D. W. White

Review-in-Brief

A quick review of Monique Wittig’s Across the Acheron (Winter Editions). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.

Monique Wittig’s Across the Acheron, translated from the French by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland in a new release from Winter Editions, is an energetic, formally impish, fiercely irreverant novel. The lost and the living–as two, as one, as all–move through a staccato structure and quick-cut chapters that exhibit a disdain of ​e​xposition and a stubbornly ongoing heartbeat. With its parenthetical dialogue and hellscape San Francisco, it less evokes Dante’s Commedia than atomitizes it, pulling the reader through the narrator’s trials and tribulations as urgently and chaotically as though through Pandaemonium itself:

Instead, I speak to Manastabal, my guide, and ask her if the laundromat is the first circle of Hell. She says:

(1 don’t know, Wittig, whether the circles of Hell have been enumerated. But never mind that, I’ve no intention of making you visit them in order.)

It takes all my energy to reply:

(Let’s go there in disorder, then.)

What to do with this sort of certainty, this simple (radical) positing of things-as-they-are? Our narrator’s Cartesian troubles about the nature of things obscure, before falling into, a deeper narrational certainty: this is her world, such as she finds, and then writes, it.

The narrative coherence is one worked out by feel rather than sight; becoming progression or degression depending only on one’s pronunciation, or perhaps belief. It is the world seen from the far side of the river, way down below the distorting—yet purifying—water. Good luck finding your way back again.

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Across the Acheron

Monique Wittig

Winter Editions

141pp

$20

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D. W. White is the Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review, Prose Editor of West Trade Review, and Publisher of Indirect Books. A Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago, his criticism and prose appear in 3:AM, The Florida Review, New Critique, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. He teaches fiction workshops at UIC and a graduate seminar on Rachel Cusk in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University. His first book of criticism, Rachel Cusk and The Art of Narration, will be published in November by Indirect Books.