Reviewed by Vincent F. A. Golphin
When does the obscenity that surrounds us demand that the writer hold, as it were, a mirror up to nature , even in all its vileness?
Kenyon Review editor Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky wrote that question in September 2008, as the journal prepared to publish “The Torturer’s Wife,” the title tale from this second short story collection by Glave. At first, obscene comes off as too dramatic a word to use for stories readers are likely to enjoy. Yet, those who surrender to the attractions of the nine stories in this 262-page book will likely find the term is apt. The way the author’s words flesh out near hyper-graphic portraits of the most desperate and human moments is beautifully obscene. More, at points the narrative is poetic.
Glave builds sentences and chooses and places words often as deftly as Wynton Marsalis blows a trumpet. The tightly woven prose explores human interactions in ways that can prompt readers who seek literary thrills to see a pleasant freshness in the plots. On the other hand, those who turn to books for entertainment are likely to push aside the work in confusion.
The Torturer’s Wife kicks open the doors of conventional yarn spinning, and challenges readers with the narrative’s pace, frankness and clarity to push beyond their psychic and emotional comforts. Murder, butchery, burnings, hate crimes, kidnaps, torture, and infidelity are subjects most Americans wish were only fiction, but the way Glave walks through characters’ inner struggles with them forces readers to acknowledge such atrocities as reality. For example, in “The Torturer’s Wife,” about a mother driven to kill her children, the gravity of the main character’s thoughts and circumstances forecast a deliberate trajectory that either bodes destruction or freedom. Whichever, is left to reader:
The voice that will rise in a future time from the sea and recount this entire night will remember how, now, she stops outside the boy’s room. Stops, and gazes with that expression that is no expression at the other woman, reappeared, who gazes back at her. Who now soundlessly opens the door to the boy’s room as she feels her own hand on the doorknob, as they both walk into the room…. There are voices, so many: inside her, outside of her, and out there, in the garden. Voices begging her now please, not to do it. Begging her to leave him, leave him, please. The boy. The precious sleeping boy.
On this planet, where corruption, violence, sexism and homophobia predominate, those who seek entertainment will want to believe that men cannot be killed just because they ignore a society’s lines of race, class and sexual preference. The stories evoke a feeling of immediacy, as the narratives remind readers of local events. For example, “Between,” although unspecified, could play out in any tight-knit, U. S. community, as happened in the October 1998 murder of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard. The narrative probes gay and straight males’ attitudes and actions, and endow the harshness depicted with deeper significance to force reconsiderations of what it means to be human:
The first time I went into him, I didn’t even know that I was thinking it until I heard it, the thought, come back out to me as I heard him groaning under me: So this is what one of them feels like, I thought. This is how it is with them. Tight. And hot. And gripping. And this is how it feels to be inside of one of them, I thought. This is how they smell, like him, and how they taste, I thought: like him.
“Out There,” the longest story, takes readers into Jamaica’s violent gay backlash to sharply consider the roots of the viciousness acts against gays in the home of his ancestors. Glave experiments with the power of language in ways similar to MacArthur prizewinner Colson Whitehead, and plots like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Columbian, whose short stories and novels such as Love in the Time of Cholera, popularized Magical Realism, a literature that inserts the surreal into human reality, which is a seat of strength in The Torturer’s Wife.