Words that are words

Other Electricities could be called a collection of short stories, but it isn’t. It could be called a novel, but it’s not. For it swings in the bizarre boundary between the two genres, orbiting a central loss or absence hollowed into the lives of its characters. Radio schematic diagrams with seemingly dense captions are interspersed throughout the book; their progression supports the prose, and ends it on a resounding note:[break]



“Dear, distance must begin somewhere”



“Dear, distance is the center of the world, unbearable like magna, untouchable like gas”



“Dear, everything has a source if you can find it, some point of emanation”



Other Electricities is experimental in form and language, in presentation and structure. The stories are filtered through images, rhythms, snows, broken limbs, death, and the weather. The echoing quality builds and haunts the reader, but Monson, an informal designer, takes it beyond the text to create the physicality in which it exists. The book could easily be gimmicky with the “Table of Contents Provided for Your Convenience Including Brief Keyword Index And Identification of Speakers/Main Characters, As Appropriate” followed by a diagram of characters and their relationships –with those alive in white, and those dead in gray – and an added index. But it is not.



The pieces were published separately, the title piece Other Electricities having won the 2002 Fugue magazine fiction prize, and as beautiful as the stories are individually, together they create a book alive and electric, in language lyrical and hypnotic, surprising, tender, grounded, yet oblique.



The stories avoid the elements of a traditional plot structure, and pivotal events happen off the page. Monson does not seem interested in revealing a mystery, or introducing you to characters one by one. He gives it all in the very beginning, with index tools and charts. You are given the character list and told what has happened to them, and sometimes how. You are told what the symbols stand for, and what dangers lurk in the people’s lives. You are told what the outline of the book is. To understand the book itself, you must read. Reading Monson’s prose is rewarding on a level of systems and meticulous planning, the changing nature of the written word (“Dear, this is a mouth, a month, a moth emerging from, a cloth across the brow, agoing-North”), how language can rise and fall, and structure can work in seemingly unstructured ways.



‘Death Messages: Instructions For the Officer’, written in second person, is the first of the short pieces; but the gravity of the writing is phenomenal. Monson concentrates on the details that tether the piece to the moment, to a specific moment, then lets it go spinning into the thoughts of an officer, of the mother who will die, of walking in snow learning to let go.



The second piece is Other Electricities where we meet the unnamed teenaged narrator who lives in Keweenaw Peninsula, Michigan. The narrator’s father becomes a recluse, interested only in the ham radio; his brother is disabled and does not speak. The book’s interest seems to be outlined here: “On the radio, they speak in code. Words that are not words. Words that are words, but not the words you think they are. They displace language. Shift it back and forth like light across a room as the day changes. Charge up the air. Charge right through it. Make it opaque.”



In the index of symbology, Electricity is listed as “the importance of connection what keeps us moving, moody”. This idea of connection is strongly strung through the diagrams, captions, events, and language. The pieces that follow tell us of Liz, the girl who died on prom night in a car that crashed through a frozen lake. The narrator is obsessed with Liz, and the depth of feeling is carried into the index. He calls her, “Liz my X my only X; Liz my unknown quotient, my lonely roamer. Liz my rune. Liz not my Y or Z, not a nor c, but X and X alone.”



Structurally, chapters such as “Big 32” are a series of temperature points, and what those temperatures make Harriet, the speaker of the story, think of. In between are “Dream Obits” which could easily be classified as poetry yet are central to the prose. Others, such as “The Organization and Formation of Blizzards as Seen by Satellites: A-M” and “N-Z” have carefully systematized sentences that begin with letters in the alphabetical order. These elements give the reader something to think about, something beyond the linear narrative telling of an event and the idea of each story building its own climax to propel the collective climax of the book.



Published by Sarabande, a small press in Kentucky, Other Electricities breaks the set ideas of books published by big-name publications.

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