Two in One

For issues number 55 and 56 of The Sonora Review, the publishers (grad students all at the University of Arizona) have released a double issue packed with (mostly) literary delights, each issue achieving its own flavor.

Issue 55 contains a hundred page tribute to David Foster Wallace, who was fiction editor of The Sonora Review when he attended the university in the 80s. His stamp is all over the issue, and I also evidenced a strong connection between Wallace's work and the playful experimentation of McSweeney's.

The introductions, stories, and tributes in this issue keep alive Wallace's singular love of language, boundless structure, and his rediscovery and escalation of footnotes as art form. With a piece called "Footnotes & Endnotes," Michael Martone deconstructs the endnote format while describing his intermittent but rich interaction with Wallace in the 90s. Of Wallace's note use, Martone says, "...it is the piecing together that is important, the attempting to make a sense and the repair of conscious mistakes made ...on the fly." He goes on to equate footnotes/endnotes with hypertext, but "hypertext seems a lame imitation of the act of simply reading. Your eye falls on this word here or a phrase there and your reading mind opens its own second channel...our hypertexts never seemed the same to me as this kind of enriched, encoded noted text."

Among those remembering Wallace are Sven Birkerts, Charles Bock, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and Ken Kalfus, and interviews with Michael Pietsch who edited Infinite Jest, and Tom Bissell who deconstructs Wallace's story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. All of these points of view illustrate a profound fondness for a man (Dave Wallace) and a deep appreciation for a writer (David Foster Wallace) who is gone by his own hand long before his projected expiration date. The tribute includes an uncollected Wallace story, "/Solomon Silverfish/*," an intricate exploration of a man, Solomon Silverfish, who is loved unconditionally by his wife and deplored by her family even as she is dying from cancer. It's hopeful and challenging and deeply bittersweet, like much of Wallace's writing.

Other stories in issue 55 show the strong influence and echo of Wallace's work. Wendy Rawlings' "The Fleischer/Giaccondo Online Gift Registry" turns a Crate and Barrel gift registry into the engrossing story of a bride's sister who, considered a bohemian outcast by her family, struggles with the perceived failures in her life while living up to her family's fears, on the eve of her sister's wedding.

"Couvade" by Kellie Wells took me on a mysterious ride. The story concerns a socially awkward young woman, Wallis--8'2, 492 pounds, struggling with her "impudent ballast of flesh,"--who we meet on the day her brother disappears. With meandering precision Wells gives over the strange details of a strange family in an average Kansas town. "Couvade" is packed like a novel, deftly turning a complicated back-story and a suburban mystery into a compelling narrator. It's also sad, fantastic, and fatalistic; like a Tim Burton movie as prose narrative.

Jared Rosello's "Knocks at the Door" is a fractured story about Michael, a man becoming more and more mentally fractured. His wife has left him, but has she really? And there is an impending storm, so bad that people in town are bordering their windows and leaving for safety. For pages we are shown a repetition of action until Michael's uncertainty about his life melts his memory so that we're not sure of the difference between what is happening to Michael and what he thinks is happening. The issue also includes short interviews with Junot Diaz and Ben Marcus that left me wanting.

Issue 56 is a bit of a letdown after issue 55. I was disappointed with Riley Hanick's non-fiction piece "Microphonics," six pages of short paragraphs that signify a headache for the reader--the narrative possibly about the hunting for the perfect lab mouse, with overt references to Kafka. But, what's the point?

The poems were lacking, distancing. I agree with Marilynne Robinson who, in one of the issue's two interviews (the other with Ron Hansen), says, "I think that at present a lot of poetry is written for the approval of other poets. As a sort of cryptic language, not really meant to go beyond certain walls."