12/01/01

Mazza is an award-winning author, and has been acclaimed for her subversive and transgressive writing, and this latest book of hers is published by Fiction Collective 2 (FC2). The first and last sentences of FC2's mission statement read:

FC2 is among the few alternative presses in America devoted to publishing fiction considered by America's largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu ... FC2 continues the commitment of its founders to unsettle the bounds of literature and broaden the audience for America's most adventurous writing.

So, don't expect to curl up with Mazza for a cozy read. A couple of chapters into Girl Beside Him and I identified my sense of bewilderment to be similar to that with which I had first encountered Virginia Woolf's fiction -- and quite novel it was to re-live that experience once again, all these years later.

Brian is a forty-something wildlife biologist who was severely traumatised when he was in his teens - an incident involving sexual abuse, and death, and his lesbian-mother-in-denial that has left him scarred psychologically for the next 25 years. Leya is a twenty-something ex-zoological animal trainer and newly discarded wife, who is bursting with freshly-learned ideas from her divorce therapy classes, and ready to start her life anew. They meet to work together on a wildlife conservation project that centers around a she-cougar that has unfortunately anti-social eating habits.

This motley cast doesn't fit in at all comfortably with the folk of the town where they temporarily base themselves; they don't encounter one another without a lot of friction. Hell, most of the time they look at their own selves with puzzlement, dislike and contempt. As I said before, this is not a comfortable read.

Mazza uses some half dozen different narrative techniques in the telling of her tale and she jumps from one to another, and back and forth in time with seldom a line or two of explanation to ease the reader from one realm to the other. She does however, use a variety of typefaces to differentiate some of the strains of narrative. The most unusual of her narratives to me, is the internal monologue that Brian conducts with himself - in a strangely detached second person. Instead of the stream-of-consciousness type of monologue that Woolf first bewildered me with, Mazza has her character's interior voice harangue him throughout the book like a nagging husband from Hades.

This book definitely invites a second reading, unless you are a far more experienced reader than I. First time through, one needs to identify and distinguish the various narratives. Next time one can experience the novel with almost the immediacy of a screened text. Strands of jukebox music waft behind the dialogue, memories past intrude unbidden, and not very welcomely into the present. And the heat and tensions of the various presents add to the discomfort of their narration.

If you are a writer of, or love to read, fiction that will "freak" the conventional publishing community, then check out all the information on the FC2 WebPages. They publish some half dozen new titles in what they call "formally innovative, experimental, and artistically challenging fiction" each year, and also have plans to revive their two manuscript competitions to find good minority fiction.

As well as at amazon.com, publication and purchase information can be found on the publisher's website, http://www.fc2.org/ along with the texts of the cover blurbs and excerpts from the book.