The Maw of the World
Review of Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X (USA: Two Dollar Radio, 2019)
By Eunice Chin
Few books put me at a loss after reading, staring into space attempting to take in what I’ve just experienced. Sarah Rose Etter’s award-winning novel, The Book of X, is one such book. Following up on her short story collection Tongue Party, Etter’s first novel dissects what it means to face loss, be at a loss and more importantly, what it means to exist in a world marked by cruelty. Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award, Etter’s novel pushes us to our limits, forcing us to inhabit and experience a world disturbingly similar to ours.
Written in three parts, The Book of X traces the story of Cassie, a girl born with a knot for her stomach, as she navigates self-image and the landscape of trauma. Her knot is a medical condition attributed to a rare gene in the X chromosome and plagues all the women in the family—her mother, Deborah X, and her grandmother, Eleanor X. In mathematics, X represents an unknown value, and that is exactly what these women are. With inconclusive research, even science does not have an explanation for their condition. Deborah tells Cassie that the knot is a woman’s burden and there is nothing they can do but let it be.
As Cassie grows up, she is introduced to the demands of beauty. Her mother, Deborah, plays a key role in her miseducation. In the first third of the novel, Deborah is always trying to help Cassie: “today, my mother wants to help,” “today my mother is focused on illusion,” and “today my mother is focused on self-improvement.” What Deborah “helps” Cassie with in these passages is to learn how she is perceived by others, and how she has to do something about her looks. It is ironic though that Deborah ignores Cassie’s most obvious trait—her knot—instead choosing to give Cassie another outfit and tweeze her eyebrows. At one point, Deborah has Cassie stand naked in front of the mirror and concludes that Cassie needs to lose weight. From then on, Deborah sends Cassie to school with a piece of rock to suck on during lunch instead of proper food.
There is a connection to be drawn between the symbols of rocks and meat in The Book of X. Meat, a life-giving force and an object for consumption, has to be harvested from the Meat Quarry. This quarry is a place that Cassie is initially prevented from going to by her mother. Instead, rocks are put on the table as food. Denied the meat and given the rock, Cassie’s hunger, both literal and metaphorical, is left unsatiated. While the image of a girl sucking on a rock for a diet is laughably absurd, Deborah’s actions are not without real-life parallels, and Etter uses her story’s surrealism and absurdity to question the pervasive, hidden ways we discipline and punish our bodies in pursuit of beauty.
Falling firmly into the realm of experimental fiction, Etter’s novel does not use conventionally long chapters. Instead, short passages of narrative predominate, and the writing is visceral, lyrical, and surreal. Consider the following fragment that closes the chapter of Cassie’s childhood:
I dream of the meat quarry, my body pressed deep into red again. I writhe in the meat and rip at the walls, harvesting faster than ever, screaming.
Pain numbs the skin, the colors, the dazzle of the world. The moon no longer speaks to me. I become the pale void, an empty pink shell.
Etter’s prose is concentrated, verbs deployed with precision to highlight Cassie’s pain. Her dream is juxtaposed against inexorable pressure (“pressed,” “writhing”), her screaming met with indifference by a moon that no longer speaks. While The Book of X may appear surrealist, Etter’s writing is observant and logical on a deeper level. It lulls us into a dreamlike state even as the tightly bound prose keeps us on a tight leash, keeping us transfixed on that which would ordinarily repel us. Our own stomachs are in knots as we read these passages, each tinged by a certain sense of melancholy and wistfulness. They come together to create the stained glass window that is Cassie’s life.
At different points, Etter also interrupts her hypnagogic prose with bulleted lists of factual information describing knots, the human anatomy, and pregnancy. Even abstract notions such as loneliness, pain, death, grief and immortality are transformed into lists:
· The word grief is derived from the Old French grever, meaning “afflict, burden, oppress,” and from the Latin gravare, meaning “to make heavy”
· Grief is a multifaceted response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed
· After conducting two decades of research, researchers determined there were five trajectories to grief:
Resilience
Recovery
Chronic Dysfunction
Delayed Grief or Trauma
Suicidal Tendencies
Juxtaposing the narrative’s lyrical prose, the lists add an element of quantification that aids Cassie’s struggle to understand her body and her knot. They function like an anchor, providing definitions and other information. However, these facts allow no room for contestation and, more importantly, emotions. One can almost imagine Cassie reciting them in a deadpan voice of forlorn resignation. It eerily echoes the way society conditions us to think. In a world that values numbers and quantifiable progress, it is almost as if there is a template for the things we should chase and the way we should live. In this virtually mechanical world, where and how do we locate ourselves?
By its surrealism, Cassie’s narrative addresses many contemporary issues at a safe distance. Etter also includes elements of familiarity for the reader to cling onto. Sections titled “VISION” regularly intrude upon the narrative as Cassie imagines a life without her knot, a life where she is accepted and appreciated. Paired with bizarre elements such as stores where people can buy a man (or even half a man) and where they can get their jealousy removed, these visions start off idyllic but eventually melt into the grotesque, just like a Dali painting.
The shop says JEALOUSY REMOVAL over the door in fat red fluorescent letters. A bell dings when I step in. The entrance gleams white and silver.
“Hey,” come the drawl from the old man behind the counter.
“Hi,” I say.
The old man has white hair, jowls, and blue eyes.
“You here for the regular?”
I nod.
[…]
“There it is,” he says.
He brings his hand forward to show me. All of my jealousy has crystallized into a disgusting gem, slick with my blood, shining its evil in the fluorescent light.
In an earlier scene, Etter envisions the removal of jealousy through a simple procedure, one that transmutes jealousy into a physical object that can be disposed of. This simplicity is however, problematized by the shop owner’s disclaimer—“It is a permanent procedure and we cannot be held liable for any side effects or other repercussions.” The irreversability of the action prompts us to think deeper about jealousy. Would removing jealousy really solve all our problems? There is a hint in the shopkeeper’s use of the words “the regular” that suggests it may return. Then there is also the closing image, where Cassie imagines everybody who has undergone the procedure: “I picture the whole town split open like me, their incisions like smiles.” The emptiness of bodies split open, smiles compared to surgical “incisions,” hints that the removal of jealousy simply turns people into soulless husks. Destructive as it may be, jealousy is therefore an essential part of being human. By reifying jealousy, Etter provides us with an understanding that emotions need to be negotiated; they cannot simply be cut out and disposed of.
The world envisioned in Etter’s book is difficult and exhausting in its violence. Cassie grows up bullied at school, and goes to the city to pursue an unfulfilling career, which she lies about to people at home. She is both reviled and desired for her knot, and that same knot later cripples her with unbearable pain until Cassie risks a surgical procedure to remove it. Etter seems to frame her novel less as a bildungsroman and more of a damning examination of the exhausting and indifferent social conditions we subject ourselves to. This misery comes to a head when Cassie is pushed to the edge in the wake of her father’s death. Without an anchor, her mind unmoors:
But I am no longer in my body. I am orbiting the scene, I am a moon floating above the voices reading the eulogy, above my body as I recite the old poem he loved, above the orchids which turn their deep faces toward my father, the man now made of ash.
Positioned at the final third of the narrative, the death of Cassie’s father’s death serves as a segue into the novel’s conclusion. One might think that the death of her father is simply just another adversity Cassie has to face. Her reaction hence comes as a surprise to us because throughout the narrative, Cassie has faced a multitude of hardships with indifference and resignation. Why then does her father’s death warrant such a different response from her? To answer this, I return to the rocks and meat symbolism mentioned earlier. In Etter’s capable hands, Cassie’s mother and father are both associated with a respective symbol. Whereas her mother gives her rocks to eat and presents her with a three-layered birthday cake made out of rocks, Cassie’s father who has spent all his life working at the Meat Quarry, gives her the key to the quarry and permission to harvest meat once a week as a present, coaxing a genuine smile out of her. The death of Cassie’s father represents the loss of a grounding figure: the only constant who does not demean, fetishize, or dehumanize Cassie. It is no wonder that this death hits hard, harder than any prior setback.
Etter’s exquisite writing creates haunting images that stick. Cassie’s attempt to rebuild her life amidst unceasing personal devastation and ever-more intrusive visions will stay with me for a long time. By the novel’s end, I am left wondering whether the world Etter writes about is the one that we are heading towards, or one that we are already living in. A gripping work that asks us to bear witness to Cassie’s struggles, The Book of X laments the standards we have allowed to dictate our lives.
Eunice Chin is a current English Literature student at Nanyang Technological University who loves anything related to Absurdism and Samuel Beckett. Her research interests include: Absurdism, Beckett Studies, Bergsonian Philosophy, Death and End-of-Life Narratives, and Posthumanism. She constantly wonders about the chaos that inhabits our minds and its resistance to being understood. When not writing, she can be found in the dance studio or in the theater.