Or are these girls really just facets of the voice that introduces them, as she tries to understand her own legacy? The girl in my mother who disappeared over time and the girl who tried to find her.
The girls who never slept and became a spiral. The girl who tucked a pearl under her tongue while she slept. In “Girls I No Longer Know” (which has followed me around these last few days), a basic list story makes various females glow like ghosts I’d like to have a drink with: The girl who clapped at the sunset. They are open and approachable, if a little unnerving like a stranger may be. Her characters are neither lofty, privileged, nor especially fascinating. Like Lydia Davis or Sabrina Orah Mark, Polek meditates on universal themes with the wry concision of short film, letting honest, specific images carry the burdensome philosophical weight. There are no apologies, no poetic overhauls of the human condition, just existences teeming with active verbs, juicy sounds, and lush (if spare) imagery: Not a particularly exceptional garden but a garden gardenly enough to set the scene for things to bloom. Rather, she presents glimpses of characters that refute the white male tradition by simply never existing in it in the first place. She does not put much, if any, political spin on the malleable environments that make up this slim collection. Polek does not necessarily contribute an experience of any one gender or another in the radical sense. She balances an early post-modern tone, infusing her scenes with a healthy dose of absurdity while exposing sincere interest in there being no single normal that being average is, perhaps, a fantasy. Yes, it is okay to play and laugh and be quiet sometimes! That our potential for delight is so often fused with dread is laid bare in Polek’s direct prose style. Instead of a kiss, they prolong eye contact, smile excessively, nod often, and wait. Or the delights of a first date in “Garden Party”: Their hands warm from the thermos the way hands warm from hands. Yes, dear Reader, it is okay to feel the impending doom of social and environmental collapse while admitting that “Not every human experience is inherently valuable.” In being granted this permission, the reader can push on, finding a delicate and joyful appreciation for, say, an over-crowded supermarket in “Grocery Story”: A group of people circle their carts around a watermelon display like a death dance, and a small girl stares at him as she crawls out from under a table, clutching a salami. And with this risk comes the most refreshing reward. Imaginary Museums is playful, balancing on the edge of banality. Meanwhile, the few first-person narratives strive for a more contemporary interrogation, a sort of “Us versus The-Objects-That-Proliferate-Around-Us-For-No-Reason” loop that you may have already been thinking about but couldn’t quite articulate. Polek’s third-person portraits include the young and the old, the single and the coupled, the exhaustively human and the tiny animals that observe us in secret ritual. Reading this collection is a bit like playing hide and seek with a potential lover you are too eager to sleep with: said lover finds you hiding behind a tree easily enough, but when it’s your turn to seek, they’ve simply and succinctly disappeared without so much as a kiss on the cheek. Polek expresses her fictional priorities in a sort of generations-old style by blending the suggestively traumatic with a “Sometimes falling is a kind of freedom” humor. You are permitted to leave the page chuckling, while still gazing out the window wondering if you should dare re-enter this terrifying reality. The reader is made to feel as safe as the vignettes’ conveyor belts behind layers of glass, scrims, walls, and doors. From the depths, she yanks a lamp that is so lit it proves bright enough to reveal the reader’s own isolations with insight, but isn’t too hot as to burn the skin. With composed brevity and a hip, off-brand optimism, Polek mines a bottomless crevasse of depressive inclinations and self-imposed disembodiment. In an independent literary landscape that so often obsessively maps the body through language (of which I am a contributing member) it is with surprising relief that I dip my toes into the twenty-six brief stories of Nicolette Polek’s debut collection, Imaginary Museums.
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