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.
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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