Fictions
Author: Ruel Johnson
Published by: Janus Books, 2013
The reviewer's tone–with its frequent tendencies towards vague, overwritten detours–doesn't escape censure in Ruel Johnson's collected Fictions, winner of the 2013 Guyana Prize for Literature.Fictions took the prestigious award for the best book of fiction; the writer's Ariadne and other Stories won the 2002 Guyana Prize for a best first manuscript. What's endured in Johnson's writing in that ten-year span is a certain self-indulgence, which, by turns, melds into critical, crucial self-examination.These stories, several of which are conducted within non-traditional prose frameworks (with varying degrees of success), dip frequently into a sensuously poetic well. The results–for any slightly world-weary aesthete who likes her literature tinged with the battery acid of self-recriminations–are a pleasurable affair.It's worth noting that if the obnoxious reviewer doesn't dodge Johnson's savagely-primed barbs, little else does, either. Fictions is split into parts one through four, entitled Out of Life's Untrammelled Novels; A Mirror of the World; Everything Else is Invented and The Patient Labyrinth. These divisions within themselves are infused with any number of poetic, nostalgic hearkenings, but it's up to the reader herself to decide how many of them are "true."The writer aggressively puts paid to any credible distinctions between fact and fictive speculation early on, with an epigraph from American novelist, Philip Roth: "I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't."
Whatever the balance of fact/fiction the reader decides to appropriate when approaching Fictions, the work, in its curious blend of sensuous flintiness, is its own reward. Johnson is arguably at his best on the page when he's immortalising past and present lovers, holding up their slights to the light with as much generosity as he delineates these women's curves in ink.In The Last Affair, (which is prefaced by another story that vaguely introduces it through an instant-message chat) one estranged, embittered lover says to another, using the medium of a letter, "What I needed, what I need from you and no one else, is what you could not give, love delivered with a particular fierceness, savagery befitting some Aztec sacrifice–a heart ripped out, pulsating and shedding its ecstatic tears of blood."
This particular fierceness, in Johnson's fiction, does not confine itself to the carnal circumferences of lovers' passion; it also describes the aching tendencies of love shared between father and son. Johnson delicately and deftly surveys the landscape of filial and paternal bonds, of how their devotion and alleged permanence can be so swiftly dismantled, replaced with lesser ties, with grudges that fester.Describing the aftermath of a petty falling-out at an open-air Christmas market, the narrator reflects: "Thus we truly, perpetually lose our sons, not by fang or fever or fire or fall, but subtly, in incremental insurrections of the heart. And what we fear most is this great void [...] where some umbilical singularity is strained til it snaps, at dusk, on Christmas day, of all days, of all days."The cautionary parable against idyllic love; the freeform stream of consciousness ramblings of a woman past her salad days; the caustic self-examinations of a man returned from Canadian coldness to uncomfortable Guyanese heat: these stories are pungent with the scent of remembrance.They are challenging in the way that good fiction inspires debate, and though they more than occasionally fall deep into mires of narcissistic navelgazing, the strength of the work's multiple meanings are never lost in the process.
