quarta-feira, 4 de abril de 2012

Terror of Teenage Life By STEPHEN BURT


Terror of Teenage Life

By STEPHEN BURT

THE RAISING
By Laura Kasischke
461 pp. Harper Perennial. Paper, $14.99.

SPACE, IN CHAINS
By Laura Kasischke
113 pp. Copper Canyon Press. Paper, $16.

If and when you go away to college you can become somebody else; you can kill off your old self and be reborn. So generations of young people have believed. But once they have done it — ditching provincial tastes and hometown boyfriends for a sorority, a fraternity or an undergraduate bohemia — they may trade one conformity for another; they may feel haunted by their former lives. No wonder teenage life, on and off campus, seems to fit stories of vampires, ghosts, the undead. Laura Kasischke is hardly the first to use such figures (as fans of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” know) but with her new novel, “The Raising,” she pursues them almost perfectly. Almost a supernatural thriller, almost a campus satire and almost but not quite a coming-of-age tale, “The Raising” is also the best of Kasischke’s eight novels, the one with the broadest canvas, the most observation, its large cast arranged with a scary economy of detail.
Most of “The Raising” takes place on a college campus — it could be the University of Michigan, where Kasischke (who studied there) now teaches. Nicole Werner was the beauty as well as the brain of her small town; at college, she joined Omega Theta Tau, the rich, prestigious, “keep-your-record-clean sorority,” whose girls are supposedly all virgins. She also began dating Craig Clements-Rabbitt, a morose stoner with bad grades who felt even more out of place in the friendly Midwest than he did in his preppie New Hampshire hometown. At the end of their freshman year, Nicole died in a car crash; Craig was driving, and nearly the whole campus blames him.
“The Raising” is the story, or mystery, of Nicole’s ghost, pursued over Craig’s sophomore year. Mira Polson teaches a seminar on “Death, Dying and the Undead”; Craig’s roommate Perry, who grew up inseparable from Nicole, joins Mira’s class because he has been seeing apparitions of his dead friend. Mira studies the dead because her mother died young; while she tries to write a sequel to her book about funeral customs, her stay-at-home husband looks after their 2-year-old twins, who are (like the sorority girls) nearly indistinguishable, and who (like the sorority girls) seem to communicate only in private, in ways no one else understands. Shelly Lockes, who works at the university, witnessed Nicole’s highway accident, and the reports do not match what she saw. Pretty, flighty, untrustworthy Josie, an OTT sister who becomes Shelly’s assistant, may know why Nicole’s real story remains untold.
Kasischke set previous novels in high schools and summer camps (one, “The Life Before Her Eyes,” became a movie starring Uma Thurman). She understands the awkwardness, and the low-grade terror, of teenage life, when we want so much for big questions to have right answers, but no one we trust ever seems to know what they are. Kasischke’s self-hating collegians (Craig most of all) can become unpleasant companions, but she does not make us stay with them all the way through. Instead, her novel gradually shifts its center from Craig to Mira and Shelly, adults unfortunate enough to depend for their lives and careers on what teenagers do and say.
“The Raising” holds tight to its symbols (sexy virgins, corpses, ghosts). Even a roll of Lifesavers has implications, and when Craig spots “The Nicole Werner Memorial Cherry Orchard,” OTT may as well stand for Over the Top. Yet Kasischke remains aware that she works in familiar traditions: her scenes play knowingly with the expectations (the helpless professor seduced by a student, the super-secret women-only ritual) that her precedents raise, from “Buffy” to Euripides’ “Bacchae.” (As in Euripides, power comes from sexuality, which neither the men, nor most of the women, control.) Sentence by sentence Kasischke writes crisply, attentively, without compromising her fast pace. When Craig and Nicole take a walk in the snow, “Craig held onto her hand, but between his insulated ski glove and her fat wool mitten, he might as well have been holding anything — the university mascot’s paw, a tree branch swathed in bandages. She said something into the scarf, but he couldn’t hear it.”
As well constructed as “The Raising” is, the novel can seem, well, constructed: loose ends tied together, with a broad audience (one that it should find) in mind. To watch Kasischke truly reckon with the messiness of death and life, with the ways they can demolish any plan we ever devise, we have to go to her poetry. Her new collection, “Space, in Chains,” is neither the most elegant nor the most consistent of her eight books of poems, but it might be the most ambitious — and the most disturbing, as it strives to comprehend first and last things. Her earlier books (especially the flawless “Fire & Flower”) often tracked her experience as a teenager or as a mother, with her stepdaughter and now-teenage son. The Kasischke of “Space, in Chains” is an adult daughter, revisiting the deaths of her parents and thinking about her own limited span.
Looking backward and forward within her life, Kasischke finds a set of identities, most of them cast off or used up. She sees herself in “the mirror breathing above the sink,” in “the child at the rummage sale — / more souvenirs than memories,” and in the wayward adolescent among the “Empty / plastic cups after the party on the beach.” Her poems, some in blocks of prose, some strewn with rhyme, strive for patterns as adults strive for responsibility; sometimes they fall apart instead, producing the breakneck lists of noun phrases that (along with irregular rhymes) are her formal trademarks. These lists can imply panic or exhilaration or cumulative, daily exasperation. “At the Public Pool” envisions “A strange blue porcelain sheet. / A naked lake, transparent as a need,” and then “The Hall of Stuff We Bought at the Mall. The plugged-up fountain at the center / of the Museum of Crap That Couldn’t Last / has flooded it all.”
As much as she gathers odd images from her own memory, Kasischke knows how she, too, is typical. She knows how even the strangest lives follow simple patterns — we are born, we grow up, we nurture or fail to nurture children, we do our work or fail to do it, we die. “The Photograph Album in the Junk Shop” agrees:
We are all the same, it claims. This
forgotten couple kissing
before the Christmas tree, in a year
they will be holding
the Christ child between them, whose
name they wish us to believe
is
 Jim.
Beside the child as Christ (each child is a type of Christ), Kasischke arrays less hopeful adults: Lazarus as a florist, delivering unwelcome messages, afraid to sleep; car passengers in a hospital parking lot; her father envisioned posthumously “in the massive shadows / of the columns / of the Museum of Griefs-to-Come.” A woman who “sprawls out on a beach with a book,” a “man hammering on the roof all afternoon” and all the other people in her poems are building “a bridge from here to there,” but “it is the kind of bridge that blows away . . . Not built to weather much at all . . . Not even health. Not even peace.”
Kasischke’s best lines are catchy as pop songs are catchy: you find yourself repeating them before you know how they work, or what they mean. “See, cold spy for time, who needs you now?” You can accuse her of melodrama, of playing to the gallery, but you should not deny her fearsome honesty, nor the homely weirdness of her images. A poem about her own death imagines “the last hour waiting patiently on a tray . . . the spoon slipping quietly into the beautiful soup.” No poet has tried so hard to cut through suburban American illusion while respecting the lives, young and old, that it nurtures or saves. No poet has joined the chasm of ontological despair to the pathos of household frustration so well as Kasischke at her best, and she is — though eerie, though willing to let threads dangle, though looser in the poems’ weave than she has been — at her best often with “Space, in Chains.”

Stephen Burt’s most recent book is “Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry.” He teaches at Harvard.

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