch of civilization gets us down."

Also from 'Whaling,'

"... If you love abstractly, you're only a bad day away from hating abstractly."

I read Orphans along with a friend. As we moved through it we kept updating each other: "'Brick House' is my favorite one." "Okay, now 'Modular Homes' is my favorite. But it's tied with 'Degrees of Gray'..." Another remarkable piece of D'Ambrosio's essays is they are all good. Most essay collections have at least one, usually more, downbeats that act as filler around the more interesting title essay. To read many collections through is hit-or-miss. Not so, here. Your attention must be paid.

Throughout, D'Ambrosio's language is at once cuttingly personal--evoking at length even the words of a brother who committed suicide and a father who disappoints--and expansive. The reader is disarmed by his candid first-person voice ('The Crime That Never Was' begins: "This is totally false, but for the sake of the story let's say the events in question begin around 2am, just because that's when I show up on the scene.") It's a perfect preparation for his acutely sensitive insights and strong stances that might otherwise feel hollow or--egad--pretentious.

The strategy is syntactically mirrored: D'Ambrosio's language is simple, full of nouns, contractions, dialogue and scarcely any adjectives; yet it's punctuated by odd words that crackle in the mouth: mantic, saurian, asperse, ambuscade, echoluction. paladin. In context the words take shape--there's no serious linguistic difficulty--but I found myself copying the words out  and saying them aloud to myself. Upon looking them up, I found that every single one of the words on my list were designated as 'archaic' or 'formal.'

Is it a case of D'Ambrosio showing off? (I recall Will Ferrell, in the brilliant Matrix spoof that originally aired at the MTV Movie Awards, desperately shouting 'ergo!' 'vis a vis!').

Hardly. The firecracker 'archaic' words in context of simple language are an expansive device--elevating D'Ambrosio's personalist narrative out of his body and into a space that transcends time. It parallels what the content of the essays do thematically--and makes for a reading of shivery brightness.

Orphans meets the collections Joan Didion and Ralph Waldo Emerson as the best short nonfiction you can read. Your hands should be all over it.

The book's publisher has an unusual story itself. Clear Cut Press's model runs like this:

"A $65 subscription (US) provides the subscriber with a complete series edition of six beautiful paper-bound books delivered throughout North America. ... Subscribers will receive their books before the general public and enjoy special gifts and invitations to Clear Cut Press events. Subscribers also have the satisfaction of knowing their purchase enables Clear Cut Press to continue its work.

"Clear Cut is inspired by early 20th-century subscription presses Hours Press and Contact Editions, and by the midcentury paperbacks of New Directions and City Lights. These historical models seem well-suited to the independent economies that emerge every generation or so around the cultural movements and new demands of global youth, whether punk, grunge, hip-hop, hippie, beatnik or flapper."

D'Ambrosio's book was but one installment. I'd say the Clear Cut deal is probably more than worth it.

UPDATE: A reader shared some disturbing news about Clear Cut Press and how it worked with Orphans. It goes something like this:

"Much as I agree with you (and do I ever) that Orphans is an unbelievably good book, did you know Clear Cut press fucked him with it?  They were supposed to do a limited run that wouldn't conflict with the planned Knopf hardcover.  Instead they rushed it out, got it reviewed, and effectively killed the hardback.

"Charlie wasn't too happy about this--it's still a sore point with him, I think, and who can blame him?  Really a shitty thing to do.  So much as I love this book and think it should be a part of everyone's home (I think there'll eventually be a Vintage paperback in the future) I try NOT to endorse Clear Cut Press when I recommend the book.  In fact the opposite.  ...

"We love Charlie.  We love Orphans.  But, uh, Fuck Clear Cut Press."

Indeed.

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

A fantastic book!

[Matthew Stadler]

I am the editor who worked with Charlie to publish Orphans. I am also the editor who commissioned 2/3 of the essays over the previous three or four years. Knopf had nothing to do with the genesis of this book. It exists because of Charlie and Clear Cut Press. Charlie signed a contract to publish Orphans with Knopf well after he and I had worked together with publisher Rich Jensen to make the Clear Cut Press edition.

Your friend is wrong about Charlie's disagreements with Clear Cut. I can't speak for Charlie, but he worked with the press happily well into the first few months of the book's publication; then he became unhappy about the press's approach to publishing, specifically our failure to give him a written contract. I don't blame him, but that is a far cry from Clear Cut "fucking him" or denying Knopf a chance to market the book.

Clear Cut was very happy to have Knopf market Orphans, but Charlie withdrew from his contract with them. I understood, at the time, that he felt Clear Cut had taken some of the market Knopf was counting on. I disagreed with his assessment, but ultimately it was his choice. Check with him on this, if you're interested. Otherwise, please don't post comments that do damage to what was ultimately a well-intentioned, if flawed, attempt to bring some great writing into print.

[Anna Clark]

UPDATE: For Charlie D'Ambrosio's own version of the story, check out the Isak follow-up, 'Update on Orphans, Part II,' at: http://isak.typepad.com/isak/2008/04/update-on-orpha.html

[lauren]

Great post. I was looking up nationwide modular homes when I came across your post. I am glad I did because I never heard of any of these books or the author. I am always looking for a new book to read. I will have to check some of these out. Which one do you recommend I start with? Thanks for sharing.