I knew, within maybe five minutes of first meeting Mary Burger at Naropa in 1994, that I was in the presence of a brilliant & completely original human being, who really didn’t need any help from me in becoming a great writer – she just needed to be herself. My advice to her consisted of telling her that she should move to the Bay Area, where her originality would fit right in & not be perceived as strange or dangerous, and giving her the address of Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy. That may be some of the best “teaching” I ever did.
Now Mary has proved me right by writing what is flat out the best novel I've read to come out of the new writing since.... Well, you’d have to go back to Kathy Acker & Jack Kerouac to find another performance on such a high level. Sonny is a novella, really, just 95 pages long, with fair amounts of white space on every page, since it’s told in paragraphs that are units unto themselves, ranging in length from short to very very short.
It consists of two parallel tales, one that of a large family one of whose older children heads out west, toward Vegas, after which he is mostly out of contact with the clan. For the younger children, he functions as much as a mystery as a presence. The second story, particularly apt this past week, is that of the Manhattan Project itself, and of the community of scientists, most of them Jewish, all of them cosmopolitan sophisticates, suddenly dropped like aliens from outer space onto a dot in the desert called Los Alamos, New Mexico. There they construct something not unlike the sun & are confronted by the terrible recognition that their intellectual games can have world-changing consequences for the entire planet.
With its microparagraphs, reading Sonny feels like going through a book of old, still photographs, tableaux that by themselves present images of posed life, but which collectively create a portrait of incredible richness – if you can use that phrase to characterize a world defined by barrenness, absence & loss.
There are moments, instants, where Sonny feels like a work “predicted” by the writing of David Markson, Don DeLillo (especially the desert sections of Underworld) & Carole Maso, yet where Markson & Maso construct works that function like arrows, moving ever progressively toward a conclusion that feels like a bullseye (or, possibly, a trap), Sonny opens out & is more comfortable with the indeterminacy of its implications. In this sense, it’s less of a performance and a far more human book than these other authors tend to produce. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the one moment of true gore in Sonny is not atomic, but rather the simple farmyard act of skinning a rabbit, described in almost clinical detail.
Mary Burger’s poetry has always had elements of the fictive about it. She has been part of the Narrativity project and is the current editor of Second Story Books (which may or may not be a descendant of the old Second Story Books of Buffalo, an early publisher of such authors as Acker & Laurie
