GUT PUNCH: MEG TUITE'S WHITE VAN
Reviewed by Adam Van Winkle
It’s a rare thing when the form of art, the experience of art, the effect of art, captures the art’s subject. James Joyce did it. Beckett did it. Odetta did it. Ginsberg did it. Bob Dylan did it. Mark Rothko did it. In WHITE VAN, Meg Tuite certainly does it.
I never thought I’d write a review with a trigger warning, but here’s one. This is your trigger warning. This book contains instances of abduction and assault and pedophilia.
If one were abducted and bound and blindfolded and thrown in a van, what would the experience, the sensory part, feel like? It would be disjointed, intense yet muffled, with flashes of light and flashes of dark, filled with momentary glimpses of the clear—smells, visions, sounds—while feeling overwhelmingly underwater.
The 49 pieces of flash, vignette, verse, and story that make up WHITE VAN--released by UNLIKELY BOOKS in March—leaves one feeling just these. The writing, these pieces, bound and gag the reader. They hold the reader hostage. They deliver the reader a heaping helping of the helpless and breathless experience of abduction and trauma.
Though, it moves beyond these as well. In many ways WHITE VAN reads like Tom Waits’ RAIN DOGS or FRANKS WILD YEARS, a series of related though not necessarily interconnected character vignettes—only WHITE VAN is a much, much more sexy and sinister version.
“Remember What?” takes the perspective of a group of run around gals (the narrator is a “we”) who make fun of old men in speedos with hard-ons, who are perennially on their way to someone’s house as long as it is not their own, who “rock handjobs and blowjobs” on boys in movie theatres, “jacked up on jizz and angel dust” (a line reminiscent of Ginsberg’s HOWL), who “crack” beers and mock the girls abducted and missing, the cold cases, girls who “were already on their way out.”
“Music Absorbs What the Body Can’t” feels like a trauma survivor. The narrator listens to a boy playing his guitar, and eventually they “hold hands and feel our genitals move through the palms of our salty hands.” Perhaps both are trauma survivors because the next morning, after the deed, “the room stinks of bewilderment and horror” as the two “can’t wait to return to our solitary bodies and shower away base, frightened sobriety and whitecap backlash of a night of soiled fingernails scraping over buttons and zippers to find mottled flesh to spread and douse in.”
One narrator has survived abduction, but it’s hard to really call it survival as she relives the incident: “I’m not a homicide. I am a homicide. Not in their reports. The mask did what it did and now I’m a paint-by-number girl. I exist in tiny beige squares. A neighbor next door spots the white van and a man in dark clothes. They ask me over and over, ‘how tall was he,’ ‘what color were his eyes,’ ‘what was he wearing?’” (“Rocks Along the Bottom”).
A man walks the street, thinking of his cuckolded wife and his homosexual affairs (“Death Every 3 Seconds”). A street walker and crack addict willfully gets into a van “parading never-to-return Jane Does” offering the driver a chance “to be ripped open by the stars” (“Drive By”). A pedophile waivers between guilt and rationalizing his actions: “I hurt my victim…The victim actually wanted sex…In reality, I was only educating my victim…I masturbate to fantasies of my victim…Honestly, I can say I cried for my victim…It wasn’t my fault” (“The Pedophile’s Test: Mutiny of Disturbance”).
And here I’ll quit simply listing Tuite’s astounding and astonishing lines—this book has more than I could ever capture in this review.
Instead I’ll say this: I haven’t been knocked back by a book like this in a long time, maybe since Donald Ray Pollock’s KNOCKEMSTIFF. There are moments of discomfort—many in fact—in WHITE VAN, but they are also moments of pure ecstasy of reading, at the realization that writing and a writer can still make me feel hit in the gut with words.
Tuite’s WHITE VAN is a pleasure ride of the power of literature. It is a collection of character sketches that you won’t soon forget, maybe never. Somehow Tuite has found a way to do justice to trauma without shying away from telling the story from all angles. She’s found a way to capture, authentically, sexual deviancy and sexual normalcy and sexual desire and sexual excess in ways we’ve probably all imagined, and delivered the dialogue in ways we could never describe but now can thanks to WHITE VAN. This book is that deep and profound and perfect for its subject.
Meg Tuite is author of a novel-in-stories, Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press), a short story collection, Bound By Blue, (Sententia Books) Meet My Haze (Big Table Publishing), White Van (Unlikely Books), won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from (Artistically Declined Press) for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging, Grace Notes (Unknown Press), as well as five chapbooks of short fiction, flash, poetic prose, and multi-genre. She teaches workshops and online classes through Bending Genres and is an associate editor at Narrative Magazine. Her work has been published in over 600 literary magazines and over fifteen anthologies including: Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good. She has been nominated over 15 times for the Pushcart Prize, won first and second place in Prick of the Spindle contest, five-time finalist at Glimmer Train, finalist of the Gertrude Stein award and 3rd prize in the Bristol Short Story Contest. She is also the editor of eight anthologies. She is included in the Best Small Fictions of 2021. Her blog: http://megtuite.com
Reviewed by Adam Van Winkle
It’s a rare thing when the form of art, the experience of art, the effect of art, captures the art’s subject. James Joyce did it. Beckett did it. Odetta did it. Ginsberg did it. Bob Dylan did it. Mark Rothko did it. In WHITE VAN, Meg Tuite certainly does it.
I never thought I’d write a review with a trigger warning, but here’s one. This is your trigger warning. This book contains instances of abduction and assault and pedophilia.
If one were abducted and bound and blindfolded and thrown in a van, what would the experience, the sensory part, feel like? It would be disjointed, intense yet muffled, with flashes of light and flashes of dark, filled with momentary glimpses of the clear—smells, visions, sounds—while feeling overwhelmingly underwater.
The 49 pieces of flash, vignette, verse, and story that make up WHITE VAN--released by UNLIKELY BOOKS in March—leaves one feeling just these. The writing, these pieces, bound and gag the reader. They hold the reader hostage. They deliver the reader a heaping helping of the helpless and breathless experience of abduction and trauma.
Though, it moves beyond these as well. In many ways WHITE VAN reads like Tom Waits’ RAIN DOGS or FRANKS WILD YEARS, a series of related though not necessarily interconnected character vignettes—only WHITE VAN is a much, much more sexy and sinister version.
“Remember What?” takes the perspective of a group of run around gals (the narrator is a “we”) who make fun of old men in speedos with hard-ons, who are perennially on their way to someone’s house as long as it is not their own, who “rock handjobs and blowjobs” on boys in movie theatres, “jacked up on jizz and angel dust” (a line reminiscent of Ginsberg’s HOWL), who “crack” beers and mock the girls abducted and missing, the cold cases, girls who “were already on their way out.”
“Music Absorbs What the Body Can’t” feels like a trauma survivor. The narrator listens to a boy playing his guitar, and eventually they “hold hands and feel our genitals move through the palms of our salty hands.” Perhaps both are trauma survivors because the next morning, after the deed, “the room stinks of bewilderment and horror” as the two “can’t wait to return to our solitary bodies and shower away base, frightened sobriety and whitecap backlash of a night of soiled fingernails scraping over buttons and zippers to find mottled flesh to spread and douse in.”
One narrator has survived abduction, but it’s hard to really call it survival as she relives the incident: “I’m not a homicide. I am a homicide. Not in their reports. The mask did what it did and now I’m a paint-by-number girl. I exist in tiny beige squares. A neighbor next door spots the white van and a man in dark clothes. They ask me over and over, ‘how tall was he,’ ‘what color were his eyes,’ ‘what was he wearing?’” (“Rocks Along the Bottom”).
A man walks the street, thinking of his cuckolded wife and his homosexual affairs (“Death Every 3 Seconds”). A street walker and crack addict willfully gets into a van “parading never-to-return Jane Does” offering the driver a chance “to be ripped open by the stars” (“Drive By”). A pedophile waivers between guilt and rationalizing his actions: “I hurt my victim…The victim actually wanted sex…In reality, I was only educating my victim…I masturbate to fantasies of my victim…Honestly, I can say I cried for my victim…It wasn’t my fault” (“The Pedophile’s Test: Mutiny of Disturbance”).
And here I’ll quit simply listing Tuite’s astounding and astonishing lines—this book has more than I could ever capture in this review.
Instead I’ll say this: I haven’t been knocked back by a book like this in a long time, maybe since Donald Ray Pollock’s KNOCKEMSTIFF. There are moments of discomfort—many in fact—in WHITE VAN, but they are also moments of pure ecstasy of reading, at the realization that writing and a writer can still make me feel hit in the gut with words.
Tuite’s WHITE VAN is a pleasure ride of the power of literature. It is a collection of character sketches that you won’t soon forget, maybe never. Somehow Tuite has found a way to do justice to trauma without shying away from telling the story from all angles. She’s found a way to capture, authentically, sexual deviancy and sexual normalcy and sexual desire and sexual excess in ways we’ve probably all imagined, and delivered the dialogue in ways we could never describe but now can thanks to WHITE VAN. This book is that deep and profound and perfect for its subject.
Meg Tuite is author of a novel-in-stories, Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press), a short story collection, Bound By Blue, (Sententia Books) Meet My Haze (Big Table Publishing), White Van (Unlikely Books), won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from (Artistically Declined Press) for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging, Grace Notes (Unknown Press), as well as five chapbooks of short fiction, flash, poetic prose, and multi-genre. She teaches workshops and online classes through Bending Genres and is an associate editor at Narrative Magazine. Her work has been published in over 600 literary magazines and over fifteen anthologies including: Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good. She has been nominated over 15 times for the Pushcart Prize, won first and second place in Prick of the Spindle contest, five-time finalist at Glimmer Train, finalist of the Gertrude Stein award and 3rd prize in the Bristol Short Story Contest. She is also the editor of eight anthologies. She is included in the Best Small Fictions of 2021. Her blog: http://megtuite.com