Review: “Is It So?”
IS IT SO?: GLIMPSES, GLYPHS, & FOUND NOVELS by Kevin McIvoy
Available as paperback original & ebook on November 7, 2023
WTAW Press
ISBN: 978-1-7336619-3-5 (pbk) / 978-1-7336619-4-2 (epub)
130 pages
$18.95 US/print
All writers read with honest larceny in their hearts, a teacher once told an MFA writing class. Kevin McIlvoy, a lifelong writer and teacher, might have phrased it slightly differently: All writers should listen with honest larceny in their hearts.
Throughout his six decades of dedication to his art, McIlvoy’s published work — six novels, a short story collection, and two books of short fiction and prose poems — reflects the fine-tuned ear of a dedicated student of rhythm, sound, and silence. In a 2019 interview with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft Podcast, McIlvoy talked about his continuous efforts to capture the nuances of sound in his work:
I don’t think that I have written anything that isn’t about listening… From the first short stories and novels I wrote to the present moment, everything depends on the sound of the work itself, either the narrative voice and the sound of that voice—its modulations, its tonal shifts—or the world that it introduces.
Equally compelling to the rhythm and sound of his writing are McIlvoy’s characters, which have always tended toward the odd, the quirky, and the forgotten. Through them, he explores our need to find meaning in our lives – to feel that we matter. For example, the narrator of the story “Passersby” – a bit part actor in a Hollywood production – says, after performing his small role (opening an umbrella at precisely the right moment), “This is how I matter[.]” He then wonders, “What are we given that honors when and how we gave, we Passersby?” Through his work, McIlvoy seems to do exactly that — give voice to the countless unnoticed, unknown “passersby” in the world, thereby honoring all of us, however minor our roles may be in the grand scheme of things.
While McIlvoy’s devotion to championing the underrepresented has remained consistent throughout his career, his most recent books have grown even more boldly original, defying conventional narrative structure, and exploring realms of the surreal, the absurd, and the fantastical. Is This So?: Glyphs, Glimpses, and Found Novels was completed just four months before his sudden unexpected death at the age of sixty-nine. This ninth and final book of fiction is, as his wife, the writer Christine Hale, points out in an illuminating introduction, perhaps McIlvoy’s most autobiographical work. An avid naturalist, artist, hiker, musician, teacher, dancer, and Catholic-turned-Buddhist, McIlvoy delves deep into the territory of complicated family relationships, grief, and death, while indulging his gift for zany humor.
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Among the pleasures of McIlvoy’s writing is the depth of feeling that arises from the music of his sentences. In “Poise,” for example, an older couple takes dance lessons, carefully adjusting their bodies as directed by their instructor. The two-page story ends with these lines:
…[Y]our old body hovers above itself rhythmically aware and ready as a bell rung by a breeze, limbs letting go one shore of sound for this one, losing the full gown of earth for sleeves of sun, for head attuned to hers, hips tilted back in time.
All bearing spaces between are unburdened, your hearts free from their thrones, your unreposed bodies poised in the unrobing, the diving down, the upreaching coming after long dormancy.
McIlvoy’s images, and the rhythm of his phrases, reflect the intimacy between the two. In the brief moment between ballroom dance steps, McIlvoy conveys the transformative quality of the couple’s relationship.
Similarly, McIlvoy marvels at the interrelatedness of all things — both animate and inanimate — and portrays life and death as intrinsically woven together. In “To Be Opened In the Event Of,” the narrator gives detailed instructions to his sons (per their request) on how to dispose of his body after death. But his instructions presuppose his conscious enjoyment of the intertwining of his dead, buried body with the plants growing through him, as he witnesses his own decomposition:
Have one Curious bulb placed in my left hand and two bulbs placed in my right hand, making sure I hold both hands together under my left ear so I can hear the quickening, can think the effort of what is growing through me, feel the three breaking the closed shell of my hands, the shale of my head, naturalizing beyond me, causing me laughter at the comedy of winter failing to kill rot’s regenerating impulse to root …
Of death, he later muses, “The problem is, as all problems are, a matter of tense.”
McIlvoy employs a very different narrative voice for a series of five short pieces beginning with “De-Installation Ceremony, Whitherton, North Carolina, May 18, 2019,” in which a crew of workmen remove a bronze monument of Confederate General Bragg. They attach burlap hoods, chains, and manacles to the heads, necks and wrists of the General, his wife, and three daughters, before ripping them from their pedestal, pissing on their backs and legs, smashing their fingers, and loading them onto their truck bed for removal. As they work, an old man — a Confederate descendant — confronts them, offended by their lack of respect for the General. When they break for lunch, they share their food with the old man, and invite him to tell his story. “He was one of us,” the narrator says, “by which I mean familiar-strange.”
Our narrator, one of the laborers, assumes a calm, dispassionate tone in these pieces. The brutality of slavery honored by the monument, and its desecration and removal (by the same means historically used on slaves), speak for themselves. This understated tone creates an almost unbearable tension in the series — a striking demonstration of the immense power of narrative restraint.
By contrast, “Mollycrawbottom” is a laugh-out-loud tirade — a letter from an author to the editor of a literary journal who has just rejected his submission. The author refers to his work as a:
… small, badass, bucket-eye creature… pugnacious-looking mollycrawbottom (no larger than your wet thumb or your cauliflower ear, no smaller than your dry prick), partnered in a dance with the algae-stained river stones …
The author continues: “I should not have sent it to your publication, that small hospice aquarium,” then excoriates the editor himself: “You with your fine-mesh, small-net heart, with your search engine replacing your instincts, with your neck stiff from self-sniffing… [w]hat species will endure despite you?”
This short piece is a delicious send-up of the often arbitrary exercise of power by self-appointed arbiters of cultural quality. McIlvoy, who spent his career as an English professor, editor, and writing teacher, offers this as a gleeful gift to all would-be writers who toil in the “Paleozoic silt” of the rough draft.
McIlvoy’s writing ranges from dead serious to playful and nimble, swinging from one narrative style to another, from one format to another. Less concerned with plot than with character, his stories follow the logic of human interactions; paramount among these is our need for connection with one another, often expressed in uncanny ways.
In “Cake All Day,” a man visits his eighty-year-old sister-in-law at her nursing home every week. Having survived a stroke, she is paralyzed and cognitively-impaired. The two sit side-by-side and “self-talk” on parallel tracks, always on the subject of cake, but without exchanging back-and-forth dialogue: “They did not ask each other to clarify what they overheard…They took turns witnessing, alert in the listening.” The logic of their words during the visits is not so important as the fact of them; their words are spoken in the service of communion and companionship, rather than for their specific content.
The narrator in the “The Gila,” by contrast, is driven to find the precise words to express his rigorous self-examination. He comes to the Gila Wilderness to hike familiar trails at different seasons and times in his life. As the story progresses, we see that he is not only a hiking enthusiast, but also a seeker, struggling to resist simple or self-serving views of himself and to find a deeper truth. Halfway through the story he makes an extended series of self-editing “No” statements followed by a revision — continuous efforts to correct and refine the claim he has just made:
In the spring, ten years later, I brought my former self to visit the Gila… I brought the older man still marked by the younger.
No.
No to that romantic bullshit.
I brought new understanding of obliterated marriage, family, friendship, the expired fellowship of acquaintances: the self-estrangements that result from divorce, pandemic, death, forced retirement, detachment.
No.
No to ‘understanding’ any of it.
Later, in conversation with the forest ranger at the station, the narrator fails to recognize the man as a former student of his. The ranger reminds him that the narrator gave the ranger a D in Freshman Composition. Filled with guilt, the narrator thinks “I was probably the reason he landed in this remote station. Our chance meeting now had probably brought old sorrows back to him…”
And once again, as if in answer to the unasked question Is It So?, the narrator rejects the presumptuousness of his previous words: “No... No to all those narcissistic judgments.” His next words ask: “How on earth can some things—no, all things—be forgiven all at once and for always?”
In the closing story, a man waits his turn at the DMV with a single question: “How to bear happiness?” He is referred through endless bureaucratic corridors and flights of stairs up to the Office of the Clerk of Happiness, who advises him to “create… a space in [himself] no larger than an alms bowl, and ask… ‘What is the sin in us living in joy together?’”
With this mash-up of the metaphysical and the mundane, McIlvoy ends the book, having shown us that none of our stories is simple; none of us can be reduced to a single personality or plot line. We are left to marvel at McIlvoy’s tremendous artistic gift that has led us through so many unknown dimensions — his command of music and sound, light and color, motive and movement.
This book, then, is not only a work of literature, but also a companion and guidebook to the world of possibilities within each of us. With each story, McIlvoy shows us that the world is so much richer, more fantastical, complicated, and thrilling than we allow ourselves to believe or imagine. He frees us from our notions of what “is,” of simple cause and effect, logic and reason. Is It So?, his last work of fiction, is a tour de force, offering endless pleasures, discoveries, connections, and above all, a limitless capacity for wonder.
Helen Fremont’s second memoir, The Escape Artist (Simon & Schuster, 2020) was selected as a New York Times “Editor’s Choice” new book; her nationally bestselling first memoir, After Long Silence, (Penguin Random House) was a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” book in 2000. Her works of fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and The Harvard Review.