For the Love of “Umph”: A Review of 'Affect' by Charlene Elsby

BY LAUREN MALLETT

Erin, Ontario: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020. 147 pages. $18.95. Order here.

A couple days ago I was in a Zoom after party celebrating the round-robin solo performances of three musician pals.

The conversation lulled at one point and another participant, a stranger to me, said, “I don’t know a thing about music. I don’t know where I’d start.”

 “That’s the best place to be,” the most generous among us (not I) jumped in. “You know what sounds good to you, and that’s all you really need.”

In the parallel Zoomosphere of contemporary fiction, Canadian and philosophy scholar Charlene Elsby is not that stranger.

Elsby wasn’t rooting around for the plot slices and word cornucopias that simply looked, felt, or sounded best when she wrote Affect.

For one, Affect is her second rodeo. Hexis, her debut published in February 2020 by Clash Books, is Gone Girl meets Groundhog Day meets Nymphomaniac. The resulting concoction is spellbinding and disturbing as hell.

If Hexis is a cold-blooded, sadist verspertine, then Affect is a mammalian rom com attended by corpses and epistemological flights of worry.

Pick the medicine for what ails you.

Should you choose the latter, you are in for an endearing roman à clef in which the weirdo unnamed narrator, a philosophy graduate student, stalks and then pairs up with the just-as-weird Logan.

“‘It’s hard to want anything in this garbage existence,’” she comments to him early on. Such truth serum is heightened by her imagined bleedings-to-death and an epic bonfire.

The protagonist calls Logan “the best accident”, a cliché which is earned by her continual, existential qualification:

It might be true that anyone you come to know is magical. That might be the nature of the human. It’s hard to imagine that all of the others of them go on leading full inner and outer lives. In my experience, only I do. In my experience, I’m the one who experiences. This is why it’s so enamouring to learn that someone else does too.

Weirdos unite en amour! And soon thereafter hit and run from maybe corpses.

The pair’s discursive sparring is the first-and-foremost treat of the book. I would happily read a hundred more pages of their dialogue alone. They poke fun at one another, challenge each other’s foibles, and display care when it counts. Like when it’s time to escape a zombie bar takeover. After being separated at said bar, the two reunite:

‘Are you ready to go?’ he asked me.

‘Yes, let’s go.’

‘I bought us some sandwiches.’

‘That was a great idea.’

‘I know,’ said Logan.

‘You should never go anywhere else again, except maybe for sandwiches,’ I told him.

‘Sounds good.’

Affect reminds readers who have found their person of the miracle that they exist.

“Umph” is the protagonist’s miraculous refrain to this end, and it slaps.

Those readers who do not have—or have no interest in—such a yes-I-get-you-and-love-you-for-you partnership will also find moments to treasure.

The few secondary characters aren’t nearly as interesting as the protagonist and Logan. When the pair runs into her ex, Nick, on the way to a coffee shop, the dialogue slackens with snippets like “‘You hurt me’” and “‘You found me after I’d been broken.”’ Womp womp.

In contrast, Affect’s narrator speaks and thinks with wit and discernment: “One of the most horrid things I have had to come to terms with is that every moment of my life is one that I have had to live through.” I dare write that Affect (in effect) holds a candle to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.

So why—hinted at by my ignorance-as-bliss anecdotal hook—do I anticipate some readers may overlook Affect?

Is it because Elsby is relatively new to the game and brings a cerebral approach distinct from the current trends of polyphony and nonlinearity? Yes.

Is it because the rom com is tired, and illustrating how Affect both cozies up to and bites its thumb at the genre feels reductive and moot? Probably.

Is it because this is the first review I’ve volunteered to write and actually written, and I feel like the ignoramus, nosing around for the grubby jewels that best preview this misfits’ love story? Most definitely. 

I cheered on the inside at the landing of “Logan and I have chosen to direct ourselves toward the same universe.” Weirdos unite!

I finished Affect emboldened to love harder my absolutely-right-for-me partner and stand taller in my scuzzy, floral rain boots.

Oh, and an honest-to-god Nick Cave sticker adorns one chapter opening. A jewel, indeed.

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Lauren Mallett’s (she/her/hers) poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Passages North, Fugue, RHINO, and other journals. She lives on Oregon’s north coast, on the traditional homelands of the Clatsop people. Find her at www.laurenmallett.com.

A Review of Kristin Garth's 'Shut Your Eyes, Succubi'

BY MONIQUE QUINTANA

Kristin Garth’s chapbook, shut your eyes, succubi ( Maverick Duck Press, 2019) , is both delightful and frightening, a conjuring of girlhood with a form inclined to romance-- the sonnet. A prolific sonneteer in a digital age, Garth understands that while some memories seem as distant as old TV sets and radio fuzz, certain characters are bright and alive and fun in our psyche and they turn up in the most opportune places.

This was the first time I read poetry with handwritten annotations, which added a poignant whimsy to the experience. As I moved further and further into the poems, each character seemed to be linked together by the same dark energy. In “Eat Me”, objects, fashion, and delicacies push each line to a sexual moment. There is no meek girl Alice of yesteryear, rather a woman who has autonomy in a scene. Stripped of masquerade, she dominates and commands as a true queen of hearts.

Two other standout sonnets are “ Claudia” and “Veruca Wants”. Both pieces reckon with the image and the sentiments of the brat girl, a girl decked with material things, who is much too grown-up for the world that she lives in. “Claudia” tells of Interview with the Vampire’s doomed enfant, a character who remains elusive in both Rice’s novel and the cinematic dreamscape of Neil Jordan’s 1994 take: “ Resolve to keep her safe at hand, but she / is something you don’t understand .”

The poem seems to acknowledge that we, the grand audience, both love and detest Claudia because she’s an unlikable girl, but also our beloved. Like “Claudia”, “Veruca Wants” made me take pause and look back at my girlhood. When I was small and I asked for material things or complained about things that were making me unhappy, my grandmother called me “Veruca” and waited for the sweet and stoic parts of me to return. Garth’s sonnet carries the want for decadence over to womanhood: “ Men / who’ll jump before she screams.” The sonnet plays with the idea that we create the very decadence that we need. It’s not the reaching for rich things, but when we’re compelled to articulate desire to the point of screaming.

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Monique Quintana is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019) and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from CSU Fresno. Her work has appeared in Winter Tangerine, Queen Mobs Tea House and Acentos Review, among other publications. She is a Senior Editor at Luna Luna Magazine, Fiction Editor at Five 2 One Magazine, and writes about Latinx literature at her blog, Blood Moon. You can find her at moniquequintana.com