Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Blue Field
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Baltimore
STATE: MD
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Canadian
http://advanced.jhu.edu/about-us/faculty/elise-levine/ * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/35498/elise-levine
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | nr 95035155 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/nr95035155 |
| HEADING: | Levine, Elise |
| 000 | 00540cz a2200169n 450 |
| 001 | 820820 |
| 005 | 20040106144353.0 |
| 008 | 950925n| acannaabn |n aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a nr 95035155 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca03927516 |
| 040 | __ |a NjP |b eng |c NjP |d DLC |d OCoLC |d DLC |
| 053 | _0 |a PR9199.3.L4675 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Levine, Elise |
| 670 | __ |a Driving men mad, c1995: |b t.p. (Elise Levine) Can. CIP (Levine, Elise) |
| 670 | __ |a Requests and dedications, c2003: |b t.p. (Elise Levine) Can. CIP (Levine, Elise, 1959-) |
| 953 | __ |a xx00 |b yc25 |
| 985 | __ |c RLG |e LSPC |
PERSONAL
Born 1959, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Married.
EDUCATION:Vermont College of Fine Arts, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Johns Hopkins University, director of the writing and science writing programs. Previously taught at American University in Washington, DC, University of Baltimore, and Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. Also has worked as a security guard and delivery van driver.
AWARDS:Canadian National Magazine Award for fiction; Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, all fellowships.
WRITINGS
Has published fiction and nonfiction in Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, and Gargoyle, among others. Has contributed to the anthologies Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Anthology.
SIDELIGHTS
Canadian-born Elise Levine received her M.F.A. at Vermont College of Fine Arts and went on to teach writing at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania; University of Baltimore; and American University in Washington, DC. She is now director of the writing and science writing programs at Johns Hopkins University. She has published her stories, poems, essays, and critical reviews in Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, and Gargoyle, among others, and in the collections Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Anthology. Her debut collection, Driving Men Mad, came out in 1995. In an interview with Rob McLennan at the 12 or 20 Questions website,Levine shared that with the publication of that first book, she began to consider herself a true writer.
Speaking of the underpinnings of her work, she told McLennan, “I think I’ve always written about various characters’ sense of place–especially the sense of mis-placement, exile–as part of my interest in the psychology of those who see themselves as marginalized, estranged, self-estranged.” She continued: “Race and gender (and class) are intrinsic to my writing, which is character-driven, concerned with the mutable ways in which we think of ourselves.” She cited as a few of her inspirations the work of Virginia Woolfe and Joseph Conrad as well as that of the more modern writers Don DeLillo, J.M. Coetzee, and Mavis Gallant.
Requests and Dedications
Requests and Dedications is Levine’s first full-length novel. The story, noted Eliza Clark in the Globe & Mail, “throws us into the mid-life, mid-heartache and ruin” of five characters living on a ranch in Ontario. The owner of the farm, Walker, takes on horses to board and train. He has a twelve-year-old daughter, Jena, with developmental disabilities. and a girlfriend, Mimi. Rounding out the quintet are Walker’s sister, Joy, and her teenage daughter, Tanis, who live in a flat at the back of the farmhouse.
Writing at Quill and Quire, Bronwyn Drainie remarked: “Levine’s fictional family is decidedly non-nuclear and dysfunctional. Five people reside in a state of tense domestic warfare.” The novel follows the characters—”sad, disconnected, embittered”—through separate chapters, told in the first person by three of them. Clark observed that “the changing points of view can be disorienting” but that the “writing is dynamic and compelling” as well as “brazen, . . . risky and gorgeous.” Drainie concluded: “This is one tough cookie of a writer, with the talent to carry off her bleak vision with few stumbles.”
Blue Field
In Blue Field, Levine examines the life of a woman, Marilyn Wolf, who is sinking under a burden of grief. Her parents have both died, one right after the other. The blue field of the title refers to the underwater world that Marilyn plumbs as a participant in what is termed “crunch diving”—the “exploration of torturously claustrophobic underwater spaces,” as Hannah LeClair described it online at Music and Literature. There “diving takes on an almost religious significance, allowing her to slip from a grief-stricken present into a submarine dream-time.” LeClair found that “reading the novel is a sensation akin to drifting weightlessly beneath the surface of the text.” Then Marilyn’s diving partner and best friend, Jane, dies in a diving accident, and her marriage to her diving instructor husband, Rand, begins to unravel.
Bret McCabe interviewed Levine in Johns Hopkins Magazine, where she commented: “I . . . saw tremendous possibilities in depicting this underwater underworld, hidden from view for most of us, as a way of modeling the depths of various modes of consciousness, including the ecstatic, and grief. It made sense to set these in broken, remote worlds—abandoned shipwrecks, caves formed by fractures in solid rock—to echo our own currently damaged places and to get at the sense of overwhelming grief and psychic brokenness Marilyn experiences.” In his review of the book, McCabe found this to be true, calling Blue Field a “taut novel [that] immerses its readers in grief’s disorienting morass.” Adam Naman, writing in Quill and Quire, asserted: “Some novels draw you in; Blue Field drags you under and keeps clamping down, an exercise in storytelling as centrifugal force.” A critic in Kirkus Reviews applauded the “raw, hallucinatory prose” and called the novel a “transgressive, gut-wrenching portrayal of grief that asks what it’s like to drown.”
BIOCRIT
ONLINE
12 or 20 Questions, http://12or20questions.blogspot.com (February 22, 2008), Rob McLennan, author interview.
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), http://www.globeandmail.com (April 26, 2003), review of Requests and Dedications.
Jewish Book Council Website, https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org (February 10, 2018), author profile and review of Blue Field.
JMWW, https://jmwwblog.wordpress.com (June 12, 2017), Marnie Silverman, review of Blue Field.
Johns Hopkins Magazine, https://hub.jhu.edu (March 4, 2018), Bret McCabe, “Q&A with Elise Levine, Author of Blue Field” and review of Blue Field.
Johns Hopkins University Website, http://advanced.jhu.edu (February 10, 2018). author faculty profile.
Kirkus Reviews, http://www.kirkusreviews.com (March 15, 2017), review of Blue Field.
Music and Literature, http://www.musicandliterature.org (October 10, 2017), Hannah LeClair, review of Blue Field.
Numero Cinq, http://numerocinqmagazine.com (April 5, 2017), Benjamin Woodard, review of Blue Field.
Open Book, http://open-book.ca (May 4, 2017), author interview.
Quill and Quire, https://quillandquire.com (February 10, 2018), Bronwyn Drainie, review of Requests and Dedications; Adam Nayman, review of Blue Field.
Elise Levine, Program Director, Sr. Lecturer
Advanced Academic Programs | Johns Hopkins University > About Us > Faculty > Elise Levine, Program Director, Sr. Lecturer
Elise Levine is Director of the Writing and Science Writing programs. She is the author of two novels, Blue Field and Requests and Dedications, and the story collection Driving Men Mad. Her fiction, personal essays, and poems have also appeared in publications including Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, and Best Canadian Stories, among many others. Originally from Toronto, she is the recipient of a Canadian National Magazine Award for fiction, as well as awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council, as well as fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, among others.
She has previously taught literature and creative writing most recently at American University in Washington, DC, and Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Elise Levine is the highly acclaimed author of a collection of stories, Driving Men Mad, and the novel Requests and Dedications. Her fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize Anthology, Coming Attractions, and Concrete Forest. A Canadian from Toronto, Levine is currently living in Chicago, where her husband, a composer, is finishing a Ph.D.
Elise Levine
www.advanced.jhu.edu/about-us/faculty/elise-levine/
Current JBC Network Author
Elise Levine is the author of Driving Men Mad Requests and Dedications and Blue Field. Originally from Toronto she lived in Chicago’s Hyde Park for eleven years and now resides in Baltimore where she directs the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins. She has taught at American University worked as a security guard with guard dogs and a delivery van driver.
Books and Brunch, FictionBiblioasis, Books and Brunch, Elise Levine
Elise Levine is the author of the story collection Driving Men Mad and the novel Requests and Dedications. Her work has also appeared in The Journey Prize Anthology, and Best Canadian Stories. Originally from Toronto, ON, she now lives in Baltimore, MD, and is Director of the MA in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University. Her latest book is Blue Field, published by Biblioasis.
Elise Levine
Elise Levine’s story collection Driving Men Mad and novel Requests and Dedications were published by McClelland & Stewart. Her work has also appeared in Sententia, Bateau, Hotel Amerika, Prairie Schooner, Gargoyle, Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Anthology, and The National Post, among others publications. She teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program and the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, DC and lives in Baltimore.
Friday, February 22, 2008
12 or 20 questions: with Elise Levine
Elise Levine’s novel Requests and Dedications was published in 2003 by McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, ON). Also in 2003, McClelland & Stewart reissued her story collection Driving Men Mad (named one of the “Best Books of the Year, 1995” by Quill & Quire magazine). In addition to her books, Levine’s fiction, poems, personal essays, and critical reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Anthology, The National Post, the Toronto Star, Books in Canada, Malahat Review, Gargoyle, and Prairie Schooner, and have been translated and published in Italy. She has been awarded a Canadian National Magazine Award, Honorable Mention for Fiction; a host of awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Council for the Arts; and residency fellowships at Yaddo (where she was an Eli Cantor Fellow) and the MacDowell Colony, to name but two. Her fiction has been aired nationally on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (the CBC), and in 2003 she was highlighted by Margaret Atwood as one of Canada’s most important women writers. Originally from Toronto, Levine currently lives in Baltimore, MD, where she teaches at the University of Baltimore.
1 - How did your first book change your life?
I began to see myself as a real writer. Getting reviewed, seeing the book in bookstores made me feel that I’d been heading in the right direction. I vowed from that point on to do whatever I could to keep on going and not look back.
2 - How long have you lived in Chicago, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
I lived in Chicago for eleven years. Last summer I moved to Baltimore. During the time I was in Chicago, most though not all of the fiction I was writing took place in the Toronto area, where I’m originally from. Now I’m starting to set some of my writing in the States – Chicago, parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Florida – as well as Toronto. Not that I’m interested in specific locale per se. I think I’ve always written about various characters’ sense of place – especially the sense of mis-placement, exile – as part of my interest in the psychology of those who see themselves as marginalized, estranged, self-estranged.
While not often explicit, race and gender (and class) are intrinsic to my writing, which is character-driven, concerned with the mutable ways in which we think of ourselves.
3 - Where does a piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A piece of fiction usually begins for me with lines, language – sometimes not very much, but loaded, charged with a compressed sense of character and situation, the possibility of what it all might mean. Definitely with a novel I ‘start large’, knowing that that’s what I’m in for. But even with a collection of short fiction, by the time I have maybe three stories I’m thinking ‘book’.
4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
Readings sharpen my writing, especially if the work isn’t yet published as a book. In which case preparing for the reading means revising, revising. If I have to stand up there in front of people, the last thing I want to see is that I’m boring them.
5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I view identity as a construct, so I’m probably more poststructuralist than anything else, cautiously attracted to the meta side of fiction. Because I’m instinctively a character-driven writer, I tend to find identity theory of interest. But mostly I spend my writing time trying to pretty much figure out the nuts and bolts of things like pacing, structure, nailing the nature of the characters’ relationships.
6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Writing is difficult -- solitary, crazy-making, painstaking. A good editor gets right inside there with you, and enlarges that imaginative space.
7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?
Two books only so far (alas). I write at a snail’s pace, which is why getting both out felt so hard. Currently I’m close to finishing what I hope will be a third, a new novel. Also I’m four stories into what could be a new story collection, and I’ve begun collecting lines and ideas for yet another novel. Overall, that’s a fat-load of ideas. Problem is, takes me forever to really get at them, develop and shape them. I guess certain aspects of fiction writing seem easier, the elements of craft and technique. But each piece – a story, a novel -- feels so different, and uncovering what each is truly about and how best to express that truth seems to take forever. I’m not naturally a patient person so I tend to chafe under the yoke.
8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?
Please don’t remind me, I’m trying to forget. I’m pear-averse. The flesh is gritty. Bumpy. Like tiny teeth in the throat.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Be sure to strut your stuff.” Editor-Provocateur John Metcalf said this to me once. And I was like, Thank you!
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
First thing in the morning -- the earlier the better – double espresso then write. Sometimes I can go all day, with breaks, if I’m revising and am pretty far along with the novel.
11 - Where is your favourite place to write?
I have a home office. Bliss.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Other fiction writers’ work, or poetry.
13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?
This new novel is in third-person-close point of view, which I’ve never sustained for so long in previous work. It also makes a number of leaps in time and place, which I want to come across as pieces of a puzzle, or cogs in a neatly ticking wheel. I’ve always paid a lot of attention to structure, but this feels like a further step, handling a significantly greater number of parts than I have before. As well, this novel necessarily has to convey a fair amount of technical information to explain the world of the characters to the reader – a huge challenge to not let the exposition burden the narrative.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Music, certainly. Opera, especially Baroque opera, which can seem so postmodern these days. Something about the self-consciously performative, the focus on voice, staging, display. I listen to a lot of what’s called ‘new music’ – contemporary/experimental art music, for example Gyorgy Ligeti, Toru Takemitsu, Kaija Sariaaho – fascinated by the combination of rigor, discipline, innovation, expressive capacity. Also I like Trip Hop, Massive Attack in particular. And Alt country -- Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch. PJ Harvey I simply place in the Genius category.
Visual art really excites me too, as a corollary to the written. Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer (his dresses! his lead books! not to mention all his other gorgeous works), Bill Viola are some faves. When I see something that really strikes me, I try to think, what would be the equivalent of this in fiction? A work by Joyce Wieland – Cooling Room II, in the permanent collection of the National Gallery in Ottawa – kind of got me going on my new novel.
The strongest influence on my writing – what goes most directly into the fiction as material – is the experience of being in various environments. Their textures, all the sensory stuff but also the ideas or ideals, the thought-contexts, that inform our thinking about such environments. What people say, how they present themselves, what they reveal and seem to want to conceal. I love driving, walking, flying (I used to spend a lot of time underwater, scuba diving, so swimming would count as well) – I love the sense of transport, movement. Probably because I spend so much time alone, in my little room, at my desk.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Don DeLillo, J.M. Coetzee, Mavis Gallant, Lisa Moore. Conrad, Woolf. Some specific books: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, Ian McEwen’s Amsterdam and The Comfort of Strangers, Jennifer Egan’s The Keep, Susan Choi’s American Woman, Peter Carey’s Theft.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel more. Also I’d like to find the time to do more critical writing.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I’d be a poet. Or a literary critic. I worked as an editor for several years -- I was miserable doing it, but I could well have gotten stuck there. Otherwise I might have become an alcoholic/drug-addict lawyer.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
No idea. I just know that many of my earliest, most acute memories are of being attracted to words, language, of having the desire to describe, to invent. Lots of things fascinate me, for a time, but then I’ll drop them completely. Writing’s the one activity to which I’ve always remained obsessively, passionately attached.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road scared the wits out of me. What a combo of stark moral vision and mastery over words and form. I recognize, I think, a similar austerity and artistry in Austrian Michael Haneke’s disturbing film Cache.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Like I said, I’m almost finished a new novel. I have some new stories toward a new story collection. Squirreling away lines and ideas for yet another novel. Plus teaching English lit. at the University of Baltimore. I love the teaching thing. It’s so intense. A pure joy to wave around a dry-erase pen as if it’s a magic wand and say hey, let’s see how this story works.
12 or 20 questions archive
Posted by rob mclennan at 10:39 AM
NEWS AND INTERVIEWS
The In Character Interview, with Elise Levine
DATE
May 04, 2017
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Elise Levine In Character Interview
Elise Levine New Head Shot-2
More than 20 years ago, Elise Levine's Driving Men Mad exploded onto the literary scene, endearing Levine to readers and critics alike. She returned with a highly acclaimed novel, Requests and Dedications, in 2005, and readers have been eagerly awaiting more since then.
This season they got their wish with Blue Field (Biblioasis), which tells the story of Marilyn and Rand, who take up cave diving to honour their late friend who died doing just that. The claustrophobic and intense atmosphere of the caves is wielded as a narrative tool by Levine, creating a tense, high stakes examination of loss, compulsion, love, and desire. Lisa Moore called the writing in Blue Field "diamond hard, diamond bright", while Caroline Adderson said of the novel "Blue Field is full immersion—an adventure story in a literary guise, one that holds your head under the current of its gorgeous prose until you gasp. Mysterious and terrifying, this book enthralled me."
We're pleased to speak to Elise today about Marilyn, the intense and enigmatic protagonist of Blue Field. Elise tells us about what drives Marilyn and what sort of person the character is, talks about her own connection to diving, and lets us know why fans of her short fiction should stay tuned.
Open Book:
Tell us about the main character in your new book.
Elise Levine:
Within days, Marilyn Wolfe loses her parents to cancer and a terrorist bombing. When she takes up underwater diving, the obsessive risk-taker in her emerges as she uncovers a realm of sublime rapture and awe — a reason to live. Returning each time to the surface, she believes herself freed from the past’s complex emotional legacies.
Until a close call diving inside a shipwreck causes her to quit. But when her best friend Jane dies while exploring an underwater cave with Marilyn’s husband Rand, she takes up diving again, to honour — and outdo — her late friend. Marilyn then drags Rand with her as she increasingly pushes herself far past her limits, endangering them both.
She’s driven and flawed, bound and propelled and ultimately unraveled by desire, loss, and guilt. She makes some bad choices that have terrible consequences. And she’s bad-assed, fearless at times despite being fearful. She headlong steps outside the neat confines of her life.
OB:
Some writers feel characters take on a "life of their own" during the writing process. Do you agree with this, or is a writer always in control?
EL:
I think writing fiction is the process of uncovering your characters. As you dig deeper and lay bare their deeper urges and fears, they take on a surprising autonomy. If you’re true to them, that is. So yes, I believe the writer — or this writer, at least — is always in control. But the control lies in choosing to be of service as fully as possible to the needs of the characters, to who they might really be.
OB:
How do you choose names for your characters?
EL:
I initially choose the names for my characters by feel. But I might change the names to have them achieve a greater resonance. From the start, Marilyn made sense for the protagonist of Blue Field. The three syllables carried a sound-sense of a descending arabesque, something internal and fugue-like, labyrinthine, a state of suspension.
Her last name was equally important. Wolfe is a Jewish surname, which I chose to signal her background without needing to draw too much attention to it, since she’s very secular, experiencing her Jewishness in a mostly off-hand way. And yet her Jewishness informs her fragile sense of life, which she traces to her parents’ anxious brand of love and survivorship — byproducts of their European Jewish descent.
Wolfe also suggests ‘wolf’, implying Marilyn’s increasingly predatory behavior over the course of the novel. (I take ‘wolf’ in a fairy-tale way. Nothing against real wolves!)
OB:
What is your approach to crafting dialogue, particularly for your main character? Do you have any tips about writing dialogue for aspiring and emerging writers?
EL:
I try to only use dialogue for significant moments that transpire between the characters and which reveal their true natures — even lies that reveal that they’re liars — and in which important decisions are made and from which there’s no going back. I revise the dialogue a lot, trying to uncover what the characters are most afraid to reveal, and what the stakes might be for them if they speak out.
Advice for myself, always, which I’m happy to pass along, if it’s helpful: use dialogue only when absolutely necessary, to avoid diluting its potential force.
OB:
Do you have anything in common with your main character? What parts of yourself do you see in him or her, and what is particularly different?
EL:
Many years ago I briefly pursued technical diving, at the novice level. A few close calls and I realized I didn’t need to literally descend into the watery underworld — I could write about it instead.
I do feel that writing and technical diving are correlatives. Both require immense and obsessive commitment and training. Both involve exploring what’s hidden from view.
OB:
Who are some of the most memorable characters you've come across as a reader?
EL:
To me character is everything in fiction, the reason I read. I find the most memorable characters are those who stretch their sense of themselves across the contours of tidy labels, and whose reaching is the story.
The young girl in Christine Schutt’s novel Florida is at once remarkably obdurate and bright, very self-possessed. Another favorite is the young girl/young woman in Joy Williams’s mysterious, time-bending short story “The Excursion”, who intuits her shaky future and leaps to inhabit it. The narrator of Justin Torres’s novel We the Animals possesses a sensitive, observant mind that heartbreakingly tracks his transformation from member of a boy-pack to his estrangement from his family. I also love the protagonist of Junot Diaz’s story “No Face”, who elevates his daily donning of a mask to hide his severe facial disfigurement by imagining himself as a hero with superpowers; over the course of the story his fears are unmasked, and yet he remains resilient and active in the face of tremendous adversity. Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic presents first-person-plural narrators — Japanese ‘picture brides’ who came to the US in the early twentieth century — who are a marvel, embodying both the effect of an Ancient Greek chorus and individual voices that pop out of the orchestral texture. I also admire the rendering of the dual male protagonists in Evie Wyld’s novel After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, troubled by violent pasts and splintered human connections, and reaching out to the nonhuman worlds they encounter. The main character of Adania Shibli’s coming-of-age novella Touch, a young girl in a Palestinian village on the West Bank, explores her sense of self, family, school, and her local environments with a thrillingly blooming intelligence.
OB:
What are you working on now?
EL:
I’m a sliver away from finishing a new story collection, This Wicked Tongue, which I’ve been working on parallel to writing Blue Field. The collection ranges from flash fictions to a near-novella-length story. Because as much as I love the long tangle of a novel, I’m wild for the short forms. More fun than clown cars!
______________________________
Elise Levine is the author of the story collection Driving Men Mad and the novel Requests and Dedications. Her work has also appeared in The Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Stories. Originally from Toronto, ON, she now lives in Baltimore, MD.
Levine, Elise: BLUE FIELD
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Levine, Elise BLUE FIELD Biblioasis (Adult Fiction) $14.95 5, 16 ISBN: 978-177196-151-6
A deeply damaged woman flirts with death in the depths of underwater caves.Toronto-born writer and novelist Levine (Requests and Dedications, 2005, etc.) uses raw, hallucinatory prose to tell this curious story of a woman becoming undone. The book's central protagonist is Marilyn Wolfe, a woman who is deeply angry at the world: "All she was also pissed at--death of her parents, cancer and a subway bomb within days of each other, boom-boom then a comet tail of grief sparking in their wake, year of parched, thirsty." The only solace Marilyn finds is in her love of diving and the company of her best friend, Jane, a cipher who mostly exists in Marilyn's memory of their idyllic childhood: "Cicada-time, girl-time of cigarettes filched from parents turned statues by coursing girl-hormones, of hash brownies and baked-baby brownies and other sundry legends. Wild dominion of fast friends who traced freckles on each other's backs and told fortunes that turned into toads or jumped ship hands clasped and never let go." But Marilyn's grief turns dangerous when Jane starts joining Marilyn and her risk-taking husband, Rand, for "crunch diving," a subset of scuba diving to explore very small caves and shipwrecks. Rand says it's "like diving for hours inside a coffin." Jane dies during a dive, her air depleted under mysterious circumstances. Readers are left inside Marilyn's raw emotions, her self-loathing, and doubt as she continues to push herself to dangerous depths, competing with the ghost of her dead friend. Levine's turns of phrases and deft use of language are often brilliant, but her fragmented prose doesn't always serve the narrative, leaping back and forth in time and offering fragments in lieu of facts. Still, the novel's visceral wordplay, rough sexuality, and anguished depiction of survivor's guilt are bound to captivate its audience. A transgressive, gut-wrenching portrayal of grief that asks what it's like to drown.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Levine, Elise: BLUE FIELD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. PowerSearch,
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Requests & dedications
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada). (Apr. 26, 2003): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2003 The Globe and Mail Inc. http://www.globeandmail.com
Full Text:
Requests & Dedications By Elise Levine McClelland & Stewart, 328 pages, $22.99
'We tie the fat girl up. Her face is caked with barnyard crap but surprisingly unalarmed. Tears glide from her as if she were naturally inclined, gifted from above. We threaten to bury her alive if she tells, we wave a stick in front of her face and for the first time in my seventeen-year-old life -- here in the heady, hay-stinky shade -- everything is control and clarity, the arrest of relations."
From the start of this bold debut novel by the author of the widely praised Driving Men Mad, muscle is flexed and borderline manic, flashy language gets in your face. It's so striking at first that everything else -- characters, story, insight -- are overshadowed by the words boxing the air in front of your eyes, until ducking from the fast jabs seems the best recourse.
The sentences are so dense at times as to be almost impenetrable, and backtracking and rereading is necessary, sometimes to no clear reward. For the first 100 pages or so, I was the fat girl, held down, tormented. Everything felt blurred, and was moving too fast. I wasn't sure who was who, where they were exactly, how they were connected, or whose point of view I was hearing from chapter to chapter.
The novel throws us into the mid-life, mid-heartache and ruin, on-the-edge lives of three main characters who share close quarters on a horse farm in Markham, Ont., north of Toronto. The setting works well to enhance the characters' feelings of being not quite where they want to be. Markham represents the eroding demarcation between urban and rural living, a place that's mutable, close to the city and close to the country, a bit of both.
By random turns, the story is told from the perspectives of Walker, who boards and trains horses on his farm, drinks and is overweight, nearly coughing up his lungs at times; his past-her-prime, but still-saucy, lounge-singer girlfriend, Mimi; and his teenage niece, Tanis, daughter of Mimi's best friend. Not a lot goes on with them if looked at outwardly. They don't undergo a lot of change or make any drastic, dramatic moves. They're all locked within themselves, fighting a losing battle to be any different from who they are, sad, disconnected, embittered. But through their first-person chapters, they slowly reveal themselves, open up inwardly to the reader in a way
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that comes to feel important and beautiful. By the mid-point in the novel, the language no longer requires the same stamina to plow through. The writing is dynamic and compelling. Pure power.
The changing points of view can be disorienting, since it's not spelled out at the start of a chapter who's talking, and engagement isn't as smooth as it could be as a result. Still, by relating the different aspects of their personal histories, regrets and hopes, empathy is created and understanding of the main characters is deepened.
It's not only because the teenager Tanis has more than double the number of chapters in her voice than anyone else that she is the most remarkable character in the book. She's younger than Walker and Mimi, so the future somehow seems brighter for her, more available. Restless with high school, she nonchalantly stops showing up. She's dissatisfied with her relationship with her mother, Joy: "I do a quick disconnect, leg it as best I can to the bathroom. I stand in front of the soap-spotted mirror, peel off my sweat-sloppy, rain-rashed tee. But within seconds Joy follows me in, pointing the TV remote at my head as she crowds me against the sink -- she's so in my face I have to lean over backward. Without my shirt on, standing in my well-past needing to be replaced bra and jeans, I feel like an opened tin of something soft and rotten. She throws her arm up as if to strike -- I switch to cringe mode -- but just as suddenly she lowers it."
Generally unhappy with her claustrophobic life in outer suburbia, she moves to Toronto and takes jobs that pay increasingly better and give her the independence she's after. She falls in love with Rachel, and, for a while, has a sexy, happy relationship that is realistically and memorably described from start to finish.
It's because Tanis's voice is so fresh, all white-hot pyrotechnics and stylish bravado, that I was bothered by the structure of beginning and ending the novel in other characters' perspectives. To my mind, the book needed to open and close with Tanis, since she's given so much weight story- wise. The prologue, in Mimi's voice, isn't as strong as the first chapter and would've been better inserted into the body of the novel.
Writing that is as brazen, as risky and gorgeous as this will get in your face at times and make you wonder if it's not too much. Sometimes it can detract from what's being said beneath and outside the words, where I think a reader longs to listen hardest. But at its best, the phrasing can spark little fires of excitement not only at what's being said, but by the way it's being said. Nearing the close of this book, the language washed over me and it was the characters who were seared into my mind, their hard-scrabble efforts to just get by.
Eliza Clark's latest novel is Bite the Stars.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Requests & dedications." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 26 Apr. 2003. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A30595692/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=81cefd72. Accessed 21 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A30595692
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Requests and Dedications
by Elise Levine
Elise Levine must really hate mothers. Her first novel, Requests and Dedications, contains at my count six maternal figures who could give Medea a run for her money. And it doesn’t matter if you kill them, neglect them, or run away from them, because, as the narrative claims, mothers are “the greatest predictor for what a person is really like” and therefore inescapable. “No other hate compares,” says one of their benighted daughters, a girl who manages by the end of the novel to revise that statement to “I’m still mad at you. But I don’t hate you.” And that’s as much grace as you can count on from Elise Levine.
This is one tough cookie of a writer, with the talent to carry off her bleak vision with few stumbles. Her canvas is the Canadian working-class family, her location the rural fringe of the Torontonian megacity, her theme, that pain outlives, while love can only endure. The family she focuses on are transplanted New Brunswickers, so it’s no surprise that she shares tonalities more with younger Atlantic writers like Lynn Coady or Donna Morrissey than with the hip downtown crowd.
The novel, like Coady’s Saints of Big Harbour, opts for a fragmented narration shared among three characters, which allows the author to reshoot, in Rashomon fashion, the same scene from various viewpoints. Fortunately, Levine has the discipline to save this narrative trick for when it really counts.
Levine’s fictional family is decidedly non-nuclear and dysfunctional. Five people reside in a state of tense domestic warfare in an Ontario red-brick farmhouse with a drafty two-room flat stuck on the back. In the main house live Walker, a 53-year-old horse boarder with an outsized belly and a temper to match, and his mildly retarded 12-year-old daughter Jena, a girl who will remind readers uneasily of the unfortunate Reena Virk who was murdered by bullies in Victoria.
In the lean-to at the back live Walker’s sister, 48-year-old Joy, who works as a cleaning lady at one of the swish Markham golf clubs nearby, and her 17-year-old daughter Tanis, who shows a talent for Walker’s horses but none for her studies. Floating between the two halves of the house is Mimi, a pitiful party girl who spent her youth as “the high priestess of higher love,” in other words a groupie on some rock band’s – any rock band’s – private jet and who stills dresses and acts the part at age 37. She is Joy’s best friend and Walker’s bedmate, an evil stepmother to Jena but a sympathetic mother-surrogate to Tanis.
Levine is at her most impressive when she shows the multiple facets of these personalities. Joy, for example, is seen through her daughter’s eyes as a red-faced shrew with no neck and stenchy breath, but when they all pile down to the Whitby mental hospital to visit Mimi’s mother, it is Joy who befriends a male patient in the waiting room and draws him into a charming card game of her own invention. And when Tanis’s sleek, young lesbian lover from downtown Toronto comes to visit and makes fun of Joy, Tanis’s hatred of her mother is instantly transformed into hostile defensiveness – my family right or wrong.
Walker’s bluster and porcine appearance also mask other qualities: an extraordinary tolerance for Mimi’s princess shenanigans, a steady if cranky support for his sister and her daughter, and, as Tanis describes it, “Walker’s botched voice mantling us all in something like love.”
In a highly charged flashback, we see an 11-year-old Walker scaling the struts of a half-built highrise to impress the sneering classmates who call him “Newfie.” As the day darkens and the boy’s tormentors fade back home for supper, Walker’s mother appears (the only positive mother-note in the book) and her concerned presence stops him from taking a swan-dive off the steel beam he clings to.
Young Tanis is the centre of the book, carrying twice the story-telling burden that Walker or Mimi do. And here Levine runs into problems of voice. Tanis is a savvy, sensitive modern teenager, but Levine can’t seem to resist giving her inappropriate mouthfuls of words to say or think: a photograph is a “dreamy pixillated spill,” a plane “leaches distance from the colourless sky,” a dirty bathroom is in need of her cleaning-lady mother’s “decontaminating protocols,” daytime TV shows are “the unspooling ribbons of satiny little appetites.” These phrases stick out of the narrative like sore thumbs, but a writer this clever and talented will surely learn to control the impulse to include pretty word-pictures just because they sound good.
Reviewer: Bronwyn Drainie
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
DETAILS
Price: $22.99
Page Count: 306 pp
Format: Paper
ISBN: 0-7710-5277-4
Issue Date: 2003-2
Categories: Fiction: Novels
Elise Levine’s
Blue Field
October 10, 2017
by Hannah LeClair
Blue Field by Elise Levine (Biblioasis, July 2017) Reviewed by Hannah LeClair
Blue Field
by Elise Levine
(Biblioasis, July 2017)
Reviewed by Hannah LeClair
As a writer, Elise Levine has an affinity for the tightly compressed, and so her novel Blue Field revolves around the exploration of torturously claustrophobic underwater spaces through the risky, physically and mentally challenging practice of “crunch diving.” In the novel, Levine sends her protagonist, Marilyn, into the depths of cenotes, where submarine rivers stream from limestone caverns, and the flooded galleys of shipwrecks. Levine describes these dives in writing that is accordingly elegant and compact. Reading the novel is a sensation akin to drifting weightlessly beneath the surface of the text—”the underside of waves a shimmering twill,” in Levine’s words. In her hands, this description becomes an apt metaphor for her prose: dazzling, textured, tightly woven. Such elegance is the result of careful and unremitting practice. Levine, a transplant to Baltimore from her native Toronto, is an exacting writer whose two other books are a testament to her drive for precision: a 2003 novel entitled Requests and Dedications, and the acclaimed 1995 collection, Driving Men Mad, in which her short stories unfolded across sometimes as few as three or four pages in dense, highly controlled language.
In Driving Men Mad, Levine, once a novice diver herself, explores the pastime in the story “In Marble”—a clear precursor to Blue Field. The setting is Lake Mazinaw, in the highlands of eastern Ontario. A Google search for Lake Mazinaw brings up autofill suggestions like “Lake Mazinaw map,” “Lake Mazinaw pictographs,” “Lake Mazinaw monster,” and “Lake Mazinaw drowning,” collectively hinting at the danger and boreal mysteriousness of deep-water lake diving. Levine’s unnamed narrator, diving solo and trussed in gear inherited from a dead man, descends and begins to twist herself into the passages of the marble cave:
Face, ass, breasts, every part of me equalling this: stuck in rock. Tangling and untangling in the line. Feeling my way out blind as Tiresias. Knowing for the first time how easily I could slip into my skin. Become, briefly, a swimming dead thing. Knowing I could never be more alive than this.
The addictive quality of such risky diving, tersely underscored by Levine’s narrator, lies in the thrill of knowing oneself, beneath all that heavy and expensive gear, to be just a body freed of emotional weight, turning deeper and deeper inward, and confronting “the terrible price of all things.”
That “terrible price” suggests something of what Marilyn, Levine’s protagonist in Blue Field, must confront—the terrible price of loss, and the equally terrible price of survival. Marilyn takes up crunch diving after losing her parents in quick succession—her mother to cancer, her father to a subway bombing. Soon, she marries her diving instructor, Rand. For Marilyn, diving takes on an almost religious significance, allowing her to slip from a grief-stricken present into a submarine dream-time where she can drift weightlessly in a “freeing aphasia.” But when Marilyn’s best friend Jane, partnered by Rand, dies in a diving accident, Marilyn’s sense of self is shattered and her marriage devolves into a hellish gyre of guilt, reproach, and mutual distrust. In Blue Field, Levine makes Marilyn’s submarine world of caves and shipwrecks a synecdoche the terrain of grief.
Levine’s concerns in “In Marble” and Blue Field almost inevitably bring to mind the words of Adrienne Rich’s iconic poem, “Diving into the Wreck.” Rich’s poem resonates not only with Blue Field’s domestic post-mortem but also with Levine’s attention to language. Although the terse “In Marble” largely eschews the lyricism that is the most compelling feature of her novel, in Blue Field, narrative’s surface tension is stretched across each sentence. In an interview with the magazine of Johns Hopkins, where she directs the university’s Advanced Academic Writing Program, Levine acknowledges a debt to Rich, whose work showed her “how elastic language and character and story could be.” Levine’s inheritance from Rich includes Blue Field‘s feminist angle: at its core is Marilyn, a woman struggling understand herself in the wake of her losses, who must confront the devastating possibility that she has been lying to herself. Rich writes, in “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”—an essay in which she finds that the subject of lying inexorably returns her to the notion of truth—that, “The liar is afraid. [. . .] She is afraid that her own truths are not good enough.” When we are compelled to look at closely at the truth, Rich writes, instead of discovering an ultimate simplicity or unity, “we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.” Rich’s vision of the truth as a texture—knotted, complicated—might well return us once again to Levine’s perception of the multifarious texture of light playing beneath the water’s surface: “a shimmering twill.”
In “Diving into the Wreck,” Rich uses language to reach for a truth beyond words: “The thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” Levine’s prose in her novel is so compact, and her use of language so exacting that her words and phrases seem to be similarly aspiring towards a thing-like density—the quality of a substance like air or water, perhaps, or the mixture of gases divers breathe deep underwater. The particular quality or consistency of Levine’s style has been characterized by other reviewers as “immersive” and precipitous”; “dense” and “haunting.” This is partly an effect of the contrasts of register that abound in Blue Field. In this novel, the poetics of Levine’s prose turn on its oscillation between lush descriptive excesses, and the terse precision demanded by both the highly specialized technical vocabulary of diving and the exigencies that powerful emotions—pain, grief—place on ordinary speech. “Diving into the Wreck” is a poem in which Rich can push hard at language’s limits with her stringent refusals of narrative, but the confessional mode—like the novel—is never able to militate completely against “the myth.” Levine knows this, and writes as one who is aware of the high stakes of her prose: its challenge is to twist itself ever more deeply into the narrow interstices between language, myth, and “the thing itself.”
Levine’s feminism, her compressed storytelling and her tight focus on a female protagonist may invite comparisons to the writing of Elena Ferrante—particularly her disturbing novella, The Days of Abandonment. Like Ferrante’s Olga, Levine’s Marilyn is a character whose emotional experience is portrayed as visceral and always embodied: “Anger and pain jaundiced every chamber of her heart,” Levine writes. Throughout the novel, she tracks Marilyn’s interiority in close, third-person narration, and she equips Marilyn, a medical illustrator, with a particularly keen insight into the human body’s integuments, where braided muscle yokes breath and feeling. Levine’s phenomenological precision is often uncannily lovely, and even the novel’s title, which refers to the “blue field ectopic phenomenon”—the medical term for the bright, gnat-like dots that dance across the visual field when one looks up at a cloudless sky—is suggestive of her preoccupation with capturing what it’s like to exist within a female body.
Like Ferrante, Levine is also interested in plumbing the depths of female friendship against the backdrop of heterosexual intimacy. Jane is Marilyn’s second self. “If they were actual twins,” Levine writes, “Jane would have been the bolder first-born.” In Marilyn’s mind, Jane belongs to “cicada-time, girl-time of cigarettes filched from parents . . . , of hash brownies and baked-baby brownies and other sundry legends.” As adults, their friendship has become more complicated: we learn that they’ve shared a boyfriend in the past, that Jane’s had an unhappy pregnancy, and that they’ve been drifting out of touch. Jane remains a perpetual cipher. Throughout the novel, she becomes a kind of lightning rod for all Marilyn’s worst insecurities about herself: her self-loathing, her uncertainty, and her guilt about the potential costliness of the mistakes she makes while diving. But it is cool-headed, confident Jane, not Marilyn, who runs out of air in an underwater cave. The vividness of Jane and Marilyn’s twin-ship comes to the fore only in Jane’s absence, when Marilyn—for whom there has always been a Jane—is forced to confront her husband Rand’s watchwords: “There is no someone else.”
Despite the centrality of the women’s friendship, Levine’s narrative ultimately gives pride of place to Marilyn’s marriage. Her husband, Rand, is a skilled negotiator of the high-stakes of crunch diving. From the first, though shaken by his individualistic assertions, Marilyn is piqued and determined to hold her own as a woman in the swaggering, macho world of diving. “The buddy system’s just an excuse for being poorly trained,” Rand says, holding court over dinner. His words leave Marilyn feeling “blurry and fierce and fucked with,” foreshadowing the threat of betrayal lurking in their relationship. In Rand’s worldview, only expertise can really command respect, and it trumps kindness, patience, and partnership—diving’s life-or-death stakes are just too high, and it’s every man for himself. Indeed, surfacing from a dive, Rand berates Marilyn for her novice screw-ups with explosive anger and disdain. “What are you,” he demands, “a tourist?” Marilyn, no stranger to bereavement, finds herself startled by the savagery of her feelings toward Rand she considers what she’s lost—not her own life, but the lives of those she’s loved: “She’d already lost and lost. What was Rand’s grief—what were his griefs—by comparison?” After Jane’s accident, Marilyn and Rand confront each other with the question, “Do you wish it had been me?” After a beat, Rand replies, “Marilyn, we’re all we have.” If Blue Field asks how we might go on living, in the knowledge that “there is no someone else,” perhaps what Levine really wants to find out is whether Rand’s “we’re all we have” could be the tender obverse of “there is no someone else”—or whether it’s merely a comforting platitude.
Levine has been previously published by the venerable Toronto House McClelland & Stewart. With Blue Field released earlier this year by the independent, Windsor, Ontario-based Biblioasis, Levine establishes herself within a Canadian literary landscape that may be unfamiliar to most American readers. It’s a landscape that suggests additional, more regionally-specific interlocutors than Rich or Ferrante for the themes animating Blue Field—survival in the face of extreme physical risk; survival in the face of unimaginable loss. That theme of survival calls to mind Survival, Margaret Atwood’s classic 1972 thematic survey of Canadian literature. Atwood, borrowing the notion of the garrison mentality from Northrop Frye, proposes “survival, la survivance” as the central symbol for Canadian literature. The notion of survival—on the frontier, in the depths, after the wreck—is, of course, also part and parcel with an Anglo- and Franco-Canadian heritage of settler colonialism, but for Atwood, it encompasses a particularly Canadian orientation toward nature and human institutions alike: her study describes survival in terms of “bare survival in the face of hostile elements,” “the survival of a crisis or disaster,” and “cultural survival,” the survival of “vestiges of a vanished order.” Atwood sees the Canada in which this struggle for survival takes place is as “the kind of space in which we find ourselves lost”—in other words, a territory for which a Canadian national literature could be a map.
Atwood—despite her towering stature—is one of many internationally recognized Canadian women writers, including Alice Munro and Carol Shields, who rose to prominence during the “Canlit Boom” of the ’70s and ’80s, at the crossroads of post-war Canadian nationalism and second-wave feminism. A generation later, Levine is writing among a greater diversity of voices at a moment when the Canadian publishing world is becoming more consolidated: In 2015, McClellan & Stewart was absorbed by Penguin Random House Canada, leaving the field open for the small but increasingly significant contributions of independent presses like Biblioasis, House of Anansi, and The Porcupine Quill Press in bringing to light highly-regarded literary fiction from writers new and established, Indigenous, Francophone, and Anglophone, alike.
Although it is easy to see how Marilyn’s struggle for survival fits into Atwood’s symbolic matrix, it may be more difficult to see what makes Blue Field a truly Canadian novel. In fact, it would be simpler to point out the ways Levine seems to have chosen to de-emphasize its Canadian-ness. While Blue Field‘s other territories—the submarine, the embodied self—take on a stunning specificity, their exactness is never extended to the novel’s external setting. The globalized northern city Marilyn hails from is a kind of no-place, anonymous and anonymizing. If that city is meant to be Ottawa or Toronto, it doesn’t seem to be the Ottawa or Toronto of the present moment. Levine replaces all the subtle details we might use to orient ourselves with others that suggest a dystopian near-future—echoing the settings of some of Atwood’s novels—in which militarized checkpoints have proliferated through the countryside, where digiboards broadcast advertisements in Franglish, Korean, and Farsi, and where urban renewal is the province of an administration whose Works!Workers build “BestBet towers . . . ringed with SureBets and SafeBets.”
Atwood’s survey is just one way to map out the territory in which a writer of Levine’s generation came of age. For all the haziness of its spatial and temporal details, and for all the foregoundedness of its language, Blue Field nevertheless contains subtle but persistent autobiographical suggestions. In an autobiographical essay for PANK, “Axioms of Euclid Avenue: herself, by herself,” Levine recalls the messy amateurism of her young adulthood: “In these days, I keep a journal: over and over I write How to Live a Life: a life: not My Life.” Levine’s idiosyncratic use of punctuation lends significance to each pause in that phrase, making a pattern of perforations that registers the halting breathiness of hesitant speech. Levine sketches some of the details of her life in Toronto as a student, suggesting her contentious relationship with her mother, what she was reading at the time, who she was sleeping with. We learn that like Marilyn, Levine is the daughter of Jewish-Canadian parents. Like Marilyn’s mother, Levine’s died of cancer. A particularly searing detail is carried over from real life into Blue Field: in death, the mother’s mouth is stitched shut to prevent her body from soiling its shroud.
In this context, it’s remarkable that Blue Field, which keeps such a tight focus on Marilyn, largely escapes using autobiography as a crutch, even as it presents a persistent flatness in Levine’s other characters: Jane, Rand, Rand’s diving buddies. Perhaps this is because the novel is so buried in Marilyn’s perception—all these figures really exist only in her head. Levine offers up a vision of the lives of others which is profoundly attenuated—almost estranged. If Blue Field flirts with the limitations of a psychological novel, it does so through just one character’s psychology: Marilyn’s. Levine always keeps her reader’s attention closely focused on her protagonist, and sends Marilyn herself into unknown depths below the surface of the water. Picture her in that obscurity, her beam of light stroking “the flank / of something more permanent / than fish or weed,” as the lamp of Rich’s diver does in “Diving Into the Wreck.” By keeping her focus trained on a blank spot—the unreadability of the motivations of even those we love and whom think we know most intimately—Levine preserves at every turn the sensation of encountering those other lives, at once simple and unfathomable.
Hannah LeClair is a writer and a recent transplant from New York to Vermont.
Q&A with Elise Levine, author of 'Blue Field'
Elise Levine
Elise Levine
Image: Britt Olsen-Ecker
By Bret McCabe / Published Summer 2017
The program director of the Johns Hopkins Advanced Academic Writing program uses cave diving as an exploration of grief in her arresting new novel, Blue Field. Johns Hopkins Magazine caught up with Elise Levine to talk about music, blue as recurring motif, and the "existential humor" of Joy Williams.
After I finished your novel the first comparison that came to mind was Derek Jarman's Blue, his devastatingly intimate, monochromatic film from 1993. I say that not only because of the superficial title connections but because how explicitly you both use a kind of built-in association with the emotional temperature of the color blue as a springboard to explore a much more nuanced and polyphonous narrative, psychological, and impassioned terrain. Was your focus on blue as this multilayered idea in the novel from the beginning, or did it get more sophisticatedly developed in the editing process?
I recognized the creative possibilities in focusing on the color blue during the later stages of rewriting Blue Field. In earlier drafts I'd already used some of the blue tropes—the color blue saturating an early scene in a motel with the main characters Marilyn and Rand, for example—and also Marilyn's attention to color in general as a way into her consciousness. I'd also presented images of sky and water as inversions of each other as a way of suggesting Marilyn's sometime state of spiritual and psychological suspension. But it wasn't until I was doing some background research into optical phenomenon associated with the anatomy of the human eye—since not only is Marilyn a medical textbook illustrator, but she's also often preoccupied with vision and insight—that I learned of the blue field entoptic phenomenon. Click. I had my title. And a way of connecting many of the layers I'd been working with. In subsequent drafts I heightened the use of blue even more.
"[I] saw tremendous possibilities in depicting this underwater underworld, hidden from view for most of us, as a way of modeling the depths of various modes of consciousness, including the ecstatic, and grief."
Elise Levine
I've never seen Jarman's film Blue, though I did think a lot about Yves Klein's monochrome paintings and his International Klein Blue, which influenced Jarman. I also kept in mind some of the early color field paintings, especially the works of Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, as well as the Canadian painter Jack Bush. Their works have always struck me as possessing a raw, primordial force that achieved the level of spiritual expression. I wanted to capture some measure of that force in my novel.
Do you dive? What attracted you to that sport as a subject and thematic vehicle in this novel?
I used to dive. I never surpassed the novice technical diver level. But the drive and commitment and accompanying high-stakes risk-taking and danger that technical diving entails struck me as a compressed, dynamic stand-in for the risks most of us take in life in order to grow as individuals, and the gambles that life asks of us. I also saw tremendous possibilities in depicting this underwater underworld, hidden from view for most of us, as a way of modeling the depths of various modes of consciousness, including the ecstatic, and grief. It made sense to set these in broken, remote worlds—abandoned shipwrecks, caves formed by fractures in solid rock—to echo our own currently damaged places and to get at the sense of overwhelming grief and psychic brokenness Marilyn experiences.
Tell me a bit about the editing process. One of the impressive feats you pull off in Blue Field is stark language sketching visually detailed scenes and characters. But the line between an economic use of language and too little information is a fine one. Was there a quasi-working mindset to the process—e.g., descriptive detail short and vivid, narrative perhaps more precisely elucidated—or was it more a matter knowing it when you saw it?
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Book review: 'Blue Field'
It was a huge challenge figuring out how much exposition to use and how to not allow it to kill a scene or overall narrative movement. At one point I had a 600-page draft, with very detailed information on the equipment the characters were using, the physiology and physics of diving, Jewish funerary rites, explicit classical allusions to descent into the underworld, and homages to the various literary depictions and traditions of the female grotesque. Among other things! It was pretty crazy. I spent much time working the essentials into scenes and images and paring down the exposition to a minimum, hoping that the strength of the story would take the reader along for the ride.
Talk a bit about your handling of time and setting here. While I take the story to be taking place in a time period that's relatively contemporary and in a place where, well, people can cave dive, the exact specifics aren't entirely spelled out, and while some time markers are included—I think toward the end you mention that about a year has passed since a character's death—not the entire time period. Did you want to background such conventional storytelling markers a bit to explore some of the more remote areas of the who instead of the more mundane where and when?
I wanted the novel to have something of a fairy tale-like quality, a "once upon a (future) time" feel. Passionate love, ecstasy, abandonment, violence, grief—the main character negotiates all these in a somewhat atemporal world, as do the characters in fairy tales. So the novel isn't attached to a particular time period external to the novel, and time passes in leaps over the course of the narrative, to zero in on pivotal moments in the protagonist's experience. I did this in hopes of capturing an immersive, primal feel.
I ask the above because for a novel that spends a fair amount of time underwater and a bit in one character's head, you're able to convey the physical world quite insistently—the claustrophobia of exploring a tight space underwater, the feeling of a gas mixture in the lungs, the texture of ground and trees and objects, the confines and limitations of the body itself. For a novel that plunges a reader into some pretty intense abstract feelings and thoughts, it never lets us forget the unavoidable thingyness of consciousness. So I'm curious: Did you recognize during the editing process that you could conjure this tangible world into stark verbal existence, or did you realize you needed that in a novel that was actively looking down into grief's depths and thinking, "I can't see what's down there, let's go find out?"
Despite the atemporality, I very much sought from the get-go to ground the novel in the specifics of the various settings and the body, in what the senses perceive as they mediate the workings of thought and consciousness—especially since Marilyn is a medical textbook illustrator, always considering how to model human anatomy and its responses to the ills of the world. It took many drafts, though, for me to realize how much of an examination of grief the novel really was, and seek ways to intensify physically representing the psychological darkness Marilyn experiences.
I ask the following as a writer married to a drummer who informs how I think about damn near everything. You're married to a composer. Has music influenced your writing at all, or how you think about writing?
Music very much influences me as a writer. I think of writing as a process of orchestrating. Sensory details, image, the acoustic properties of language, characterization, style, and voice and tone all work into a structure that might itself share characteristics of music such as formal large- and small-scale repetition in terms of the overall design. In the kind of fiction writing I do, of course, there's narrative content, though—Marilyn does this, then chooses to do this, her husband responds.
Growing up, did anything—literary or otherwise—shape the kind of writer you thought you wanted to be?
As a teenager I was blown away by the prose writing of Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf, and the poetry of Adrienne Rich. I felt they showed how elastic language and character and story could be, as well as the politics and humanity of what a person could be. I also loved Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, for their language as well as the high Gothicism, the pure strangeness made legible—more and more I realize Peake's influence on me.
What's the author, novel, short story, or genre that you press on people—you know, the person or title you can't believe more people don't know about and celebrate?
The American novelist and short-story writer Joy Williams will take your head off. Her work is mysterious and precise and funny, full of sly existential humor, beautifully realized scenes, and dogs. I can't imagine living, let alone writing, without her books.
What are you working on now?
I'm this close to finishing a new story collection, This Wicked Tongue. Short stories, with their compression and heightened focus, are my true literary love. So I'm very excited.
Review
Book review: 'Blue Field'
By Bret McCabe / Published Summer 2017
This taut novel immerses its readers in grief's disorienting morass. Late 20-something Marilyn takes up cave diving after she loses her parents in quick succession, and starts up a romance with her instructor, Rand, that leads to marriage. Her lifelong friend Jane soon joins their diving expeditions. During one excursion, Marilyn makes a few decisions that endanger her and her fellow divers' safety; a few days later Rand and Jane take off on a more advanced dive that results in Jane's death. After a time, Marilyn plunges back into the water, pushing herself to take bigger risks, to submerge herself deeper in the inky darkness.
What makes Blue Field (Biblioasis) so gripping is that author Elise Levine, program director of the Krieger School's part-time Master of Arts in Writing program, explores this intense emotional terrain in stark language. Time jumps indeterminately between the novel's six sections. Chapters often last but a few pages. And Levine pares down sentences to a hypnotically lyrical minimalism, expressing a maximalist level of physical and emotional detail with few words, as in this passage describing Marilyn surfacing post-dive: "Finally with a great mud-unsucking she stumbled onto land. A few unsteady steps beneath her hundred pound–plus gear and she latched her arms around a tree trunk and twisted her mask from her face. A smoky rosemary scent. Random birds. Smudge of grey sky."
Blue Field is technically written in the third person, but because so much of the novel takes place inside two increasingly ineffable voids—Marilyn's psyche and the titular azure of deep waters—it reads like a telegraph dispatching psychological Morse code. At just over 220 pages, it's a slim read that lands with a monolithic force.
Elise Levine
ALSO SEE
Q&A with Elise Levine
A conversation with the author of Blue Field
Blue Field
Elise Levine
Biblioasis 2017
200 Pages $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-77196-151-6
amazon indiebound
barnesandnoble
Within days Marilyn loses her parents to cancer and a terrorist bombing. As she mourns, she traces her increasingly fragile sense of life to her parents’ anxious brand of love and survivorship — byproducts of their European Jewish descent. When Marilyn takes up underwater diving, the obsessive risk-taker in her emerges as she uncovers a realm of sublime rapture and awe—a reason to live. Diving deep and long she encounters hidden aspects of her identity nearly extinct. Returning each time to the surface, she believes herself freed from the past’s complex emotional legacies. Until a close call diving inside a shipwreck causes her to quit. But when her best friend dies while exploring an underwater cave with Marilyn’s husband she takes up diving again to honor—and outdo—her late friend. Marilyn then drags her husband with her as she increasingly pushes herself far past her limits endangering them both. This gripping novel explores the tangled lives of three driven and flawed people, bound and propelled and ultimately unraveled by desire loss and guilt.
Review: Blue Field by Elise Levine (reviewed by Marnie Silverman)
June 12, 2017 · by jmwwblog · in Reviews. ·
Blue Field
by Elise Levine
Biblioasis, 2016
200 Pages, $14.95
978-1771961516
Elise Levine’s Blue Field starts slow, setting up its characters and their relationships carefully, like dominoes to be knocked over. I found myself getting a little impatient during sections of Part One, wondering when the plot was going to kick into high gear – and then, without warning, I was hooked. Blue Field is written almost akin to a prose poem, with long, winding sections of vivid imagery, barely any paragraph brakes, and nothing to really denote dialogue from description. At first, the descriptions seem mundane, if not slightly colored by protagonist Marilyn’s background as a medical student (as when she describes “her follicles, alert as antennae” from the cold). But as Blue Field marches steadily onwards, the long descriptions feel more Lynchian, an extended shot of a moment that Levine lingers on for just a bit too long before releasing you into the next segment or chapter.
Blue Field, being the story of a woman who is once passionate about diving, quits, and then takes it up again, has an abundance of scenes that take place underwater. These scenes in particular accomplish a certain anxious breathlessness that puts the reader side by side with Marilyn, going through every step of the dive as she performs it. The level of research Levine put into Blue Field is impressive, and abundantly clear from these parts alone. Many of the terms related to diving aren’t explicitly defined in the text, as Marilyn is already familiar with them, but it’s more than easy to pick up on what they do through how Marilyn handles or uses them. I never found myself stumbling over a sentence for lack of knowledge about a term – rather, it was easy to simply let the current of the diving sequences carry me, and learn the terms through context. Most of them are used repeatedly throughout the book, giving you multiple chances to learn the vernacular. But even if you don’t, there’s no great loss to your understanding of the book (and you can always look it up later).
Levine weaves Marilyn’s internal narrative in seamlessly with the events happening around her, wrapping the reader up in Marilyn’s anxieties surrounding mortality even before the gut-punching death that comes roughly halfway through the novel. But even from Marilyn’s memory of her parents’ funerals, towards the beginning, Blue Field never shies away from potentially messy depictions of grief. Instead, it employs the same Lynchian method mentioned previously, forcing the reader to get up close and personal with not just the way that Marilyn grieves for both her parents and her dead friend Jane, but the way that Marilyn’s husband Rand, and even Jane’s family do. These scenes are by no means pretty, but they gives the characters weight, making their sorrow almost tangible, even among the supporting cast members who only show up for a chapter or two.
Blue Field is at its best during these unflinching moments of raw emotion, and the last few parts of the book felt relentless. I found Blue Field hard to put down not only because of its steady, full-steam-ahead pacing, but because I was genuinely worried about what would happen to Marilyn by the end of the book. As she slowly self-destructed, I became as preoccupied with mortality as she was, questioning if Levine would really let the book end on such a dismal note as Marilyn’s death. Though I won’t say definitively what the answer to that question is, Blue Field, for all its relentless grief and panic, manages to end on a surprisingly cathartic note. I found it a very satisfying read, and would recommend it for anyone looking for a new book to pick up this summer (though considering its subject matter, it may not be the best book for the beach).
Marnie Silverman
Just Water, Water Everywhere | Review of Blue Field by Elise Levine — Benjamin Woodard
Author Photo by Britt Olsen-Ecker
Levine’s spare language works brilliantly to capture both the vastness of the open water and the claustrophobic chaos of underwater caverns. — Benjamin Woodard
Blue Field
Elise Levine
Biblioasis, 2017
224 pages; $14.95
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Much like her thrill seeking protagonist, author Elise Levine’s isn’t interested in convention, and in her new novel, Blue Field, she cleverly toys with structure and omission to tell the story of Marilyn, a woman who takes up cave diving as an outlet to escape the sadness she feels for her recently deceased parents. Levine’s spare language works brilliantly to capture both the vastness of the open water and the claustrophobic chaos of underwater caverns; it also provides a heightened, stylized canvas for Marilyn’s addictive nature, which encourages her to push her skills to their dangerous limits. The result is a tale of self-destruction and hubris, and it is absolutely gripping.
Written in a close third-person perspective, Blue Field unfolds in six parts that cover brief moments in Marilyn’s life. In the first, she falls for her instructor, Rand, as she learns the basics of diving. Part two centers around a dive two years later. Marilyn and Rand are now married and Marilyn’s friend, Jane, has also taken up cave diving. The dive goes sideways, and the results carry over to part three, which features yet another large time jump.
This bouncing ball pattern continues throughout the remaining sections: Marilyn loses her confidence in diving, is on site to witness a freak tragedy, and then returns to the water with determination. By trusting the reader to fill in the blanks left by time gaps, Levine not only eschews unnecessary narrative beats, but she focuses her text on the agony and ecstasy of diving. This decision reinforces the adrenaline rush that comes with the sport, where water means everything and clouds all other of life’s threads, and it drops the reader into the single-mindedness of Marilyn and her gang.
As these characters dive, Levine’s style transforms the page into a kind of textual illusion, for passages simultaneously present the underwater world as wide open and confined. When Marilyn submerges in part two, for instance, Levine begins by writing:
First one in, Marilyn hung. Alien, aquanaut—trussed and bound, packed tip to toe into a sealed drysuit. Hoses from her tanks tentacle around her and a nylon harness cradled her chest and hips and crotch and cupped her buoyancy device to her back like wings.
In this passage’s first sentence, the word “hung” implies weightlessness in the water, but also restriction. (What does one typically hang from? A noose? A tether?) From here, the next two sentences take this restriction and exploit it with descriptions of the equipment strapped to Marilyn’s body, complete with constricting language like “tentacle” and “bound.” Yet, mere sentences later, Levine segues to ruminate on the limitless feeling of standing at the bottom of a body of water:
But here, twenty feet beneath the surface in a pewter-tinted corona of visibility that extended maybe thirty feet in all directions before blurring like smoke—thirty-foot viz—just water, water everywhere. Freshwater. Middle of the north channel between two great northern lakes.
When read together in a single paragraph, the juxtaposition is effective, as it creates alternating feelings of safety and discomfort, and as Marilyn and Rand move to explore their targeted underwater ruin, the reader is primed for ratcheted tension. Levine maintains this momentum with fragmented sentences (“Here but she wanted out. This instant.”) and repetition (“Think, she thought from some pit deep in her brain. Think hard or die. Had any thought ever been clearer? Think and live.”). Sentences begin to collide, and a textual panic takes over.
In fact, even outside the water, flashes of panic present themselves, and throughout the novel, nearly every aspect of life takes on a yin/yang duality. The relationship between Marilyn and Rand wavers from loving to toxic: Rand screams at Marilyn in frustration; Marilyn accuses him of striking her; they frequently make violent love and threaten to break apart. Likewise, most of the peripheral characters in Blue Field, like Rand’s diving buddy, Bruce Bowman, are portrayed as difficult live wires who will also give you the shirt off their backs, and the extreme diving community itself is painted as one with questionable loyalty. At one point, Marilyn looks at an online diving forum’s fatality list, and is greeted with headlines like “FAREWELL, TRAVELLER, DIVE ON IN THE BEAUTIFUL AFTERWORLD” and “BYE DUMB BITCH, PUTTING YOUR LIFE IN HELL ON PURPOSE EARNED YOU A BODY BAG.” These contrasts add dimension to Marilyn and Rand, and they help the novel achieve an interesting balance, and, perhaps thesis: life is good and bad, freeing and suffocating, loving and perilous.
Fans of James Salter may see Blue Field as a quasi-homage to the late author’s own Solo Faces, for both employ spare language to chronicle extreme adventurers (Salter’s novel tackles mountain climbing), and both include a character named Rand as the seasoned veteran, taking new thrill seekers to nature’s limits. To continue with the idea of balance, one could see Salter’s creations as high above life and Levine’s as deep below. Whether this comparison is Levine’s intent or not doesn’t ultimately matter, however, for Blue Field is a remarkable novel on its own. Its story reflects the modern escapist fantasy so many desire, yet never achieve. As Marilyn becomes obsessed with her passion in an effort to figure out life, we recognize her craving and experience her thrills vicariously.
— Benjamin Woodard
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Woodard
Benjamin Woodard lives in Connecticut. His recent fiction has appeared in Hobart, New South, and Cog. In addition to Numéro Cinq, his criticism and nonfiction has been featured in The Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, Electric Literature, and other fine publications. He also helps run Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine. You can find him at benjaminjwoodard.com and on Twitter.
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Book Reviews
Blue Field
by Elise Levine
MayReviews_BlueField_Cover
Some novels draw you in; Blue Field drags you under and keeps clamping down, an exercise in storytelling as centrifugal force. A good portion of Elise Levine’s first book in more than a decade takes place underwater, in pitch-dark depths illuminated only faintly by the helmet-mounted flashlight of its deep-diving protagonist. It’s as if the author were drawing a parallel between her choice of setting and the style she applies to it. The seal between form and content is airtight. The question of whether the experience is transporting or suffocating depends on a reader’s willingness to take a deep breath and follow her down.
Blue Field is narrated by Marilyn, a woman in her late 20s whose confident, alluring exterior betrays a whirlpool of insecurities and internalized resentments, all related via a third-person point of view that’s as intimate as an inner monologue (or even more so, as it suggests that we know her better than she knows herself). Marilyn’s self-lacerating streak runs deep, and as the book opens, she’s reeling from seeing both of her parents die in rapid succession – her mother from lung cancer, her father in a terrorist attack that places the action in a frame of arbitrary morbidity.
This one-two punch only sharpens the guilt and isolation that already lurk at the edges of Marilyn’s daily grind, and given her obsession with introspection, it makes perfect sense that she would embrace cave diving. It’s less a hobby than a high-stakes way of disconnecting from reality – an example of risk as its own reward. Marilyn also begins a relationship with her diving instructor, Rand, whose presence and personality are described in the same glancing, oblique detail as the submerged objects and creatures she encounters during her outings. He’s more like a specimen than a person, and the detachment is curious and provocative. What Marilyn perceives as her instructor-turned-lover’s mix of concern and condescension might look healthier or more understandable from another angle, but because Blue Field never swims out of its protagonist’s headspace we’re never certain if he deserves the benefit of her (many) doubts.
Marilyn’s passionately mixed feelings about Rand are mirrored – and superseded – by her devotional love for her best friend, Jane, a cipher who seems to have been conjured into being out of a twined sense of competition and communion: “[Marilyn] liked to believe that if someone slit her open, inside might nest a near-semblance of her friend.” Marilyn’s need to measure herself against a woman she’s known since childhood suggests an attraction that runs deeper than any romantic attachment, and given their lifelong tendency to swap boyfriends, they’re almost lovers by proxy anyway. Their friendship (or at least Marilyn’s estimation of it) is so intensely symbiotic that it’s ominous, and in a novel with a less sophisticated structure, the inevitability of Jane’s coming to a bad end would be distracting. But Levine’s phenomenological approach reduces plot to an afterthought. The predictable turns of the story are subordinate to its virtuoso presentation.
Blue Field is a master class in using language to simultaneously vivify and de-familiarize, and it’s at its best in the long passages that place Marilyn in isolation. Instead of simply treating water like negative space, Levine renders it as an infinity of fleeting, teeming movements, any one of which could prove fatally definitive: “a blur of hoses and fins, her own grasping fingers … what had ever tentacled around her and choked.” The tangle of tersely interconnected sentences force us to perceive the world through a visor glass, darkly, and yet for all its claustrophobia, this perspective is also wide open to synaptic leaps in time and space – flashbacks that parcel out dramatic and psychological
exposition in jagged chunks.
It’s risky business to commit so fully to a subjectivity that reveals so much and so little at the same time, and Blue Field’s murkiness will be frustrating to anybody who likes characters with fully transparent pathologies. (It’s also not recommended for claustrophobes or anybody with a phobia of drowning). Levine is the proverbial writer who needs to be met halfway, but if you are suitably courageous, and swim out far enough, the swirling vortex of her prose will take it from there.
Reviewer: Adam Nayman
Publisher: Biblioasis
DETAILS
Price: $19.95
Page Count: 224 pp
Format: Paper
ISBN: 978-1-77196-151-6
Released: April 2017
Issue Date: May 2017
Categories: Fiction: Novels, Reviews