Listen
Issue #27
By Ling Ma
Published: March 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
Wendy Salinger grew up in North Carolina during the1950s and ’60s engulfed in her father’s steady stream of verbal demands, accusations, and complaints. As an English professor and unrecognized poet, Victor is deeply frustrated and bitterly caustic. He is also fiercely articulate, and language is the choice form of abuse that he unleashes on the family. Through the series of vignettes that composes this memoir, Salinger re-enacts the family dialogue by assuming the voices of its members, mimicking the malignant inflections of her father, and the softer, bruised tones of her mother.
Just as Victor’s daughter is subjected to his vocal terrorizing, she is also nourished by his lessons in literature and the arts. It seems that verbal exchange directs all aspects of this father-daughter relationship — except, that is, for the unspeakable. Victor is incestuously attracted to his daughter, someone he identifies as his most promising pupil and perhaps most like himself.
Salinger, herself now an accomplished poet whose collection of poems Folly River won the National Poetry Series, doesn’t take the route of most modern memoirs, which confuse self-confessional with self-therapy, and litter clichéd pearls of wisdom along the way. Rather than using the memoir form to shed light on her past, Salinger enthralls in the ambivalent quality of language, swathing her memories in its comforting opacity. Additional devices such as the disintegration of prose into poetry and the loose arrangement of scenes beginning and ending at whim chart an inward psychological retreat. There is no self-diagnosis.
Reading like a fevered, impressionistic dream, Listen is an aesthetically refined work. Yet precisely because the recollections are embalmed in a sheath of linguistic artistry, it’s difficult to grasp the emotional gravity of such a devastating situation. The narrator’s muted portrayal of her own emotions largely accounts for the memoir’s lukewarm and tepid tone. Perhaps it’s the voice of someone, who, after all these years, still can’t bring herself to fully speak. At the end, that leaves only the reader, straining too hard to listen.
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ABOUT THIS BOOK
Listen
(Bloomsbury)
by Wendy Salinger
(Bloomsbury
$22.95
272 pages
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