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WORK TITLE: Clothed, Female Figure
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Providence
STATE: RI
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http://www.dzancbooks.org/our-books/clothed-female-figure-by-kirstin-allio * https://www.brown.edu/academics/literary-arts/writers-online/authors/kirstin-allio * http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-kirstin-allio-20160801-snap-story.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1974, in Phillips, ME; married; children: sons.
EDUCATION:Graduate of Brown University and New York University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Brown University, Providence, RI, former teacher of creative writing.
AWARDS:5 Under 35 Award, National Book Foundation; O. Henry Prize, PEN America.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Kirstin Allio is a wife and mother who has taught classes in creative writing. The worlds evoked by her fiction resonate with the authenticity of personal experience, even when the characters and plots do not. Allio was born in southwest Maine, in a small town with a long, sleepy history. She attended university in Providence, Rhode Island, where she later settled down to raise a family.
Garner
The novel Garner is set in a small town in New Hampshire, not unlike the author’s rural hometown. The year is 1925, and the town of Garner is dying. Times are changing, the modern world is encroaching on the farmland and back roads, and teenager Frances Giddens is dead. Postmaster and local historian Willard Heald finds the body floating in Blood Brook, and the story begins with his narration. Heald knows everything there is to know about Garner–both history and rumor. Frances is–was–a child of woods and stream, a mystery to some, an unattainable object of desire to others. Malin Nillsen is attracted to the mystery.
Hard times prompted Frances’s father to open the family farmhouse to summer boarders. Nillsen is a sophisticated socialite from New York City, lured by the quaint appeal of country living. It is Nillsen who narrates the second part of the novel, as she attempts frustratingly to befriend the teenager. Frances communicates wordlessly and joyously with nature but has little use for casual conversation. Nillsen’s departure from Garner precedes the discovery of the teenager’s body, and the rest of the story emerges from Allio’s vignettes of the remaining townspeople. Only at the end of the story does the reader learn the identity of the murderer. Heather Birrell observed in Believer: “The most unsettling, gut-wrenching, and effective whodunits consistently refuse a reader full access to the crux of the mystery” to offer “a hazy, suggestive atmosphere rife with both seamy secrets and veiled confessions.”
While Frances is seen to represent the spirit of Garner, Allio casts the town itself as the main character. In her Booklist Review, Annie Tully described Garner as “a shockingly beautiful work about the clash of age and youth, experience and purity, and urban and rural life.” David Abrams explained in January that “Allio immerses the reader in a world which is being pushed and pulled and squeezed by … the intrusion of tourists and new residents” who bring with them “money, power and a sense of danger.” Critics acknowledged that Garner is not a novel for the impatient reader, but as Abrams shared in January, “Garner ultimately won me over and wouldn’t let me go.” Birrell observed: “It is rare to feel so truly transported by a work of fiction.”
Female Figure, Fully Clothed
Readers would have to wait more than ten years for Allio’s story collection, Female Figure, Fully Clothed. These stories explore a theme of womanhood, but they are not stories about gender per se. Allio addresses the many subtle ways in which oppression touches the lives of women, regardless of education or socioeconomic class. “Mother-daughter relationships take the foreground,” observed Gillie Collins at Full Stop.
In the title story, Natasha, a Russian-born psychologist, spends her career as a nanny for a female American doctor. Equally credentialed, they are at opposite ends of the economic hierarchy. Natasha begins to receive correspondence from a former charge, now a college student about to become a nanny herself for the children of her sculpture professor. Facing a compromising situation, it is the nanny, not her mother, in whom the girl confides. Another story is narrated by a young woman whose late mother worked as a janitor at a university, but successfully passed herself off as a graduate student to grade papers for a well known sociologist.
Other stories are more directly about mothers and children. A pregnant businesswoman happily abandons a successful career to immerse herself so deeply into the relationship with her new baby that she cannot even share him in the form of birth announcements. Another successful, well-dressed, stay-at-home mom faces reality when her best friend–and quasi-mirror image–commits suicide. A gardener’s daughter contemplates the unintentional cruelty of charity that serves only to emphasize her mother’s destitute situation. “But simplifying Allio’s stories to these one-line descriptions doesn’t do justice to her prose,” Ilana Masad emphasized in her Los Angeles Times review.
By writing about women and only women, Collins explained, Allio can focus on a diverse cast regardless of gender issues: “With every story, she urges us to both imagine other people’s life experiences and remember that we can’t.” She observed: “All the women in Allio’s stories are intelligent, but those in subservient positions often have a better grip on reality than their superiors.” Critics were enchanted with the scope and depth of this collection. “Not much happens in these stories,” observed a contributor to Kirkus Reviews; “Allio tells more than she shows.” However, noted Reba Leiding in Library Journal, the “prose is lush with imagery.” Masad summarized: “The way she works her way into and out of her plots is skillful, but it’s the writing itself, so deceptively easy at times, that is truly breathtaking.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2005, Annie Tully, review of Garner, p. 57.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2016, review of Clothed, Female Figure.
Library Journal, August 1, 2016, Reba Leiding, review of Clothed, Female Figure, p. 89.
Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2016, Ilana Masad, review of Clothed, Female Figure.
Publishers Weekly, July 18, 2005, review of Garner, p. 184; August 8, 2005, Robert Dahlin, author profile, p. 105.
ONLINE
Believer, http://www.believermag.com/ (February 11, 2017), Heather Birrell, review of Garner.
Brown University Web site, https://www.brown.edu/ (February 11, 2017), author profile.
Dzanc Books Web site, http://www.dzancbooks.org/ (February 11, 2017), author profile.
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (October 4, 2016), Gillie Collins, review of Clothed, Female Figure.
January, http://www.januarymagazine.com/ (February 11, 2017), David Abrams, review of Garner.
Kirstin Allio has taught creative writing at Brown University and holds degrees from Brown and New York University. Born in Maine, she lives in Providence with her husband and sons. Her novel, Garner, has been described by reviewers as “exceptional” and as a “strange, startling and beautifully written first novel.”
Kirstin Allio was born in Maine in 1974. Her novel, Garner, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for First Fiction. She also received the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35″ Award. Her short stories have appeared in a variety of publications. She lives in Seattle, WA, and has taught creative writing at Brown University and holds degrees from Brown and New York Universities.
Kirstin Allio's novel, Garner, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award, a PEN/O. Henry prize, and other honors for her short stories and essays. She has been a Howard Foundation Fellow at Brown University, and she lives in Providence, RI with her husband and sons.
LC control no.: n 2005031833
LC classification: PS3601.L444
Personal name heading:
Allio, Kirstin
Variant(s): Allio, Kristin
Found in: Allio, Kristin. Garner, 2005: ECIP t.p. (Kristin Allio)
data view (b. in Maine and lives in Providence, R.I.;
degrees from Brown and NYU; has taught creative writing
at Brown; first novel) book t.p. (Kirstin Allio)
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Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
Novels
Garner (2005)
Collections
Clothed, Female Figure (2016)
Allio, Kirstin: Clothed, Female Figure
Reba Leiding
Library Journal. 141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p89.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Allio, Kirstin. Clothed, Female Figure. Dzanc. Aug. 2016. 280p. ISBN 9781941088098. pap. $16.95; ebk. ISBN 9781941088715. F
The stories in this collection take readers to New York or Providence, RI, neighborhoods, or to a university, probably Brown, all locations the author knows well. But the territory plumbed in depth is the interior world of women's relationships, especially when tested by loss, loneliness, or as in one story, a mother/infant bond so intense the mother can't bring herself to send out birth announcements. In another, a suburban mom mourns the sudden death of a best friend. Plot complications can be quirky. In the title story, a Russian nanny receives letters from a former charge, a young woman who is now an au pair in a compromising situation. In "The Other Woman," a daughter remembers her mother, a janitor at a college who passed herself off as a postdoc and graded papers for a female professor; after her mother's death from breast cancer, the daughter meets the hoodwinked academic. VERDICT An impressive first collection from a promising new voice in women's literary fiction. Allio's (Gamer)[[ prose is lush with imagery,]] and the story lines are revealed obliquely, making even domestic dramas profound and mysterious.--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Leiding, Reba. "Allio, Kirstin: Clothed, Female Figure." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 89. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459805008&it=r&asid=07fffa31de448d8d0d9a5df887e7a219. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459805008
Allio, Kirstin: CLOTHED, FEMALE FIGURE
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Allio, Kirstin CLOTHED, FEMALE FIGURE Dzanc (Adult Fiction) $16.95 8, 9 ISBN: 978-1-941088-09-8
First collection by a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and author of Garner (2005), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction[[.Not much happens in these stories]]--not on the surface, anyway. There's little in the way of dialogue. [[Allio tells more than she shows.]] They succeed, though, because Allio's protagonists are obsessively observant. A Russian emigre working as a nanny re-examines her own life in the light of minutely confessional letters she receives from a former charge. The attempt to understand her best friend's death subsumes one woman's whole existence. A new mother, excruciatingly aware of the intricacies of class and the conflicting demands of gender, "knows she's privileged to be a housewife looking down (from above) on a housewife." For Allio's protagonists, hypervigilance is a necessary condition of survival--because of near-crippling social anxiety, because they've been critically wounded by loss, or because they're enduring an awful combination of the two. "The Other Woman" is exemplary. The daughter of a female university janitor who moonlights as a sociologist, Swan can't escape the jaded worldview bequeathed to her by an amateur social scientist and lifelong hard-ass. For example, this, at a party honoring Swan's mother-in-law, "the famous feminist": "I heard her bray above the usual modulations and I thought, Alex has spent her career practicing laughing louder than any man in academia." Cancer does little to soften Swan's mother, but it eats at Swan, and some of the story's most finely wrought passages are Swan's attempts to describe her fear and, ultimately, her grief. Swan's voice is so real, her observations about class and race and living and dying so very spot-on, that it will likely take the reader some time to notice that "The Other Woman" follows, in its perfect inevitability, the shape of a fairy tale.Marvels of craft and insight.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Allio, Kirstin: CLOTHED, FEMALE FIGURE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA455212711&it=r&asid=3d25ff49a144131114a59a7886ff184d. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A455212711
Allio, Kirstin. Garner
Annie Tully
Booklist. 102.1 (Sept. 1, 2005): p57.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Allio, Kirstin. Garner. Sept. 2005. 232p. Coffee House, paper, $14.95 (1-56689-175-2).
Allio's first novel is[[ a shockingly beautiful work about the clash of agc and youth, experience and purity, and urban and rural life]] in 1920s New Hampshire. With farming less lucrative than in the past, the Giddens family makes the controversial decision to take in summer boarders. The farm draws wealthy, young, and overconfident New Yorkers, and the Puritan town of Garner shakes its collective head. Through Allio's stunning prose, the tension of this situation is tangible and thrilling, even more so due to the knowledge, presented in the opening pages, that young Frances Giddens will turn up dead. As the story focuses alternately on various characters fascinated with the elusive Frances--from a lonely female boarder to the town's curious postman--we learn about the complexity of Garner. And this farming town proves to be the novel's strongest character. Against the haunting backdrop of an ancient forest, Garner is still stinging from the Civil War, a dwindling population, and rapidly changing times, and its conflicts make for an alluring and unforgettable novel.--Annie Tully
Tully, Annie
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tully, Annie. "Allio, Kirstin. Garner." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2005, p. 57. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA137016953&it=r&asid=1ee7a039e7f1ed947ee88a2f6f4d8520. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A137016953
Garner
Robert Dahlin
Publishers Weekly. 252.31 (Aug. 8, 2005): p105.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Garner, Kirstin Allio, 30 (Coffee House Press, Sept.)
Born: Phillips, Maine; now lives in Providence, R.I.
Favorite authors: Grace Paley, Bruce Chatwin, Flannery O'Connor.
Career arc: From creative writing teacher to first-time novelist.
Plot: In 1925, Garner, N.H., is steeped in history and wary of modernity. When a woman's body is found, the circumstances of her murder bring about the unraveling of this picture-perfect town.
Author's toughest challenge: "The seeds for Garner were probably planted when I was in graduate school. When I started, 1925 was one of the settings, and there was also a huge part that was contemporary, but the contemporary always seemed so trite. I'd build up the plot, and then tear it down. I had many, many versions."
Publisher's pitch: Says senior editor Chris Fischbach, "Garner is like a cross between Edith Wharton and Michael Ondaatje. It takes place in the 1920s and could have been written then. However, it is also very fresh, with a lot of voices woven together."
Opening lines: The postman used the roads and the woods alike and bareheaded on a day that provided such weather. If he came upon Frances it was always she who saw him first and he who, knowing himself watched, was pleasantly startled. A tree became a girl, he allowed himself to wonder. Today, the stream was full with a sudden rain after a dry spell but he was a man of all weathers.
Dahlin, Robert
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dahlin, Robert. "Garner." Publishers Weekly, 8 Aug. 2005, p. 105. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA135079846&it=r&asid=ee65cacbae89c815fb78e1166fe92595. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A135079846
Garner
Publishers Weekly. 252.28 (July 18, 2005): p184.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Garner KRISTIN ALLIO. Coffee House, $14.95 paper (232p) ISBN 1-56689-175-2
With his ears made of envelopes," postman Willard Heald hears the secret intimacies of the residents of Garner, N.H., the setting of this exceptional debut. He composes intricate histories of his small town--time lines, lists, aphorisms, ordinances, predictions and conversations--which form the skeleton of Allio's lyrical evocation of country life as its adherence to the past smothers its present. In a novel full of voices, Heald's rings the loudest: "For some of our native folk, to meet the modern age was a difficult task. It was I who came upon young Frances, face up in Blood Brook and floating." This discovery occurs at the end of summer 1925, during Garner's transition from a prosperous farming town to a decaying vacation destination for a group of wealthy urbanites, and the death of nymphlike Frances only hastens the metamorphosis. Allio's finely wrought writing--Frances has "a laugh of leaves," while Heald's wife muses that "the evening was what one married for"--just barely overshadows a narrative that turns suspenseful in its final third. Four main characters nurse hearts as brittle as autumn's foliage, and their hurts lead them to places as frightening as dark forests and as shocking as the cool water of a stream. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Garner." Publishers Weekly, 18 July 2005, p. 184+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA134459942&it=r&asid=41c1804022c98a1f72147bfdc10e2504. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A134459942
Garner
by Kristin Allio
Published by Coffee House Press
221 pages, 2005
Caught in New Hampshire
Reviewed by David Abrams
Kirstin Allio's fresh first novel, Garner, is framed by the discovery of a young girl's body floating in Blood Brook near the small town of Garner, New Hampshire, in 1925. Teenage Frances Giddens is a free-spirited youth who moves through the local forest like a gossamer-winged wood nymph and is the object of suppressed longing from several of the novel's characters.
While Frances' death holds the narrative of the book like tentpoles on either end, the novel is as much about the town, the land and its residents as it is about the murder of young Frances, the girl with a "silver and green laugh."
From the moment the town's postman first discovers Frances' body in the water, Garner moves back and forth across space and time like a skipping gust of wind. Allio writes in short, lyrical paragraphs with a poet's ear. As the novel frequently shifts perspective, we feel like we're floating omnisciently above the New Hampshire forests, catching snatches of conversations and lives.
Postman Willard Heald, the closest thing to a main character, is our initial guide as we move through Garner's landscape populated with "men of sweat and blood." The self-appointed scribe of the town, Heald knows most of Garner's secrets and chronicles them in his notebooks for the history he is compiling. Allio writes: "Willard Heald heard everything with his ears made of envelopes." He also has the disturbing habit of reading the mail before it is delivered and so, like a switchboard operator, he knows a little bit about everybody in a community trying to cling to the old ways even as the wolf is at the door.
We also meet Frances' father, "a lean and horse-gray man who played the organ with great sympathy," who has made the controversial decision to neglect his farmland for a season and turn his home into a boarding house for summer tourists. And there is one of those boarders, Malin Nillsen -- cut from the cloth of an Edith Wharton novel -- who comes to vacation in Garner with her fiancée but then finds herself sympathetic to the plain country folk her entourage of friends make fun of. There is also a scandal-plagued "fallen woman" who escapes Garner but finds life is just as hard in the city, a widowed farmer forced to sell his land to a rich couple from the city, Heald's wife who quietly distrusts her husband's frequent outings into the woods, and perhaps a half-dozen other characters who help form the portrait of a small, turn-of-the-century farming community.
But it is Garner itself which is the axis of the novel. Everything revolves around "the slip of land, sail-shaped." Garner reveals the decay of small-town society in much the same way that Sherwood Anderson chronicled it in Winesburg, Ohio. Through sentences which mirror the formality of early 20th-century literature, [[Allio immerses the reader in a world which is being pushed and pulled and squeezed by]] the rapidly-encroaching urban growth along the Eastern seaboard. Garner stands like a trembling, defiant animal in the center of the road as a newfangled automobile of progress bears down on its staid traditions and quiet rhythms.
As Heald the postman tells us, in the town's ordinances it is written that "Women can be anything they want as long as they are wives. Men can be anything they want as long as they can fix their own machines." These rural, Puritanical ideals are now threatened by [[the intrusion of tourists and new residents]] coming from the big city where the sexual Jazz Age revolution is boiling over. The slick, mocking urbanites [[bring money, power and a sense of danger.]] Ripples and repercussions spread through the town, changing it forever with the catalyst of the murder.
Allio wisely begins the novel with news of Frances' death and doesn't reveal the circumstances until the closing pages. As we read, we are always haunted by the knowledge of her pending death and that gives urgency to these pages. Frances is more than a victim of lust; she is a symbol for nature -- much like that other descendant of Puritans, Nathaniel Hawthorne, used the wild, dark forest to give his stories deeper meaning. Ultimately, the circumstances of Frances' death, the who behind the dunnit (and indeed it's never quite clear exactly how she dies), are less important than the fact that a vital piece of Garner dies with this young girl.
Fair warning: Garner is not always the easiest novel to absorb and impatient readers might give up in its earliest pages because of the way the language tangles and knots. But those who commit to at least 40 pages, as I did, will find themselves slipping into Allio's deftly-created world. They will be carried away by the current of esoteric diction, eventually absorbed by the lives of the novel's characters. Hours later, they will look up from the novel, blink, and wonder where they are. This is one of the few novels I've read where the 21st century becomes an unwelcome intrusion. I found myself returning again and again to the book to escape the jangle of telephones and hissing buzz of the television. Though I was initially put off by its stiff sentences,[[ Garner ultimately won me over and wouldn't let me go.]] This is easily the most important book I've read this year. | March 2006
David Abrams is a January Magazine contributing editor. He has written for Esquire, Glimmer Train Stories, The Greensboro Review, The Readerville Journal and other literary magazines.
October 4, 2016
Clothed, Female Figure – Kirstin Allio
by Gillie Collins
Allio cover[Dzanc; 2016]
In Kirstin Allio’s debut collection of short stories, Clothed, Female Figure, there are no male narrators and few male characters. Instead, women are the life force of every story, and[[ mother-daughter relationships take the foreground]]. By controlling for the gender of her characters, Allio draws our attention to another vector of oppression: class. Her stories are set in a world (like ours) where some women own “country estates” and others are janitors; some are “famous feminists” and others do their laundry. Together, these accounts speak to the importance of intersectional feminism and the challenges of living it.
In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term “intersectionality” to describe the way “women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity,” depending on other dimensions of identity, including “race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.” Since then, intersectionality has become an important framework for third-wave feminists, who are concerned with the way systems of oppression overlap. In practice, they argue, every woman experiences patriarchy differently.
Clothed, Female Figure suggests the merits of this theory. Class, as much as gender, impacts the way Allio’s characters experience the world. Even flowers mean different things to different women, depending on their socioeconomic situations. In the book’s first story, “Millennium,” the owners of a forty-acre estate send flowers to their resident gardener, who is dying of skin cancer. To the wealthy couple, the bouquet makes a cheerful get-well gift; but to the gardener, it stands for a lifetime of labor, subsistence living, and bodily sacrifice. On a cultural level, flowers are also symbols of female anatomy. Allegorically, then, Allio suggests that money changes a woman’s womanhood.
The collection’s stories are set in the murky waters between socioeconomic strata, where “clothed, female figures” from different backgrounds are forced into contact. Some of the Allio’s most interesting scenes take place between employers and employees in the domestic sphere. Natasha, a Russian nanny, narrates the books eponymous story. She works for (and lives with) Virginia, a successful doctor. In one scene Virginia brings a personal letter to Natasha’s room:
It was last Saturday when I heard my employer’s appraising step along the attic hallway that leads to the little room that comes with my paycheck. . .
‘Oh, Natasha!’ her surprise at finding me in my own private corner was unconvincing. ‘Here’s this — ’ and she held out a rather bulky letter, laden with small stamps, as if someone had a tedious math assignment. I had the impulse to snatch it up, but it seemed essential that I measure my response: that it be equal, exactly, to my employer’s.
‘Thank, you Virginia.’ There was a pool of quiet around us. . . .
‘Is Colin napping?’ I inquired.
‘A miracle,’ said Virginia. I nodded as if to excuse her.
‘Oh!’ She paused to signal what was coming was such an incidental request it had only just now occurred to her. ‘Would dinner at six be possible?’
While Virginia and Natasha share a mailing address, their relationship is transactional: Natasha provides a service — feeding the family, tidying the house, caring for the children — and receives a paycheck in return. But the intimate nature of her work blurs professional boundaries. To navigate this ambiguity, Natasha keeps her responses “equal, exactly, to [her] employer’s,” while Virginia attempts to appear laissez-faire. She presumes Natasha is oblivious, when, in fact, she is more aware of the conversation’s subtext. Her livelihood depends on it.
[[All the women in Allio’s stories are intelligent, but those in subservient positions often have a better grip on reality than their superiors.]] In “The Other Woman,” the narrator’s mother is a university janitor who also grades papers “capably,” maybe “brilliantly,” on behalf of a distinguished anthropology professor, Nam Shemaria. Like all instances of passing, this one discredits the logic of hierarchy, proving success and capability don’t correlate. After she discovers her surrogate’s identity, Professor Shemaria is scandalized that a janitor could do her job: “‘A single mom with no education, recurring breast cancer,’ she faded off, shaking her head. ‘We women.’” Professor Shemaria uses the word “women” to paper over race and class differences. She claims to represent all women everywhere.
There are few instances of overt classism in Clothed, Female Figure. Instead, Allio suggests the subtle, counterintuitive ways that hierarchy perpetuates itself. Here, even charity exacerbates inequality rather than reducing it. In “Millennium,” Rosemary, a gardener’s daughter, remembers receiving “thin-ply garbage bags of clothing with an envelope that read: PLEASE SIGN ENCLOSED FOR TAX DEDUCTION.” To Rosemary, this token donation only highlights her mother’s neediness. It doesn’t make up for a system in which so many are suffering. In the collection’s longest story, “Quetzal,” the protagonist’s mother, Diane, attracts the generosity a “philanthropist-landlord” who has a crush on her. Here, gender and class are interconnected. As a young, beautiful widow, Diane has a better chance of upward mobility if she plays along with patriarchy. When her youth expires, this privilege will too.
None of this is to say that Allio’s wealthy characters are happier or more self-possessed than those who face economic hardships. If anything, the opposite seems true. One of the first things we learn about Heather, the narrator of “Still Life,” is exactly where she falls on the socioeconomic totem pole. She and her husband are poster children for upward mobility: “once they were post-college sweeties, with a collection of plastic cutlery in a shoebox,” but now Heather wears “expensive shoes” and owns a house “in the historic registry neighborhood.” Still, privilege does not guarantee happiness. After her best friend, Gilda, commits suicide, Heather spirals downhill. Because Heather and Gilda had so much in common — they are both stay-at-home moms, suffering from what Betty Friedan called “the problem that has no name” — Gilda’s death forces Heather to examine what makes her life worth living. Here, wealth doesn’t deliver women from patriarchy; it fetters them.
But Allio does not portray stay-at-home moms as victims. Instead, she subverts the post-Friedan expectation that all financially secure housewives are miserable. In “Announcements,” Elena likes being a mother. In the ninth month of her pregnancy, she “gives her notice. Not three weeks paid maternity leave, but goodbye forever to the deliberate clatter of high heels bisecting the commuter rail platform.” She doesn’t look back.
The baby [Alexis] is three months old and Elena has the sense that Time itself has a three-month-old’s consciousness. Time cannot, for example, roll over, and Time’s blue eyes are still bleary, even flat, marked by a previous universe. She supposes Time can hear — her baby passed the hearing tests — but can’t or won’t pick out the words of her specific pleas, spells, sentences . . . Time, like her baby, moves spastic, with a startle reflex.
Alexis becomes Elena’s whole world, her way of measuring time and marking progress. Nothing exists beyond him. As readers, we are immersed in this way of seeing. When Elena imagines taking her son to a park, where “an ice cream cone will once again mean what it meant when she was a kid,” we remember our first ice creams, too. Interestingly, Elena does not take her good fortune for granted. She “knows she is privileged to be a housewife” and fantasizes about “buy[ing] ice creams from the singing truck for all the low-income children.” Seeing beyond her own predicament, even for a moment, makes Elena grateful.
Clothed, Female Figure brings the diversity of feminism’s constituents into stark relief. Allio’s greatest gift is for re-writing the “same” domestic world from different vantage points. [[With every story, she urges us to both imagine other people’s life experiences and remember that we can’t.]] Social progress, she suggests, depends on a self-conscious attention to what we do and don’t have in common: you don’t know what you don’t know.
Gillie Collins lives in New York City. She writes about books, movies, and photography.
Garner
by Kirstin Allio
Central question:
What happens when “Live free or die” becomes “Live free and die”?
Format: 232 pp., paperback; Size: 5” x 7.5”; Price: $14.95; Publisher: Coffee House Press; Editor: Chris Fischbach; Print run: 4,000; Book designer: Linda Koutsky; Typeface: Perpetua and Texas Hero; Author’s great aunts were: spinsters; Author’s grandfather was: church organist; Author’s greatest suspension of disbelief: trees talk; Author believes New Hampshire’s gravest error was: not selecting the White Pine as the state tree; Representative sentence: “William Heald believed such a thing could be done; that there were caches of time stowed, say, at a defunct field’s blurring edges.”
[[The most unsettling, gut-wrenching, and effective whodunits consistently refuse a reader full access to the crux of the mystery]], bypassing clues for character, and avoiding a clear sense of motive for [[a hazy, suggestive atmosphere rife with both seamy secrets and veiled confessions.]] Who needs Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead pipe when you’ve got the sail-shaped town of Garner, New Hampshire, year 1925, complete with some two hundred of its complex, stoic, intensely back-storied citizens?
As an opening to her first novel, Kristin Allio opts for a quietly stunning revelation, old-fashioned and filmic at once, wherein the body of young Frances Giddens is discovered by the town’s postman in a local brook. Time slows and billows at the discovery; it is unclear for a few moments if the woman is dead or merely fallen, the blood trailing from her body or a hook-torn fish. If Garner, the town, is the soul of this mystery, then Frances is its spirit. Somewhat otherworldly and often described as a creature of the forest with “the cheekbones of a butterfly and the mouth of a tidy cat” and a laugh both “green” and “silver,” she belongs almost exclusively to the town’s hidden pathways and shadowed spaces, even as she nimbly transcends them.
Willard Heald, the aforementioned mail carrier who narrates the first of five parts in the novel, is not only the town’s deliverer of tidings, but also its collector of events past and present. A “sorrowful busybody” with “ears made of envelopes,” he makes it his business to record the townspeople’s comings and goings in the interest of history, a “hobby” which fully inhabits and shapes his psyche.
Generically less novel than long scrapbook-poem, this first section is a patchwork—of poetic musings, town-meeting transcripts, dream sequences, lists of native plants, local lore and aphoristic proclamations—which successfully cobbles a sense of the civil ordinances and Puritanical strictures underpinning the town’s mores. At the very moment Willard’s account begins to border on the frustratingly cryptic, Allio changes course, shepherding us into the more ordered head of Malin Nillsen, a cosmopolitan New York socialite and summer boarder at the Giddens’ farm, who leaves Garner before the murder occurs. Unlike Willard, Malin speaks in the types of conversational “whips and circles” that do little to impress her deeply practical hosts, or Frances herself. Garner natives’ imperviousness to the petty vagaries and witticisms of city living are incredibly attractive to Malin, who soon resolves to befriend the tight-lipped Frances. In the remaining sections, Allio lingers with a number of the town’s cast members, unearthing their discreet aspirations and sacrifices with the same stilted, quaint diction and pile-ups of imagery she employs throughout the novel.
Garner is neither a brisk nor a strictly satisfying read, but it evokes with an ominous charm a particular place and time that, for all its emphasis on preservation, seems to hover somewhere beyond or outside of history. Because this imaginative kindling springs so easily from the language’s sleek metaphors and lyrical bustle and lull, I often found myself enthralled in a near-hallucinogenic manner by Allio’s prose. [[It is rare to feel so truly transported by a work of fiction.]] Therefore, at the risk of alliterative (and accolade) excess, I dub Garner a masterly, multi-voiced, mood-altering mystery—and a debut so wise, certain, and cleverly empathetic as to seem the work of a sure-footed pro.
—Heather Birrell
Women's stories, in the best way: Kirstin Allio's new collection
Clothed, Female Figure is the new book by Kirstin Allio
'Clothed, Female Figure' is the new book by Kirstin Allio (Dzanc Books)
Ilana Masad
There are many ways to write about women, but the argument could be made that almost any novel or story written by a woman is somehow about women, as if that theme automatically applies by dint of the fiction’s connection to its writer. But that would be a simplistic reading and would likely frustrate many writers — unless, like Kirstin Allio, they really are writing about and embracing the theme wholeheartedly.
It’s been 11 years since Allio’s debut novel, “Garner,” came out from Coffee House Press and was a finalist for the L.A. Times book prize for first fiction. Allio returns from her long book-publishing-absence with “Clothed, Female Figure,” a collection of short stories that are about both individual women — their woes, fears and small triumphs — and womanhood as a concept, a state of being. While there is never a clear spoon-fed message of feminism, the validating undercurrent of these women’s experiences is more like an undertow, strong and carrying.
Connections between women are also subtly explored in the almost fully female cast. In the title story, a once-Soviet psychologist has become a nanny after immigrating to the United States.
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The liminal space between motherhood and womanhood, where the two intertwine and diverge, is strong. — Ilana Masad on Allio's collection
Natasha’s English is impeccable, and she is highly educated; it is never made quite clear why she never tried to practice her former profession in this country. What is understood by the end of the story, however, is why she turned to nannying, specifically. Between those start and finish points of her personal history, however, the story meanders into her relationship with a former charge, Leah, who is now in college, studying art, and has begun writing letters to the nanny she remembers from over a decade prior. Leah tells Natasha that she is a nanny herself, by accident almost, as she’s agreed to go with her revered sculptor-professor to Italy and take care of her children.
In Leah’s letters, which have a voice distinct from Natasha’s own, Leah describes a sculpture she wanted to make, “a life-sized sculpture of a woman. The whole point was she would be clothed, suggesting the opposite of clothing. Like naked bodies are less sexy, actually, than bodies in bathing suits. Uh-huh, that’s my college for you.” Leah adds, “Then I had an idea that the body had to be yours… You looked as if you immigrated every day, to Chelsea.” Natasha doesn’t share whether she finds this insulting or upsetting — she is only giddy to hear from Leah and unable to write back, fearing that contact from her would ruin the fairy-tale version of herself that Leah has built up in her memory. Natasha, never a mother to her charges but very clearly a caretaker, is considered by Leah and her mother as the conscience they lacked. The liminal space between motherhood and womanhood, where the two intertwine and diverge, is strong in this and several of the other stories.
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Kirstin Allio, left, author of "Clothed, Female Figure".
Kirstin Allio, left, author of "Clothed, Female Figure". (Stephanie Alvarez Ewens,left, Dzanc Books)
Indeed, mothers are almost ubiquitous to these stories, as is the relationship between women and class. In “The Other Woman,” the narrator’s mother was part of a university’s cleaning staff, but pretended to be a post-doc student and became the protégé of a famous sociologist. In “Ark,” Caryn is snowed in with five children — four her own and one nephew — and needs to entertain them while also figuring out her relationship with her nephew, who is quiet and somewhat mysterious to her. In “Quetzal,” a mother and daughter seem to be linked forever by their desires and loves and how they end up losing and regaining them.
[[But simplifying Allio’s stories to these one-line descriptions doesn’t do justice to her prose.]] There is something reminiscent of Alice Munro in Allio’s stories, a similarity in how both writers can fit novel-like stories into fewer than 30 pages, flashing between years past and present without a hiccup. There is also a similar economy of language that nevertheless provides a world of imagery. Here, she describes revealing physicality: “Between Phil’s thick eyebrows and mat of dark hair was a sweatband of tight forehead,” and “Sara was glad she was so thin, as if it signified strength of character.” Her landscapes contain insights into the story’s emotions and also a commentary on the U.S.: “Trackside backyards bearing a family’s series of big purchases — aboveground pool, trampoline, boat on blocks, pre-fab tool shed with a single barren window box. A series of disappointments.” And read her original, simple, entirely evocative descriptions of weather and time: “The air was watery, snow by afternoon”; “At six o’clock the morning is a light sleeve”; “Outside, the air is still as if it’s been trapped under a hat for days.”
While some of the stories in “Clothed, Female Figure” end with such an openness that they almost don’t feel finished, and may be dissatisfactory or alarmingly sudden for some, there is still a deliberateness about them that makes it clear that Allio knows what she’s doing. [[The way she works her way into and out of her plots is skillful, but it’s the writing itself, so deceptively easy at times, that is truly breathtaking.]]
Masad is an Israeli American writer living in New York.
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“Clothed, Female Figure”
Kirstin Allio
Dzanc Books: 280 pp., $16.95 paper