The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Echoes by Dennis BaroneMatthew Roberson
Dennis Barone. Echoes. Potes & Poets, 1997. 172 pp. Paper: $14.00.
Echoes collects twenty-eight pieces that can’t be called fiction, poetry, essay, biography, or autobiography; between one to fifty pages, the pieces are instead prose assemblages that drift into and out of and in between more familiar genres. “Biography,” for one, takes as its subject “you,” the reader, while simultaneously telling the story of the writer, who “went to sleep too early and slept restlessly thinking of this page.” About the “effacement of the ego,” this (auto)biography is nevertheless also absorbed in lyrically haunting personal memories: “The crash on Christmas Eve. At home children waiting for gifts, for you. The glasses shatter in your eyes . . . Resolved: you will learn to see in a new way.” A constant throughout Echoes is Barone’s insistence on making the world, and language, unfamiliar. He says that “where there is no symmetry there can be no rest,” and his lines dramatize the tension inherent in insisting upon differences, particularly between what is new and what has been written before. While he is fascinated with the inevitability of repetition, his pieces refuse to surrender to it; they insist on twisting repetition into something else. “Bir-Hakeim is a stop on the Paris Metro, though it could be something else, too . . . Think of the word ‘note’ because it is between memo and letter . . . Begin then to divide ice with shrill notes, shape ice into continents and where will be the divisions?” In Barone’s work “variation will be encouraged”; what he creates and what readers will in turn “study is foreign.” The pieces in Echoes are difficult, but that is their appeal. They are delirious literary plateaus that ensnare the mind, showing that the “present and necessary function” of literary work today “is transformation” and that “on the slight groundwork of reality, imagination” truly can spin. [Matthew Roberson]