Blue Field

by Elise Levine

Overview

"Elise Levine uses language as a dare—tough, intense, almost defensive; ironically, it only heightens the effect of her compassion, which pierces the narrative with equal immediacy. From this edginess her vivid characters—who, in various states of ruin and repair, struggle towards a sense of family—emerge as authentic as bone."—Anne Michaels

When her friend Jane dies while exploring an underwater cave with her husband Rand, Marilyn takes up diving again, to honor—and outdo—her late friend. Marilyn drags Rand with her as she increasingly pushes herself far past her limits and skill level, endangering them both in their private underwater version of hell.

Recalling the best of Mary Gaitskill and Lidia Yuknavitch, this gripping, tense novel explores the tangled lives of three driven risk-addicts—deeply flawed people bound and propelled and ultimately unraveled by desire, loss, and guilt. Driven by character, foregrounding language and form, at times fabulist and dystopic in style, the novel's heightened sexual atmosphere and psychological distress immerse the reader in a world of unforgettable depth and darkness.

After more than two decades since the release of her sensational, critically-acclaimed collection Driving Men Mad, Blue Field marks the much-anticipated return to form for Levine.

Elise Levine is the author of the story collection Driving Men Mad and the novel Requests and Dedications. She lives in Baltimore, and directs the MA in Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771961516
Publisher:	Biblioasis
Publication date:	04/25/2016
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Elise Levine is the author of the story collection Driving Men Mad and the novel Requests and Dedications. Her work has also appeared in The Journey Prize Anthology, and Best Canadian Stories. Originally from Toronto, ON, she now lives in Baltimore, MD, and is Director of the MA in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University.

Editorial Reviews

2017-03-07
A deeply damaged woman flirts with death in the depths of underwater caves.Toronto-born writer and novelist Levine (Requests and Dedications, 2005, etc.) uses raw, hallucinatory prose to tell this curious story of a woman becoming undone. The book's central protagonist is Marilyn Wolfe, a woman who is deeply angry at the world: "All she was also pissed at—death of her parents, cancer and a subway bomb within days of each other, boom-boom then a comet tail of grief sparking in their wake, year of parched, thirsty." The only solace Marilyn finds is in her love of diving and the company of her best friend, Jane, a cipher who mostly exists in Marilyn's memory of their idyllic childhood: "Cicada-time, girl-time of cigarettes filched from parents turned statues by coursing girl-hormones, of hash brownies and baked-baby brownies and other sundry legends. Wild dominion of fast friends who traced freckles on each other's backs and told fortunes that turned into toads or jumped ship hands clasped and never let go." But Marilyn's grief turns dangerous when Jane starts joining Marilyn and her risk-taking husband, Rand, for "crunch diving," a subset of scuba diving to explore very small caves and shipwrecks. Rand says it's "like diving for hours inside a coffin." Jane dies during a dive, her air depleted under mysterious circumstances. Readers are left inside Marilyn's raw emotions, her self-loathing, and doubt as she continues to push herself to dangerous depths, competing with the ghost of her dead friend. Levine's turns of phrases and deft use of language are often brilliant, but her fragmented prose doesn't always serve the narrative, leaping back and forth in time and offering fragments in lieu of facts. Still, the novel's visceral wordplay, rough sexuality, and anguished depiction of survivor's guilt are bound to captivate its audience. A transgressive, gut-wrenching portrayal of grief that asks what it's like to drown.

Kirkus Reviews