Genevieves
Henry Hoke
Subito Press, 2017
Reviewed by Joe Sacksteder
“Weaponize your juvenilia,” recommends the narrator of “Wentz,” the opening story of Henry Hoke’s collection, Genevieves. Who is speaking and to whom is unclear. The story’s protagonist, a girl named Carolina Cone, has been hiding in her room from her sinister new step-father, Doctor Wentz, the OB/GYN who delivered her, and imagining the room’s contents are her new friends. These contents include old word collages she’d put together, like “My name is Carolina Cone, and I’m a private eye.” These scraps are perhaps Carolina’s juvenilia, and since it’s at this moment that Wentz’s son Doctor Junior materializes to help Carolina and be her sidekick, the reader might suspect that she has conjured this companion. Doctor Junior is just one of many alter egos, doubles, or spectral figures who appear in Genevieves. Carolina resolves earlier in the story, “Today I’m going to wake up and be just one girl, today for sure, today,” and then immediately gives up: “But no, I’m always two or more girls, or one girl and one boy.” Likewise, it is in fact a prosthetic version of Carolina that Doctor Junior helps his new friend discover in Wentz’s secret room, and it is this doll that, when presented to Wentz at a party, causes the villain to fall apart into nothing but a trail of prosthetic limbs. That old story.
Hoke weaponizes his own juvenilia on a much larger scale throughout the collection. By which I mean (as a compliment), these are stories that appear to be written by someone who has never read a short story or been taught how to write one. If the pejorative “workshop story” is really a phenomenon of contemporary academic writing, these stories are the opposite. Pure, mad creativity—before tutelage gets out its red pen. Reading these stories is simultaneously inspiring and disheartening, for here is proof of the massive task of unlearning the rest of us would need to undergo to achieve something so strange and fresh. The stories use a child-like ignorance of form and craft to attack the mired familiarity of our world and the inertness of our received genres. Hoke shows us how to forget what we know about characterization, setting, and conflict. Using generous white space, with paragraphs that often appear more like poetic lines or the block-like lexia of modular fiction, Genevieves resists being called a short story collection. More like an accumulation, an accretion, a Wentzian heap of prosthetic limbs, these nine stories serve as artificial replacements for the text’s absent presence, a reminder of survived traumas.
It takes some serious decoding, but the absent presence binding all of these stories together might be the figure named in the title. Genevieve first enters the collection in an italicized preface in which she appears as an unnamed speaker’s imaginary friend:
When I was little I wanted my name to be Genevieve. Genevieve was the best name on the playground because when I tripped or got pushed down it helped me up. And when I was up the playground was clearer, weirder. I always told the teacher that I was glad to have Genevieve in my class and the teacher always made sure to tell me there was no one with that name.
This preface appears to be an allusion to Shirley Jackson’s “Charles,” a story in which a kindergartner named Laurie comes home each day with stories of a classmate named Charles’s wild behavior and subsequent punishments. Laurie’s mother becomes increasingly intrigued by the miscreant and the prospect of meeting Charles’s parents at a P.T.A. meeting. The story ends at that meeting, the confused teacher informing Laurie’s mother “We don’t have any Charles in the kindergarten.”
While the Genevieve of the preface is a more positive or even therapeutic imaginary friend than Laurie’s Charles, her presence throughout the collection is varied and ambiguous. Other than perhaps “MoNa,” the only story in which Genevieve—or her absence—plays a palpable role is “Genevieve Exists,” which takes the form of a movie production assistant’s “coverage” on a screenplay called Taken by the Sky. “Page 17,” Karla’s coverage reads, “contains an action that may throw you off: ‘Genevieve exits.’ I’m sure you’ll notice that there’s no character named Genevieve in the scene.” The assistant explains that it is one of the director, ZR’s, signatures, originally a typo in the screenplay of his very first film. “All of ZR’s short films have been in the can on schedule and under budget,” the assistant explains, “and ZR attributes this to Genevieve’s textual presence, never my dynamic supervision.” Here we get the first signs of conflict, of Karla’s unreliability, which eventually spirals into obsession and mania à la Charles Kinbote’s commentary on John Shade’s poem in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
A clue to locating Genevieve in the other stories can be found in the table of contents. Below the names of the nine stories and their corresponding page numbers runs another list in tiny font at the bottom of the page: “driver/specter/neighbor/designer/sister/replacement/ skyscraper/mascot/director.” It doesn’t take too much wattage to realize there are nine items in both lists. “Genevieve Exists,” being the second story in the collection, would correspond to “specter,” which makes sense: the most direct reference to Genevieve’s role in the collection is reserved for the story in which her absence is most obvious. And “Wentz”… driver. Well, at the end of the story, Carolina has her half-brother call her a car, and the final paragraph reads, “She stared into the sunglasses of the driver in the rear view. A young woman behind the wheel, a young woman so focused on finding the smoothest route out of the world. Carolina Cone almost asked for her name.”
But there’s something even more complex going on here, because golf is a big part of the story, and, whereas Doctor Wentz loves playing golf, Carolina prefers a version of the game that substitutes stolen chicken eggs for golf balls, prosthetic limbs for drivers. And as chicken eggs themselves are at one point conflated with human incipience—“Holding [eggs] up to the light and checking the opacity, to see if they’ll hatch instead and get big and spin a sign on the street and disappoint us”—the prosthetic juvenilia, and Hoke’s stories themselves, are simultaneously weaponized golf clubs joyfully smashing to bits the profession of Carolina’s OB/GYN step-father and the focused, mysterious figure chauffeuring us away from the mess of our past and into our unknown future. Or Carolina herself is driving the car, and “I’m always two or more girls, or one girl and one boy” is simply an exact equation: Carolina/driver, Carolina/Doctor Junior.
To find out how Genevieve might take the form of neighbor or designer or sister or replacement or skyscraper or mascot or director, you’ll have to read the book for yourself. And while you’re at it, read Hoke’s other heap, The Book of Endless Sleepovers (Civil Coping Mechanisms), which came out the same year that Subito published Genevieves. Hoke’s assault on traditional ideas of craft and form is so extreme in Sleepovers that it short-circuited my ability to write a review, and what came out of me was a pseudo-poem in the voice of the author.