Karen Lillis

review of
Karen Lillis' The Second Elizabeth
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 16, 2011

The author of this is a friend of mine. She lives in the same neighborhood I do. I'm very glad she does. She's someone I like very much. I'd heard her read about working in a bkstore but was otherwise unfamiliar w/ her writing. I'd heard that The Second Elizabeth was "like Gertrude Stein" from a mutual friend. That cd mean: 'it experiments w/ repetition' &/or I might very well hate it as I did Stein's The Making of Americans. I waited a while to get a copy of this & to then read it partially b/c I was worried that I wdn't like a bk by a friend of mine. Actually, it's not 'not liking a bk by a friend of mine' that's so worrisome - it's how to review it (as I typically do) afterward that's the problem.

The Second Elizabeth is divided in 2 parts: "July" & "August" & these are the 2 mnths that she writes about living in Charlottesville, VA. This is part autobiography, part language play. It's a personal bk. If one wants a spectacular life as a basis for autobiography, this is not the place to go. Karen writes about working at a deli w/ a friend named Beth, living w/ her brother, being left by her fiancé, on trains & traintracks. Her life is fairly ordinary.

But what saves the ordinariness from being all that there is here is the way she writes about it. There's a refreshing openness. Karen lets us know that she cried alot, Karen lets us know that she was lonely. But she also has a way of telling this that strikes me as fairly unique to her. There's what one might call a poetry to her openness that's very likable, for me at least. On pp 52-53 she writes:

"My heart has a murmur, a doctor who is not my father told me. A murmur, she called it, but all I know is that my heart skips a beat every so often. My heart beats in time with my footsteps, and my feet are still young, and so sometimes, but just sometimes, my feet pause and wonder where to go, and my heart skips a beat, and the blood whispers something to my feet, and my feet mumble something back, and then they start walking again, and my heart starts beating again. And the doctor called it a murmur, but I might call it a pause and a whisper and a mumble instead.

"My heart beats in time with my feet, and my feet once danced on my father's toes, and now I wear the boots by father once wore to mend a war. I wear the boots every day, and my boots have changed the shape of my feet, and my footsteps have changed the shape of my boots."

I rather like the description of that passage & it was this type of thing that ultimately made The Second Elizabeth interesting for me. Another example from pp 60-61:

"The night in Charlottesville smack in the middle of July is much more than a string of moments. The night breathes deeply in Charlottesville July, the night takes breaths from a place deep inside its belly. In its vast belly, this night has room for all of time. In the night in Virginia in July, I can find 1978 and 1990 and 1989, and I can look very hard for 1972. In July, the night is not just the second half of a day, not merely its darker counterpart - the night is a PLACE in the summer in Virginia - the night is a world, a dream, a gift, a beautiful play with a new plot to surprise me every twenty-four hours. In the night the trees talk to each other - I listen to them whispering by moving their branches and shaking their leaves - and the daytime world has been hushed enough that the trees can hear each other again. The night in July in Virginia is a symphony - the night is the earth's secret symphony, where the crickets and the trees and the freight trains and the tomecats play, for anyone who is patient enough to listen for it; but if no one is, the symphony plays nonetheless."

The most tedious part of The Second Elizabeth for me is the part starting on p66 where she goes into a history of family names. I shd qualify that, tho, by saying that names are important in the overall fabric. Karen had named herself "Karen Elizabeth Elizabeth Lillis" & her best friend's name is "Beth" - wch isn't a diminutive of "Elizabeth" & such connections & disconnections are important to The Second Elizabeth's language.

This bk expresses alotof feeling & the feeling bleeds into other things. P89: "Beth doesn't know that I cry only to her, and Beth doesn't know that my tears are just new words with the letters in the wrong order." & on p90 the names & the feelings collide: "The crying rag that Beth gave me that is my favorite color blue holds my almost-words, my almost-language called Elizabeth, the second Elizabeth." This way of exploring & feeling language is the strongest quality of The Second Elizabeth for me. P93:

"And as I get closer to Leesburg, I see that the wooden signs have been replace by plastic ones that speak strange words. In this strange language, C's have become K's and K's have become C's. The K's that aren't C's became X's, and S's became Z's, and many E's and GH's have disappeared entirely. The signs along 29 North have turned into a language I don't understand, because I don't know whose language it is. I don't know who write this language, whose handwriting scratched it out, whose face these letters press behind; I don't know whose names this alphabet is contained in."

There's alotof crying here, the crying fertilizes the fluidity of the writing. PP 97-98: "I didn't know that my tears were mixed up letters, and I didn't have a crying rag, so when I was crying TO in the garden, I was crying INTO the garden, when mixed up letters were running down my face they were falling INTO the garden. I can't keep a garden in my pocket so I have to stay near the gardens; my story is written in my tears, and my tears are planted in the garden."

These tears are related to the lack of incoming love in her life. P115: "I am growing my hair as long as it will grow. I am growing hair that is the color of train tracks. I know that at the end of my train tracks, a great love waits for me, and I know that if I send my words on the train, the train and my words will bring him to me." P123: ""I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair," that was the song my mother sang to me, me in the bathtub with Johnson and Johnson No More Tears shampoo on my head" - I found that a very interesting way of tying together some loose ends of sorts that'd preceded.

Karen leaves herself somewhat open, somewhat vulnerable, to emotional scrutiny. I respect this. Formally, this is augmented by the double spacing of the bk. It feels spacious. & I'm glad to say that her emotional openness seems to help resolve her sadness w/ the help of her friend Beth. P179:

"When I am dancing I remember that the language of the second Elizabeth is already written, when I am dancing and singing and I let some of the secret noises out of hiding, and then I listen closely to the language inside my blood, and not the language that the daytime people wrote between my ears, and not the story that someone etched onto my body, and I hear the language of the second Elizabeth, deep inside my blood."… (mehr)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

(IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE: About a year ago, the author of this book wrote a complimentary article about CCLaP for her personal blog, although in no way was this done in expectation of a good review in return. Nonetheless, it should be kept in mind when reading this write-up.)

Knowing what I do about author Karen Lillis, I had been sort of gritting my teeth in expectation of reviewing this latest novella by her; because to be frank, this academically-minded former bookstore employee has a habit at her popular blog of championing the kinds of abstract, highly experimental work that I have a low tolerance for, and I was afraid that this was going to be the case as well with this newest slim volume of hers. But the good news is that this is actually a highly readable, engaging and entertaining story, essentially a deep character study of one of those douchbaggy, intellectually bullying, constantly mooching "artist dudes" that otherwise smart women seem to constantly fall for, written entirely as a series of reminisces from one of these smart women and examining all the sneaky ways that such guys manage to burrow under such women's skin. As such, then, potential readers shouldn't expect anything even resembling a traditional three-act plot, but rather should be prepared to enjoyably wallow in Lillis' casual, unhurried prose style, the point not really to find out "what happens" but rather to get a complex inside-out understanding of just what makes such Proust-quoting underachievers tick, jumping randomly from location to location around the world but admittedly at its Romantic finest (with a capital R) when looking at the characters' time spent in a deliberately precious contemporary Paris, cliched days of staying on back cots at Shakespeare's Books and pretending that poor artists still hang out in the Left Bank, but effective and moving nonetheless. A perfect companion to Ann Beattie's Walks with Men (covering the exact same subject but set in early-'80s lower Manhattan), this will strongly appeal to fans of New Yorker stories and other intriguing blends of academic and mainstream work, and it comes recommended to that specific audience.

Out of 10: 8.8… (mehr)