"The Gown From Mother's Stomach" by Blake Butler and found in Ninth Letter Vol. 5 Issue 1 (Spring/Summer 2008) is one of my favorite Butler stories, if not my favorite. While I think quite a bit of what Butler does is fantastic, there are also many times that I'm enjoying a story and suddenly hit that moment, that moment I believe Blake goes for strange just to inject strange, and not for a specific reason. Many seems the time I've thought "I really don't need to read about a baby being eaten at this juncture . . ."
That said, when Blake Butler is on, when he's revised a story until it's shining and has labored over every word a dozen times, I think he's capable of generating material that should be found in Best American Short Stories or the PEN/O.Henry anthologies. Puschcart for absolute certain. "The Gown From Mother's Stomach" is one of those stories. And that's not to say there's no weird in the story (pay attention to that title - it's literal), not at all. It's to say that it all makes some sort of sense. The weird fits in with the characters and the plot and the sentences are immaculately put together.
As I don't think this is the type of story one can ruin the end of, that's what I'm going to share:
The bear dissembled her in pieces. It ate the entire girl. It ate her hair, her nails, her shoes and bonnet. It ate the gown and ate her eyes. inside the bear she could still see clearly. The color of the bear's teeth were mottled yellow. Inside its stomach, abalone pink. The color of the daughter became something soft--then something off, then something fuzzy, then something like the gown, immensely hued; then she became a strange fluorescence and she exited the bear--she spread across the wrecked earth and refracted through the ocean to split the sky: a neon ceiling over all things, a shade of something new, unnamed.
To me there's amazing writing here - the way Butler uses repetition mesmerizes the reader; the seeming simplicity of the sentences. It reminded me immediately upon first read of the way Peter Markus ends his stories, the brothers stories. I can't say anything much nicer than that. I believe this story will be in Blake's Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books, fall 2009). I'd consider pre-ordering it soon.
I read this in Ninth Letter and loved it then. It's brilliant.
Posted by: Katrina Denza | May 13, 2009 at 04:06 PM
If not for this story, I would be using the Internet strictly for email and online bill paying. If not for this story, I would never have discovered Blake's blog, which opened up the world of Interlit.
Glad to see it here; it's a hell of a story.
Posted by: Molly Gaudry | May 16, 2009 at 02:48 AM