The Synesthesiac Arts and Letters With Ashley Gamell and Maddie Oatman

Author: Ashley Gamell and Maddie Oatman

Best of Bread Loaf:
Part II

Robert Cohen's New Novel
Reviewed by Ashley Gamell

Robert Cohen is that gangly, profusely-bearded English professor who swoops impressively around the fringes of campus, looking like a bird of prey conspicuously native to New York City. He has published three novels and a book of short stories, and has received several awards, including a Pushcart Prize. The last novel he published, the best-selling and highly-praised "Inspired Sleep," was described as an "all-consuming" consolation of the human condition by The New York Times.

On the last evening of this summer's Writer's Conference, Cohen ducked onto the stage of the Little Theatre and wrapped his long, knobby hands around the podium. With a smirk, he expressed his relief that Michael Collier would be closing the final reading and announced that he would leave the deep stuff to Collier.

Over the next half-hour, as Cohen read from his forthcoming novel, the audience howled and cackled like a pack of adolescents. However, just as often, the theatre rang with the prized communal sigh that comes after a perfectly devastating phrase. Cohen's nearly-finished book, whose title is in the works, will be a triumphant manifestation of his career-long doctrine that, in fact, "the highest form of seriousness is humor."

Cohen's newest protagonist is a variation on his archetypal hero, a fumbling victim of the existential universe with whom we empathize only too much. This endearing champion attempts to consummate a failed relationship, wades through the deafening thralls of solitude and performs a series of comical and painfully familiar mistakes.

The novel is the fruit of five long years of fastidious craftsmanship. Cohen reflects that he has never written "so intuitively, so slowly and graspingly before." Showing his usual panache for metaphor, he explained, "As I get older I find I can't let certain sentences out of the house without their mittens and their gloves and galoshes." Indeed, Cohen is the master of detail. At Bread Loaf, he lectured on the minutiae of character-naming and tackled the art of sentence construction with the precision of a neurosurgeon. His 2002 book of stories, "The Varieties of Romantic Experience," was perhaps too much the product of this carefulness - Cohen can wrap up a story's themes and images as neatly as a Christmas present from Bloomingdale's. The Newness feels more jagged around the edges. It will be a phenomenally hilarious and brutal read.


"Babylon" by Alix Ohlin
Reviewed by Maddie Oatman

Alix Ohlin, blonde and bright eyed, stood out at Bread Loaf this year. Luckily, Ohlin boasts the brains to back her petite good looks. Her latest collection of short stories, entitled "Babylon," explores quirky characters in slices of a world that seems to be moving beyond the edge of her stories. Her unpretentious style leads us straight to convincing portrayals of flawed individuals that are immediately compelling. Their small triumphs and moments of compassion allow Ohlin's characters to endure the grit of growing up.

Ironically, Ohlin's elatedly-titled Babylon is often a realm of failure and disappointment. "It was a summer of disasters," begins Aggie in "The King of Kohlrabi." The story dwells on a teenager who endures the sting of seeing her father run off with another woman, undergoes the extraction of her wisdom teeth and gets a new job at shady Dejun Enterprises where "everyone ... seemed to be ducking something - clients, spouses or accountants," only to watch her mother become involved with the boss. Throughout this summer of humiliation, though, we have faith in Aggie as she rises above the tactless adults in her life.

We are content to see Ohlin's characters lead mundane, sometimes slow-paced lives, and "Babylon" falters only when Ohlin grows impatient and attempts to skip too far ahead into the future. The momentum created by a romantic encounter between a teenage girl and an exchange student from Russia in "Land of the Midnight Sun," for example, fizzles when the narrator jumps ahead in her life and, already married and for some unknown reason in Russia, reminisces about her charged run-in with the exchange student Yuri.

Yet, Ohlin dazzles us with simple shocking prose - "his fingers brushing against hers, furtive, barely there, yet electric" that fills the absences created by spotty plot development.

While the title suggests an escape to a fantasized realm, "Babylon" turns out to be the name of an ordinary town in Long Island. By grounding us, humoring us and surprising us, Ohlin's characters persuade us to accept an imperfect paradise on Earth.