Forget Little House on the Prairie – these American stories are slim and strange
The filmmaker Agnès Varda said that if you cut her body open, you would find beaches. For the narrator of Danielle Dutton’s stories in Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, it would be the Midwestern prairie: “This is exactly what you’d find… My body’s obscured by the waving of plants… There are millions of flowers like stars.”
Dutton’s slim, strange book, published by the independent press Prototype, is about landscapes and our place within them. The stories in the first two sections, ‘Prairie’ and ‘Dresses’, are scant on plot; more often, they follow the thought-pattern of an unnamed female narrator, and are led by the weirdness of their settings. Sometimes, their surreal quality comes from environmental collapse, as when our narrator drives her son home during “the hottest week in the world”, the sun “clearly rising on the wrong side”. At others, it comes from her 13-year-old son’s storytelling. He often explains things such as “what would happen if she got sucked into a black hole”. While camping, he tells his mother about the Mothman, a mythical “dark creature” who threatens to turn real when they hear screaming outside the tent.
The book’s form is even less conventional. After the abstract pieces of ‘Prairie’ and ‘Dresses’ comes ‘Art’, an essay on Dutton’s visual inspiration. Reading it is rather like watching a post-film Q&A with a director; Dutton explains that she wants to write stories with “a specific way of looking”. Her voice is inquisitive, constantly clarifying: “By looking I mean seeing, but I also mean a way of being in relation to the world, a politics of attention.” Swerving into non-fiction risks breaking the book’s momentum, yet the authority of Dutton’s essay balances out the dreaminess of her stories.
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is best at creating an unsettling air. ‘Other’ picks up the stories in even odder vignettes; in one, an older female writer kills a younger more successful one. Something sours in the the marriage of the narrator of ‘Prairie’ – she often can’t find her husband – while her son’s move into adulthood – “it was only recently he’d turned into this stranger” – is just as unnerving. You’re never sure whether Dutton is still on the outside, or getting at the narrator’s anxiety within. But that uncertainty feels part of this project, which gives us not just a cycle of stylishly observed stories but also, midway through, the tools to read them.
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is published by Prototype at £12. To order your copy for £10.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
