Revisiting Grace
A review of Grace Before the Fall
In January, Necessary Fiction published a shortened version of my review of Geri Lipschultz’s debut novel Grace Before the Fall. Following is the review in its longer form.
Geri Lipschultz’s Grace Before the Fall is a book of madness and wonders. The foreword, by John Irving, invites the reader to think of the book as “magical realism meets Alice in Wonderland.” But magical realism achieves its magic by being grounded in realism in ways that Grace Before the Fall is not and doesn’t aspire to be. This novel defies description, categorization, and evaluation. To enter it is to enter a world of dreams that think they’re reality and nightmares that think they’re dreams.
Although the novel is set in a specific place and time—Lower Manhattan in the late spring of 1980—and even as it bears the emotional and mental marks of that setting, the only thing realist about the narrative is its utter unreality. The year and season are established through events specific to the historical moment—young gay men are dying of a disease as yet unnamed; the Three Mile Island nuclear accident of 1979 is fresh in memory; the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran is still holding American hostages; and President Jimmy Carter’s Operation Eagle Claw has recently failed in its effort to free them—but the novel’s action unfolds on another plane altogether.
Set in motion when Grace Rosinbloom, in the course of her mundane if unlikely job (assessing computerized records in an unidentifiable city office in order to schedule derelict housing for demolition), finds herself with access to a trove of ostensibly secret federal government data, the plot surrounding this massive and supposedly secret list—what it seems to be, what Gracie decides to do with it, what she imagines she’s accomplishing by doing what she does, and all that she will be punished for—spirals in and out with as much dissociation from reality as (in Gravity’s Rainbow) Tyrone Slothrop’s advance arousals at the precise London locations where German missiles are next to fall.
And indeed Grace Before the Fall has more in common with Pynchon’s paranoid postmodern cartoon worlds than with the magical realist worlds of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Grace spends as much time with her crew of hallucinatory familiars (a worm, sometimes bookish, sometimes glowing; a phantasmagoric green goddess or warrior woman; an avuncular pedant in plaid; a queen bee) as with her various living friends; the dialogue, whether in land of dream or reality, is shaped by artifice, as is at times the narration, in a seance of voices that carry echoes of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Shakespeare, along with a great deal of music; now and then a song or poem pops in to interrupt or punctuate the action; the plot line is paranoid and its logic thin; and every character’s name is worth parsing for meaning and puns.*
In an early scene, perhaps the most firmly grounded in the real world, in a club in the Village, Grace, her friend Em, and Em’s boyfriend Bruce, a filmmaker and impresario of their shared mixed media act, give an impromptu two-part performance: first, Bruce’s mostly silent film features Em miming her longing for him and also her own power; then, on stage not film, Grace as the voice and Em as the miming body together perform “a living epilogue.” As their performance reaches its climax, Em collapses, and after this vividly dramatized event, the sense of reality begins to unravel, so much so that a skeptical reader may question whether the novel will turn out to be hallucination from start to finish. When Em ends up in Bellevue, it becomes easy, if possibly misleading, to read Em as the body, Grace as the heart and soul—from the body’s point of view, the lost or disembodied mind still roaming free.
Is Em really just an aspect of Grace? (Is Grace an aspect of Em?) Is Grace’s sudden impassioned love for Em’s doctor, Starlinsky, no more than spiritual enactment of Em’s therapeutic dependence and transference? (Does Starlinsky even exist?) If the two women are one, which of the two is “real”? And what is to be made of Bruce, formerly Grace’s lover, whose persistent pursuit Grace is now unable to shake?
At the end of a longish and somewhat Beckettian back-and-forth in which Em tries to persuade Grace to have sex with Bruce one more time, Lipschultz presents, in a nutshell, the larger arc of the enmeshed relationship between the two women:
“We’re one,” Em says.
“We’re individuated,” Grace says.
“We’re all the same.”
“I have a self, and you have a self,” Grace says.
“I am self-less,” Em says. “Please—for me.”
“Nevermore.”
While the many narrative teases about what is real and what is not serve primarily as lures, and Gracie’s story develops and advances mostly through her dream world, the novel’s mysteries and lyricism keep a reader following her with curiosity and wonder into the realization that the word here is all—all that can exist in the novel and all that is in Grace’s power to effect. Even her supposedly treasonous act of supposed resistance against the world of war and destruction comes down to nothing more than the deletion of words, as eventually she sees.
Ultimately arrested (for stealing the device that gave her access to the secret files and for their deletion), in her cell Grace is “adrift in a bit of paradise,” Starlinsky with her in her jailhouse bed, until the novel and Grace together, facing their powerlessness in the world of destruction, become a scream of protest. Sprung from confinement by some combination of dream magic and her friends and allies storming the jail, surrounded on the street outside by a crowd of supporters and tormentors, “The entire planet is a land mine,” Grace cries. “Weapons. Where are there not weapons? Is that all that’s left for us to do here? To kill as many as we can?”
In what may be the most direct articulation of the relationship between Grace’s world of dream and imagination and the reality she actually lives in, Grace admits, “I erased words,” and adds, in contrast and prophecy, “The weapons will erase the world.”
Until this acknowledgment, Grace’s actions and experience have been set up as real primarily through contrast to dream scenes shared with her hallucinatory companions—who, although benign, have brought with them from their first appearance elements of nightmare. If what reads as real, what as dream, what as nightmare, may vary from reader to reader, in these final moments it’s the reality beyond the book, the world of weapons not words, that is the true nightmare, even while, in Grace’s world, magic wins.
In “Cassandra Float Can” (first performed 2008, published 2016 in Float), Anne Carson writes of Priam’s prophetic daughter, “like spacetime, she is nonlinear, nonnarrative,” “everywhere Cassandra ran she found she was already there,” and “everywhere Cassandra ran she found she could float.” Like Carson’s Cassandra, Lipschultz’s Gracie Rosinbloom lives outside of time—and she can float.
*A moment of play with the characters’ names: Grace Rose-in-Bloom is close to but becomes detached from her composer friend Stem (short for Stemeroff) at the same time she starts rising off the ground; Em is short for Muriel, which means bright sea or shining sea, her last name Lyons; Dr. Starlinsky’s first name is Daniel (suggesting Daniel in the lions’ den), and at one point gets parsed as Star-lin-Sky; Bruce Steen is missing only Spring, while Bruce means willowlands and Steen stone; Zelda, the name of the swirling green phantom, means gray woman or warrior, or alternatively, blessed or holy, along with Beatrice, the queen bee’s name, which also means blessed or “she who brings happiness.”
Geri and I met at Iowa in the Writers Workshop in 1975 and we reconnected in 2013 for the AWP in Boston (see us below at a meal with some of our cohort and friends). We’ve stayed in touch ever since, especially during the first year of covid, when an intimate weekly zoom group of women writers and artists helped keep the five of us healthy and sane. Recently we shared time at the Baltimore AWP, and here we are with Danilo Thomas and Christine Kelly of Baobab Press and my filmmaker daughter Heather von Rohr. (New Yorkers, see her short film, A Bird Came Down, at the Katra Film Series on April 8. More on Heather and the film at Filmmaker, when they were shooting in 2024.)
👍👍👍❤️