The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Essays by Jenny Boully
(Sarabande Books)
Review by Wm. Anthony Connolly
In Media Res
This review will have no middle and as unsavory as that sounds to some it is possible, additionally, that this review might completely misread or misinterpret what is at the center of Jenny Boully’s collection The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Essays published by Sarabande Books, because there is no center. In fact, this collection of “invented prose” might be impervious to review, since it is a book of little else but beginnings and endings, with the individual held responsible for filling in the middle. Consensus, postmodernity’s devil, does not reside here. Here there is no locus, but the reader.
Reading Boully’s attempts at fractured, intuitive, prose is both a delight, akin to finding oneself with an hour to kill in a strange city and stumbling upon a den of groaning bookshelves and at random picking through the titles, and an exercise in frustration—the reader continually held in suspension, rising into narrative’s climax, only to be dropped mid-sentence into a prosaic other. Boully doesn’t offer, say, a beginning of one essay in one part of the collection only to have its ending appear elsewhere—no; this farrago is cut and pasting of a large array of divergent essays (some of which have appeared in their totality in literary journals and textbooks). So readers find themselves, say, reading about a Biblical verse, which terminates page thirty-two, “Think then of the Biblical verse that states, ‘I am,’” only to turn to page thirty-three to find the opening salvo proclaim: “if it is not the forlorn pocket of false fullness that one steals from another.” What is being read here is not text, so much, as you. The center does not hold on the page, it’s behind the ribcage. This is a constant reminder at the foci of
This is so important; it is as lyric essayist, and “Seneca Review” editor John D’Agata posits “the future of nonfiction in America.” Thankfully Boully’s publisher hasn’t taken literally Boully’s pernicious structure to heart by having the fragments in, well, vastly different typefaces, although Sarabande does flirt with annoyance by changing, subtly, fonts, headers, and footers. At first encounter it feels oddly like error.
In a volume that bedevils expectation, readers aren’t entirely left in abeyance. Boully’s essays cover the gamut of genre chestnuts one would expect such treatises on the body, prose on the failure of love, text on heuristics, exegesis of biblical passages; all with a juxtaposing preciousness Joseph Cornell would have placed within a shadowbox.
Most of all, the beginnings and endings are beautifully rendered—lacunal and iconoclastic to be sure—and divine in their completeness between writer and reader. After all, “God can only be present in creation under the form of absence,” Simone Weil writes. The gaps of Boully’s choosing remind us that sometimes there is much in the middle to contend with. We are the dash not the dates, Boully seems to suggest in a collection that deserves a shelf all to itself.
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