Caren Beilinโs new novel, Sea, Poison, like her much of her other work, attends to the terrible realities of the medical industry and the personal effect this has on people. (She wrote about how her IUD triggered terrible rheumatoid arthritis in her memoir Blackfishing the IUD, and fictionalizes, in part, her experience of arthritic feet in Revenge of the Scapegoat). Of course, Beilinโs writing is about so much else, and it never feels tired to read her work about such a potent topic that impacts so many.
This also doesnโt imply the book is depressing or a tear-jerkerโquite the opposite. Beilin, wizard that she is, manages to make you laugh even at the darkest of scenarios. Like when the protagonist Cumin Baleen realizes maybe her recent ex has joined a cult in which everyone serves an ailing man, she thinks, โI wondered if in the American medical system, in the nursing and in the American aging system, this is whatโs actually required to get any help with the toilet. Start a cult.โ
The protagonistโs name, Cumin Baleen, is a clear joke. Of course, Beilin is writing about herself! But is she? The thin veil between fact and fiction sets your head spinning, as Cumin is told her best chance to treat her rheumatoid arthritis medicine and get her fingers unclench from their claw shapeโto continue writing her novelโshe needs to get an eye exam. And then the eye exam leads to a surgery.
But the laser singes her brain. Then she can barely write a sentence. Sea, Poison is circuitous, mimicking the experience of mystery ailments, the bureaucracy of medical care, and its endless wormholes. But these problems arenโt consigned to the medical sphere. People talk past each other perpetually in the novel, many talking at Cumin but not to her. When people talk at you, theyโre not thinking about optics. They often reveal more than they mean to.
The center around which the novel circles, what Cumin was trying to write about before her brain injury made it impossible, is one of the medical industryโs darkest secrets: sexual abuse exacted by OBGYNs and forced hysterectomies. When people are perhaps more vulnerable than any other moment and that vulnerability is, horrifically, exploited. World War II is a shadow of the book, as its title is drawn from Shusaku Endoโs short story The Sea and Poison about a Japanese doctor late in the war performing experiments on captured Americans under the guise of medical knowledge but its purpose is far darker.
Beilin also meditates on OuLiPo, how Anne Frank hiding from Nazis was, perhaps, the ultimate form of writing with a constraint. Cuminโs brain is singedโanything she writes is certainly borne from constraint. The fact I have struggled to give you an unblurry picture of this amazing and short novel illustrates Beilinโs mastery of the written word. I tip my hat to Publishers Weekly, which manages to accomplish where Iโve failed a third of the space. They write in their starred review, โBeilin employs a host of narrative tricks to reflect [Cuminโs] unsettled state, including sudden time shifts, a dose of metafiction, and Ouilpian constraintsโฆAbove all its tricks, this rewarding and uncompromising novel is distinguished by its deliriously wild writing (the moon is described as โbright as a hexed white plate.โ)โ
Beilin tells us about her to-read pile: โI told my rheumatologist Iโd read his favorite King novel by the time of our next appointment, which is coming up. Dorothy mailed me their new ones and the Lana Lin is immediately capturing me. Otherwise, Iโm stackless, stuff in storage, housesitting at writer/journalist Ben Mauk and artist/photographer Carleen Coulterโs place in Cleveland; he tells me the books here capture undergrad-2014, along with whateverโs been very recently acquired (weโre all new to Cleveland). I looked through their shelves and found a few books that Iโve refused to read out of pursuingย them directly,ย because my intentions are so strong around them itโs like Iโve already read them, and I know that theyโll need to be met, not pursued. Some crystalline, obvious incident. The one with only a black binding is an ARC of Dyerโsย Zona (Ben tells me he reviewed it in grad school), which Iโve been waiting unsuccessfully to meet crystallinely since 2012.โ
*
Hilary Plum, Important Groups
โIn the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups.ย Between April and December 2024, I was writing a long poem,โ writes Plum on her Substack. โLike many of you I havenโt known, I keep not knowing, how to think and to live this past 15 months, in which we were conscripted to bear witness as our governmentโฆfunded and armed a technologically massive assault on a small densely populated civilian area, funded and armed a genocide in Gaza. Once again protests were widespread and that didnโt matter or at least not enough.โ
Stephen King, Pet Sematary
โโPet Sematary,โ with its downright silly title, [is] inspired by a place on the edge of a Maine forest where children had gone over the years to bury their dead dogs and parakeets,โ writes Christopher Lehmann-Haupt at the New York Times in 1983. (Iโve always wondered if โPet Semataryโ is like how Led Zeppelin wanted to avoid being called Leed Zeppelin if they spelled their name correctly.) Lehmann-Haupt comes around, writing, โWhat has always made Mr. King so effective as a storyteller is his instinct for subtly exploiting the unconscious hostility and consequent guilt that men and women feel in the routine of living with each other and raising their children.โ
Geoff Dyer, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room
Sukhdev Sandhu writes at The Guardian, โTwo-thirds of the way intoย Zona, his characteristically singular book aboutย Andrei Tarkovskyโsย Stalkerย (1979),ย Geoff Dyerย declares: โThere are few things I hate more than when someone, in an attempt to persuade me to see a film, starts summarising it.โ Doing so has the effect of โdestroying any chance of my ever going to see itโ. Itโs a surprising assertion โ though less so if youโre familiar with Dyerโs books which, whether theyโre about jazz, the first world war or DH Lawrence, go out of their way to fuse form and content in arresting fashion โ becauseย Zonaย is one long movie summary, a shot-by-shot rewrite.โ
Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger
Hammadโs rigorous and vital book has been in several to-read piles. โI first heard Hammad speak a year ago, at an event that many of us Arab writers now view, in hindsight, as a similarly revelatory momentโa prelude to the one that would upend everything,โ writes Abdelrahman Elgendy at The Nation. โThe event was the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, held at the University of Pennsylvania in September 2023. There, I listened to Hammad discuss her latest novel, Enter GhostโฆBut what I recall most vividly from Hammadโs conversation was her discussion of a slightly adjacent theme: how to write from a place of exile when one is denied a homeland.โ
Lana Lin, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam
โTaking inspiration from Gertrude Steinโsย The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, filmmaker Lin debuts with a bold โmemoirโ in which she narrates her partnerโs life story from her partnerโs point of view. In a meditative register, Lin (as Lam) recalls the pairโs first meeting in New York City, then plunges further back into Lamโs adolescence,โ writes Publishers Weekly in its starred review. โThe coupleโs joys and challenges get equal airtime, with odes to their creative chemistry bumping against harrowing recollections of Linโs breast cancer treatment.โ
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (tr. John Sturrock)
I recently found a vital Internet (I like to lean into being a luddite and this is what I call a website): The Complete Review. It is a compendium of reviews for any number of titles, its own review, and a catalog of links, similar titles. Iโm a little embarrassed I only discovered it recently, considering Iโve been writing this column for over three years (!) and itโs such an amazing resource. Anyway, via The Complete Review, here is a quote from the 1998 Washington Post review of Species of Spaces, โIf youโve been tempted to try Georges Perecโs masterpieceย Life: A Userโs Manualย and found its length daunting, you might prefer to look into this volume of his selected writings.โ
ย
