DOG DAYS, by Emily LaBarge
On the night of Dec. 22, 2009, six masked men broke into the holiday rental on a Caribbean island where Emily LaBarge, then 25, was staying with her mother, father and sister. Soon LaBarge felt a crocheted blanket being pulled over her head and a gun pressed to the base of her skull. “We don’t want to hurt you,” the intruders whispered, “but we will.” Eight terrifying hours later, the men left.
Her mother’s friend called it an “amazing story,” hinting that LaBarge should write about it. LaBarge was incredulous: “I remember thinking that’s crazy. No way will I ever write this story.”
She still hasn’t written “this story,” or not exactly. Instead she has written “Dog Days,” a strange and stunning book that begins with the event that would later go by many names — The Incident, That Christmas, The Home Invasion, That Awful Thing That Happened, It.
LaBarge, an essayist and art critic, is alert to the lie of “the good story,” the version that “doesn’t make anyone feel too uncomfortable, bad, complicit.” One especially popular variant is the trauma plot, which flattens characters to a reductive back story — an entire life explained by a horrific event. LaBarge is wary of such shortcuts. To call what happened “The Trauma” would be perversely euphemistic, she says, “since it implies something singular and enclosed, when the reality is precisely opposite, no matter how you try to contain it.”
Still, she tries to contain it. The first third of the book conveys her fitful and fragmented attempts to describe and redescribe the facts of what happened. She heard one of the intruders laughing uproariously at “Mrs. Doubtfire,” the feel-good comedy her family had been watching when the men broke in. Later she heard the choral music of “Agnus Dei,” one of her family’s CDs, playing on repeat. But she knows that these particulars are “the weird, almost comical, parodic ones, not the life-threatening, not the deep marrow fear ones.”
So she tries out other forms. These include poetry (“Someone smashes a glass./Someone smash smash./Someone smash”) and a script that verges on farce (“Father jokes says he is fine but rules out watching hostage movies ever again, ha ha, a joke”). Another effort has her resorting to placeholders for most of the words: “For seven hours they XXXX and she XXXX XX XXXXXX until XX.”
LaBarge wants to put boundaries around something that is boundless and undefinable. In the weeks and months after the event, what comes closest to capturing her “deep marrow fear” is a dream she has of being in a dirty, cell-like room while people bang on the door and press their faces to the window. “I lie down on the ground with my back to the wall, so the faces cannot see me, make myself small and start counting,” she writes. “Something hot and awful crawls into my mouth and I swallow.”
At first, her images and impressions are necessarily cramped and claustrophobic. Trauma is isolating; it cuts her off from others and turns her in on herself, spiraling around the same preoccupations. But soon the book begins to venture outward. “I read and read and read myself stories in order to live,” LaBarge writes, amending Joan Didion’s line about storytelling.
Reading writers like Joy Williams and Lorrie Moore, who play with ambivalence and absurdity, allows her to feel communion and connection. Her existence no longer seems so confined; it resonates with “other strands and lives and narratives unfathomable, real and not.” And it isn’t just these writers’ characters or their plots; it’s the thrum of their language, the surprising rhythms of a voice, the sly sense of humor. Their stories create “possibilities that don’t yet exist.”
“Dog Days” pursues this expansive approach, braiding memoir with criticism, psychoanalysis with poetry, fiction and even quantum physics. It’s a testament to LaBarge’s gifts as a writer that she can make even the most complex and cerebral ideas feel urgent and alive. Her interests and tastes are invitingly omnivorous: Whether considering a Joan Mitchell painting, the Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” or the phantasmagoria of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” she writes with attentiveness, curiosity and rigor.
“Trauma is a narrative problem” is a refrain that appears at various points in the book. Trauma “traffics first and foremost in uncertainty,” LaBarge writes. It defies the compulsion to identify cause and effect. It warps one’s sense of time, speeding it up and slowing it down. Dreams can capture this disorientation; fairy tales, too, which are “a realm of dream rather than a sphere of action.”
Language, for LaBarge, offers both constraint and possibility. In an epigraph, she includes a line from the critic Vivian Gornick: “The trick, she saw, was to pay strict attention to one’s actual experience and then find a way to make the writing accommodate it.” Later LaBarge quotes Samuel Beckett saying the task of the artist is “to find a form that accommodates the mess.”
“Dog Days” traces her discovery of the form this accommodation could take. It begins with the lonely violence of waiting to die with a crocheted blanket over her head and ends with a commitment to engage with the world. “What happens to you happens to me happens to everyone and everything”: We all share the stubborn fact of our mortality.
LaBarge recounts how the poet and performer Antonin Artaud delivered his lecture at the Sorbonne on “Theater and the Plague” by rolling around on the floor, screaming and gasping. He later explained that he wanted his audience “to be terrified and wake up” because “they don’t understand that they are dead.”
But this anguish wasn’t the same as despair; in Artaud’s confrontation with finitude, LaBarge finds a measure of hope: “I read this desire to show the audience they are dead as an exhortation to live.”
DOG DAYS | By Emily LaBarge | Transit Books | 267 pp. | Paperback, $18.95
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
The post ‘That Awful Thing That Happened’ Is Now a Stunning Memoir appeared first on New York Times.
