Fiona Lui Martin
Book Review
A review of Darcie Dennigan’s Little Neck (Fonograf Editions). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.
In a Literary Hub article, Providence-based poet and playwright Darcie Dennigan writes about writing her sophomore novel Little Neck in the hushed idyll of beautiful cemeteries. Atmospheric Riverside Cemetery, crumbling Oakland Cemetery, and St. Mary’s Cemetery—in which her great grandmother Marguerite and baby cousin are buried.
I wrote this review of Little Neck in crowded-with-the-dead Calvary Cemetery, Trinity Churchyard (home to New Amsterdam’s oldest headstone), and Green-Wood Cemetery where I’ve gone since I was small, naming the koi fish and taping yellow flowers to my Gong Gong’s grave.
Dennigan’s dark tale is set in a New England town known as Little Neck, in a sunless monument shop run by two weird sisters, where dust dries up the people inside and things are done the opposite way. In this cold grey soil, a girl grows.
A girl who, as she matter-of-factly explains, already has a gravestone. “It is when I am born. When I am born I am left by a gravestone at Rose Head. Rita says to me that half of Little Neck wonders which grave.”
So we meet our half-feral heroine—found in a cemetery, the talk of the town before she’s fully developed breasts (“white peonies” she calls them), cared for by the graveyard groundskeeper… until one bloody August night severs her young life into a before and an after, like a chestnut tree split by lightning. The following morning, she wakes up to find: “Now I am Marguerite Concrete.”
Her name is not Marguerite Concrete. In fact, her name is never revealed; the better to submerge the reader in the deafening silence and desirous torments of her experience. Nameless, she exists as sole, all-consuming subjectivity.
Taking its title from the real Massachusetts construction company, Marguerite Concrete is the memorial dealer where the protagonist lives, learning the craft of carving. The doors are locked daily since even her face holds an indelible secret.
Naturally, the narrator wonders what the sisters mean when they say “he didn’t get her” and, then, no more. Gradually, her questing turns inward, into an Oedipus-like journey of self-discovery. Who is he becomes who am I? And what, or rather who, do I come from?
To return to the opening sentence: “now I am Marguerite Concrete” reflects how the narrator’s surroundings deeply affect her sense of self. Because, in Little Neck, people and places aren’t separate; they’re inextricable. The environment buries itself inside the inhabitant, just as the inhabitant will one day be buried in earth.
Want to know someone? Look around. The atmosphere in which they dwell melds with their skin, their hair, bloodstream, and bones. Take the groundskeeper, whose eyelids “look heavy… like his lids are holding up a pile of dirt.” Down the road, north of Rose Head, “when [Rosmarge] talks a whole gravestone has to move to the side so that her voice can get out.” In contrast, evil incarnate has a gentle voice but smells “of something that has not ever been alive.”
Moreover, the protagonist’s unconventional milieu imprints itself upon her—equally peculiar—vocabulary. Having been raised among more headstones than humans, it makes sense that epitaphs, poetry, biblical quotations, and antiquated turns of phrase seep from her surroundings into her vernacular. In other contexts cliched, here, these alternately grand, sentimental, and stern statements are endowed with expressive truth because they shape how the main character processes the world.
For instance, when yearning for her long-lost keeper the girl thinks “watch between me and thee while we are absent from the other” and “set me as a seal upon thine arm.” Later, desperate to escape her circumstances, she imagines declaring “peace be thine” while delivering a mortal blow. However, as time passes, the narrator acclimates to new rhythms and routines. After all, “time doth settle.”
The longer she stays, the more the stomping grounds of her early childhood are overtaken by Marguerite Concrete. Still, Rose Head dominates her mind. Within the walls of the stonehouse, she performs a kind of mental alchemy: “The slate dust is pollen. The gravestones are flowers. The cutting saw is the grass clippers. The carving tools are the air bugs.”
In an interview with BOMB Magazine, Dennigan details the seed that became Little Neck: “I began this book by being interested in Lena Herzog’s project on lost languages. She talks… about how to make silence apparent and says, You sound what has gone silent, you describe hunger by describing bread.” According to this logic, Little Neck’s protagonist isn’t just hungry, she’s starved. Starving for sunlight, warmth, forbidden knowledge, physical touch, plants, her groundskeeper, and—whether she knows it or not—love.
She conjures all of the above in strange, erotic daydreams more visceral than her dreary existence. In reality and fantasy, fluids flow, blood abounds, roots can feel like fingers, and the boundary between self-punishment and self-pleasure proves permeable. The line “all flesh is grass” epitomizes this ethos—nature and sexuality interwoven:
“I have no shirt on. I am trying to cough the grass flies back out. I cough until fluid comes up from my stomach. A bright green fluid. A peony green. But the two grass flies do not come up. They are married in me. I am kneeling in the grass covering the fluid with more grass. My elbows bang my chest and hurt the peonies. So I bang them more. It is so good to hurt them. A stick from the crabapple tree. I push the stick into the middle of one flower and then the other. Then go and knock on the chapelhouse door and the keeper opens it and sees. Blood and flower juice running down my chest.”
Furthermore, this slim volume is replete with repetition. Far from filler, reiteration proves to be part and parcel of parsing for the truth. With each pass over deceivingly familiar terrain, illuminating new memories and moments emerge.
For example, the main character may look stagnant—even static. For a whole winter, she lies on a long couch in the side room. Yet appearances belie that a great change is taking place. In this way, reading Dennigan’s Gothic coming-of-age/rage story is akin to watching a plant grow, not in glossy time-lapse but in real-time.
Little Neck
Darcie Dennigan
Fonograf Editions
106pp
$20
Fiona Lui Martin
